Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
Your first assumption is a major assumption. The counter-factual to not building NGP isn't simply waving your hand and saying the oil is still produced anyway. Unless oil finds markets it stays in the ground. GHGs are central to this question. Canada has made targetsto reduce its GHGs by 17 percent by 2020. To achieve these targets the government would need to demonstrate how building the pipeline and the new upstream oil production that will come would be consistent with those targets. It's basic math.
You can't count all the upstream benefits of the pipeline without equally counting all the upstream costs. The benefits are widely touted, X amount of investment in oil sands infrastructure and jobs Jobs JOBS! The costs are GHG emissions and other environmental impacts from that production. The Harper government expressly forebade any consideration of the costs which is a fundamentally inconsistent and pre-emptive methodology.
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You cant say that the world will produce more jobs as a result of this pipeline, you can take the benefit of moving the created jobs to alberta.
You cant say moving oil production out of canada will decrease world wide greenhouse gas production, you can fairly argue that Canadas GHGs would be reduced, unfortunately the earth doesnt care where the CO2 comes from. The oil will still come out of the ground at the same rate, it just wont be from Canada's
Beyond that barring new polluting projects built to better technologies than previous ones is a poor way of limiting green house gases. The only efficient method of limiting carbon will be pricing it. The government shouldnt be picking with projects go ahead based on how they polute. They should set a target for carbon emmissions and auction those credits off every year to industry and citizens and you need carbon credits to burn carbon. Then allow businesses and individuals to set the price of Carbon and base projects on that cost.
If the government did that you might find that the pipeline actually saves carbon. Rail is more carbon intensive than a pipeline per barrel so increasing demand for rail makes our carbon intensive oil less green.
Also by just denying projects instead of encouraging green behaviour you just push production out of Canada and into areas where there is zero oversight into ghg and other enviromental and safety issues.
SAGD and its varriants are now being used all over the world to extract heavy oil. So the arguement that our oil is dirtier than other oil fails as all new production is non conventional.
Any solution needs to start with decreasing the demand side of the equation as energy is relatively inelastic to price changes.