In Eleanor Waring’s blogpost, she brings up the much speculated issue of the pricey consequences of being environmentally friendly. Saskatchewan’s attempt at eliminating carbon dioxide emissions costed a whopping $1.4 billion in tax payer’s money to create, and that was only one machine. Ella makes a good point that the likeliness of other provinces adopting this technology is slim to none, as the amount of money it would cost is extremely high. This led me to think about how likely it is for provinces to develop or adopt these types of sustainable technologies in the future if the price is this high with little chance of financial return.
While I believe sustainability is an extremely important concept that governments should be trying to integrate into their provinces, I also think affordability is equally as important. As we can see in Ella’s article she cited, the cost of this new technology was almost unfathomable, and the technology failed to spread to other provinces due to the price. This issue poses the question: how can we be sustainable and economical simultaneously? This is something that I believe governments should be thinking about for the future, because the environment is the basis of our country’s economy and revenue.