Why it’s pointless to protest pipelines — and bad for the environment

Nothing feels better than standing out there in the rain with your protest sign and sticking it to those evil oil companies who want to funnel their black death through pristine wilderness and traditional native land, utterly convinced you occupy the moral high ground. But what if you’re wrong? What if your good intentions have actually led you to become part of the problem rather than the solution?

Let’s say you get your wish and all pipeline projects in Canada are cancelled. Now what? Despite your pipe-less dreams, the oil is still going to move. Currently, 93.5 per cent of the world’s transportation energy comes from oil, and that isn’t going to change any time soon despite optimistic predictions to the contrary. And that says nothing about the non-transportation uses of oil, which include everything from electricity generation to manufacturing computers and heart valves. If anything, demand for oil is only going to increase due to the rapid development of nations like China and India.

The simplest solution, as proposed by people like David Suzuki, is to not move the oil at all. Instead, we should simply reduce our consumption and leave the oil in the ground. That may sound like a viable option from Suzuki’s cushy downtown Vancouver office, but try telling that to a poor Chinese farmer struggling to feed his family. Energy is how we generate food, clean water and medicine, and fossil fuels are the most efficient way to do this. Therefore, asking that farmer to consume less fossil fuel energy is akin to asking him to forego food, clean water and medicine for his family. Is that what we really want to do?

And don’t even talk to me about so-called renewables, such as wind, solar or biomass, which currently provide just 3.3 per cent of the world’s energy. If you think our use of fossil fuels is environmentally devastating, imagine if we shifted over to electric vehicles powered by renewables. That means ramping up wind, solar, hydro and biomass energy production by 300 per cent. The problem is, even though wind, water, solar and biomass are renewable, the technology required to capture these fuel sources and turn them into useable energy is not. Renewables also represent a low power density compared to fossil fuels, so the footprint required to capture this energy is exponentially larger.

For example, wind generates an average of 1.2 Watts/square meter (W/m2), solar 6.7 W/m2 and ethanol (biomass) 0.5 W/m2. Meanwhile, a marginal natural gas well generates 28 W/m2 and an oil well producing 10 barrels/day produces 27 W/m2. Right away you can see that if you want to scale up wind to replace the power we get from oil or natural gas, your environmental footprint will be 28 times larger. Solar requires you to increase your footprint by 400 per cent.

Manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines is also environmentally devastating. For example, both require rare earth minerals, most of which come from China. A mere glimpse at the process of extracting these minerals will convince you that there’s nothing inherently clean about renewable energy. Even if we cleaned these mines up, it wouldn’t be long before reserves of these minerals were tapped out. Of course, this says nothing about the impact solar and wind installations have on birds, bats and other creatures. Wind and solar are also intermittent and unreliable, which means they must be backed up by fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro. So they’re not really an alternative at all; they’re merely a supplement, and a highly inefficient one at that.

Which brings us back to pipelines. As much as we’ve been conditioned to think of oil as evil and those who produce it as the bad guys, consumption of fossil fuels is still the cleanest, most efficient way to power the world and create the products we need. Until that changes, it’s pointless to talk about if we should move the oil. Of course we should, and we will. The only conversation worth having is how best to do this—by pipeline, rail, road or some combination of the above. All of these methods have risks and benefits, which I will discuss in a forthcoming Paper News post.

Kevin Miller is an award-winning writer and filmmaker who has applied his craft to documentaries, feature films, books, blogs, you name it. Born and raised in Foam Lake, Saskatchewan, Kevin has spent most of his adult life living on the West Coast. However, he and his family finally decided to escape the rain and have relocated to Kimberley, BC, one of the province’s best kept secrets. Follow Kevin on Twitter: @KevinMillerXI