Mayors Naheed Nenshi of Calgary and Denis Coderre of Montreal have more to agree on than the last week of political battling might suggest, The Energy Mix curator Mitchell Beer argues on the GreenPAC blog.
“If you cut through the immediate controversy, it looks like Nenshi, Coderre, and most of the rest of us are looking for the same things,” Beer writes. “We all want steady, secure, well-paid jobs for ourselves, our families, and our communities. We all want clean water, whether it flows through the Bow River or the St. Lawrence River. (And we want a stable enough climate to reduce the likelihood of the Bow River overflowing its banks.)
“Most of us want climate action that aligns with the 1.5°C long-term goal for average global warming that Canada and 186 other countries adopted at the United Nations climate summit in Paris last month.”
And “we should all want to see Alberta recover quickly and well from what Notley herself described as the “boom and bust roller coaster ride” of fossil fuel development, in her election night victory speech last May 5. Anyone outside the western oilpatch who’s celebrating Alberta’s pain should consider some emergency nation-building of their own.”
But “that doesn’t make Energy East the solution,” he stresses. “We’ve known for years that the large majority of the world’s fossil fuels are unburnable in any reasonable climate scenario, and there’s little reason to expect the project to survive a multi-trillion-dollar carbon bubble. With oil prices expected to stay low through 2018, and competing renewable energy options becoming more affordable by the day, it’s hard to imagine why TransCanada would even want to try.”
