Editor:
John Weston’s July 3 misstatement that failure to build the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline will cost $27 billion annually was clarified in the July 11 Coast Reporter letters section to say the alleged loss would actually occur over 15 years from 2016 to 2030 for all levels of government with an overall loss to the Canadian economy of $131 billion.
These are big numbers designed to impress, but they are less impressive than Harper’s Conservatives would have us believe.
Assuming Weston’s clarified numbers are devoid of political spin, the $27 billion accruing to all levels of government — federal, provincial and municipal — averages just $1.8 billion annually. The projected $131 billion increased GDP averages just $8.7 billion annually, or less than half of one per cent of Canada’s $1.937 trillion projected 2014 GDP. Alberta, where most of the benefits accrue, collected just $3.5 billion in royalties from the tar sands in 2012/13, a mere two per cent of the value of the extracted resource.
While substantive, these touted economic gains must be evaluated alongside their very real environmental, social and economic costs.
Climate change, due largely to the burning of fossil fuels, is an increasingly serious global reality in terms of human tragedy and enormous economic costs, and it’s getting worse, not better. More erratic weather, rising sea levels, increased ocean acidification and increased human, animal and plant health risk tally into the toll.
Alberta estimates the cost of the June 2013 floods at $6.1 billion with the federal government on the hook for $3.1 billion and Albertans covering up to $4 billion, for a single weather event. In 2013 Canadian insurers laid out $3.2 billion for floods, hail and ice storms. Additionally, families and businesses suffered massive uncompensated losses.
How much of those losses will be paid by the petro-corporations reaping the mega-profits? Not one red cent.
Jef Keighley, Halfmoon Bay
