Pipe Dream
Undoubtedly one of the most debated topic these days are in regards to Canadian oil. The expansion of the tar sands via pipelines have sparked many political and ethical questions. Robert van Waarden is one of those people that have been drawn into the debate. Van Waarden’s project is a photographic documentary of the lives of the people that will be directly affected by the planned TransCanada East pipeline. By putting a face on the issue van Waarden wants to inspire people nationwide to voice their opinion on the topic.
The debate about the tar sands has raised the question of how far are people willing to go to for short term gains at long term costs. Unfortunately for Canada the prospects of the potential revenues is too great to be ignored even when knowing full well the impact it will have on our environment. Environmentalist have even made the issue of the tar sands a matter of life or death. Many provinces have even started a them versus us campaign war. The problem is only exacerbated with a weak federal government. What can be done? There certainly isn’t a perfect solution to many of the problems Canada faces but there are smarter solutions than simply allowing the tar sands to expand or not. The most significant barrier to nationwide approval of pipelines is the potential of spills. In an ideal world the government should be enforcing the need for locally extracted oil to be refined locally also. This would not only rid the mess of damaging spills (gasoline evaporates) but also create more jobs that aren’t restricted to the few provinces that have oil. The other issue is the overall impact towards global warming. There certainly isn’t a solution to this problem, but seeing how critical oil is to Canada’s economy Canada needs to accept that any decision won’t be favorable. If Canada should support the pipelines it should also use a significant portion of those funds to develop sustainable strategy that allows for the country to transition from its current state to a sustainable future. It would allow Canada’s economy to continue to grow while setting a framework that avoids a crash once the oil is gone and have the potential to grow into the renewable energy industry. Still many will, understandably so, reject these ideas as we may be at the crossroads in deciding the fate of our planet.
Van Waarden’s project will be of significance for our country. The more voices that can be heard the better the choices we can make. Certainly van Waarden is only considering one side of the complete story. It would be interesting for someone to also document the stories of the people whose livelihoods have changed due to the oil sands, whether for better or worse. Due to the sheer size of Canada there is often a disconnect between communities. It will be important for every community to connect as a nation and depict the stories of these peoples as opposed to a battle between corporations and mindful citizens.
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You raise lots of interesting issues here Sidney! The idea of using the stories of individual people and communities to ‘put a face’ on the issue fits nicely with a lot of work in psychology on the ‘identifiable victim effect’ – which basically shows that people are often willing to donate more and feel more empathy for a single, identifiable victim than for a larger number of ‘statistical’ victims without an identifiable ‘face.’ So that would likely help to build opposition to pipelines.
But even if the public came to strongly and unanimously oppose pipelines, would that really solve the problem? I think the oil sands would continue to be developed and the oil shipped to China instead of sent via pipe to the US… and refining the crude oil from the tar sands doesn’t always result in gasoline – a lot of it is just turned into less crude oil that is used for purposes other than gas, and so spills would still be a major concern even if refining occurred at the point of extraction.
I think the bottom line is that the economic incentives for continuing to develop the oil sands are too strong to be stopped, but your idea of maybe using some of the revenue (perhaps via taxation since the revenue will go to private companies, not the government) to fund the development of renewable energy could be a great way to offset some of the seemingly inevitable environmental costs of these developments.