It's not about the pipelines

Justin Trudeau's government delivered its long-awaited verdict on three pending pipeline projects yesterday, approving two (Trans Mountain and Line Three) and nixing one (Northern Gateway). Right on cue, protesters immediately took to the streets, in Vancouver and elsewhere, to protest the government's temerity in approving any pipeline construction at all.

I don't suppose Trudeau and his colleagues need me to tell them this, but here goes anyway: for environmentalists, opposition to these projects (or to the much bigger Keystone XL pipeline, which may be revived under a Trump presidency) is not about the pipelines.  The environmentalists want to see fossil fuel use phased out as quickly as possible, so they are opposed to anything that allows fossil fuels to be brought to market.  There is no compromise possible here.  If God were to come down from heaven and declare that the Trans Mountain pipeline would never leak, the environmentalists would still oppose it.  They want the fossil fuels to stay in the ground.

The fact that many indigenous communities are also opposed to pipelines -- in the ongoing Standing Rock confrontation, or in the areas in northern British Columbia that have successfully seen off the Northern Gateway project -- is a blessing for the environmentalists.  It allows them to cloak their opposition with a higher cause: native rights.  Truth to tell, however, if the Standing Rock community did a U-turn and decided to support the pipeline, the environmentalists would abandon them in a trice and find another basis for their opposition.  They just want the fossil fuels to stay in the ground.

What about those indigenous groups and their own objections to these projects?  Some of the fears over the potential for polluting vital watercourses are undoubtedly justified, but there's more to it than that.  These communities would be no happier if the proposed project was a railway across their territory, or an airport*.  Once again, it's not really about the pipelines.

I'm probably giving the impression here that I'm all gung-ho to build pipelines hither and yon, and damn the ecology.  Far from it: as the leader of Canada's Green Party, Elizabeth May, has pointed out, with world fossil fuel consumption seemingly having peaked, with fossil fuel supplies abundant, and with the cost of renewable energy falling fast, the economic case for any of these pipelines is far from being established.  Any or all of them may turn out to be a white elephant from day one.

The truth is that "debate" and "compromise" are no longer terms that have any relevance when it comes to pipeline projects, because one side has its mind firmly made up.  That being the case, Trudeau's announcement yesterday just sets the stage for endless rancorous legal debates in the months and years to come -- and by the time any of the projects is approved, let alone built, the economic rationale will very likely have dwindled even further.  

* Or, as The Donald may be about to discover, a wall.  There's a 70-mile stretch of the US-Mexico border that's part of a historic, treaty-protected indigenous homeland.  The people there are determined not to allow Trump or anyone else to put a wall across their land, and the courts will very likely support them.