Re: Tanker debate sinks to new low (B.C. Views, May 9)
I’m sorry Tom, but it is hard to get behind either side of this “cause.” Having just returned from a month-and-a-half in Tianjin, China where I drank polluted water, ate polluted food and soothed my burning throat with lozenges daily, I have no place to argue the concepts of more tankers, less tankers, new pipelines or old pipelines.
While we continue to debate these trivial points, billions of people are coming on-stream. They want cars, they want iPhones, they want “wealth” and opportunity.
More importantly, they look to us to provide the context of that future that they envision.
Sending these places the crude that they “require” is a foolhardy enterprise. The magnitude and liability of such an undertaking are already at the point that it makes little to no sense.
As for the hypocrisy of our own fossil needs, I agree.
Of course we get our fuel from refineries “elsewhere,” just as we get our Nikes and our cellphones. No one will give them to us, so we need to make them our priority.
After seeing this “elsewhere,” the first thing I did upon my return was purchase an electric car. I also started talking with the biodiesel co-operatives in Cowichan and Victoria, which make 100 per cent biodiesel from waste vegetable oils and who have been recently bludgeoned with a unified carbon tax system that, at least when I went to the voting booth, was intended for fossil fuel consumers.
You are absolutely correct about debate, but more than that we need action.
Ryan Gisler
Saanich