“Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition?” Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, rhetorically asked in a letter to the Wall Street Journal in response to a letter by climate change skeptics. Trenberth, along with 37 other atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, and other climate experts, signed the letter published Feb. 1.

“You published ‘No Need to Panic About Global Warming’ (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science,” continued Trenberth.

If U.S. President Barack Obama’s rejection of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline was predictable, so was the federal government’s leap to the conclusion that this inflates the Northern Gateway pipeline to a “national imperative,” clearly an opportunistic ploy to convert doubting voters into siding with the northern pipeline.

However, I hope the Canadian electorate is not so easily fooled. The arguments against the Northern Gateway pipeline are in no way changed or diminished by what happens with Keystone. These arguments include the very real threats of oil spills to both the terrestrial and Pacific Coast environments and their northern communities.

Nor is the “bigger picture” argument altered. Existing pipelines are adequate for current and reasonably increased levels of oil production (“Geological expert disputes need for Northern Gateway,” The Journal, Jan. 17), so the purpose of another pipeline is to enable a huge increase in production, with all its associated social and environmental evils. Not least of these is the almost incalculable damage due to carbon emissions and global warming.

If, as most pipeline proponents make out, the international requirement for oil will remain steady into the foreseeable future, why is there such a rush to drain every last drop in the shortest possible time? Having a diversity of markets is a good thing for an economy, but not at all costs. As for job creation, there are many ways in which governments could stimulate job creation, including in renewable energy resources.

Expanding oil production is not the way to create a sustainable economy. Whether Keystone eventually goes ahead or not, kudos to the U.S. for taking time and care to protect its national environment.

P.J. Cotterill, Edmonton

In 2008, I became an Obama supporter when he courageously refused to sign on to the proposal of a gas tax holiday, a gimmick supported by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain. He should likewise reject this latest misguided energy policy.

THOMAS JANDL
Towson, Md., Jan. 2, 2012

The Journal’s editorial board likens the Harper government’s climate position to a game of Texas hold’em.

From a risk point of view, I liken our government’s position to a game of chicken, wherein two drivers bear down on each other from opposite directions, each daring the other to swerve away. If neither swerves, the result is a potentially deadly collision.

I wouldn’t be concerned if it was just the life of his government that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was risking. But what’s at stake are the lives of future generations, all because Harper refuses to believe that global warming is caused by humans.

In its latest report, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (a government body initiated by U.S. President Barack Obama and mandated by Congress) lists 10 key findings, the first of which states that “global warming is unequivocal and primarily human induced.”

The finding supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in its 2007 report stated that most of the observed increase in global temperatures since the mid-20th century “is very likely” the result of human activities.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences supports these findings, as does NASA, the American Geological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for Advancement of Science.

The list goes on. And yet it’s still not enough to prompt our government into action.

If the fossil-fuel industry needs a subsidy, support for a pipeline or help with a burdensome regulation, Harper is there with a bag of money, pompoms and a regulatory workforce reduction.

But when it comes to action on climate change – the greatest issue facing the world – Harper is an obstructionist and has been since he first darkened our political landscape.

Peter Adamski, Edmonton

The crux of Ezra Levant’s arguments in justifying his application of the glowing catchphrase “ethical oil” to the output generated by these various operations in the Athabasca bitumen deposit region are simply an effort at misdirection.

He and Environment Minister Peter Kent are being apologists for the industry, whistling past the graveyard of the enormous environmental toll the oilsands are generating to reach for the brass ring of greater public/ international approval of its expansion.

Levant and others are pointedly asserting that because one nation, ours, doesn’t do immediately condemnable things in the course of operations of its energy extraction/refinement industry, and that this region is less geo-politically in conflict with its own citizenry or foreigners, our industry is consequently ethical.

This is a ludicrous conclusion, founded on shrugging at the inherent and site-specific harms of our own Alberta industry.

It is dishonest because it attempts to create a gangway for renewed and intensified investment in the goliath juggernaut that is the northern Alberta bitumen industry.

This slipshod rationale doesn’t pass either the smell or the shame test.

Alberta does not get off the hook this easy.

John McGuire, Edmonton

That is the main excuse Canadians, Americans and their politicians are using to do little or nothing about our high-carbon world.

Indeed, Canadians are now regarded as obstructionists at climate-change negotiations such as Copenhagen.

Scientists are telling us the time is critical, with the door closing to limiting the global temperature increase to an already dangerous two degrees Celsius. Canada’s CO2 emissions are even worse than those of the U.S., with a 17-per-cent increase since 1990 (those in the U.S. have increased seven per cent).

It is unfortunate conservatives such as Ezra Levant, in coining the phrase “ethical oil,” are giving people a false sense about our way of living.

How can it be ethical to live unsustainably, with increasingly deleterious impacts on our only planet?

We can change this; only the will is lacking.

Our children, grandchildren and drought-or flood-stricken people in the Third World do not and will not care whether our atmosphere is warmed by carbon from Alberta coal or oilsands, Saudi crude or Russian natural gas, nor will they care about what side of the political spectrum governments that failed to act were on.

It is unfortunate most Canadian and U.S. conservatives have politicized an ethical issue.

Victor Dorian, Edmonton

That’s a bit like saying, “I’m an ethical guy because I don’t cheat on my wife, even though I’ve killed a person by drunk driving.”

There are more ways than one to be ethical, and human rights is hardly the main point here.

The point is that Canada’s fast and furious exploitation of oil for overconsumption and profit is wrecking the planet and jeopardizing the chance of humans and myriads of non-humans for a sustainable future.

How can that be ethical? If the Durban talks on climate change fail to produce significant action to control CO2 emissions, it will show that humanity is not ethical, not even intelligent, just selfish and avaricious.

P.J. Cotterill, Edmonton

Meanwhile, a recent review (partially funded by a group that denied climate-warming science) of more than a billion pieces of data – five times the amount previously examined by anybody else – by Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist who was skeptical about climate science, concluded that the consensus global warming conclusions, including the hockey stick model, are indeed supported by the evidence.

The problem is not suppression of the debate, but is instead superficial and uninformed coverage of the science by the press.

Carlo Ricciuti Hamilton, Ont.

According to Graham Thomson, “You could argue it’s unfair to focus so much on the oilsands when we produce more carbon dioxide through burning coal and collectively driving our cars and trucks.”

You could argue this point, but I wouldn’t. This is not an either/or situation. This year, in addition to the Keystone XL protests, we have seen fracking protests, coal plant protests, oilsands protests and general, all-purpose action on climate change protests.

As well we should.

What we pay for the fossil fuels we burn does not take into account the damage they do to our health, the environment and the climate, and until we ledger the cost of these externalities we need to protest the escalating use of any and all fossil fuels. The science demands it.

Peter Adamski, Edmonton

In a recent article (“From pipelines to bridges, local politics trump national interests“, 7 Nov 2011), Barrie McKenna argues that the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is an example of local politics trumping the national interest. What this analysis ignores is climate change: a perilous circumstance that our continued fossil fuel addiction is imposing upon future generations all over the world. Far from being a local matter, principled opposition to Keystone XL is global and intergenerational.

Milan Ilnyckyj
Toronto

By Milan Ilnyckyj, Calgary Herald
August 29, 2011