Oil and terror mix all too well

How chilling that 19 (thankfully!) non-violent Greenpeace protesters scaled Canada’s Parliament with impunity to hang banners supporting their evangelical crusade against the oil sands.

Only weeks ago in a Toronto courtroom, Canadian justice dispensed with the cases of 18 Canadians charged with plotting to invade Parliament with intent to behead the prime minister and blow up the ultimate symbol of our democracy.

When arrests were first made in that plot, many of us thought these the absurd fantasy of deluded jihadists – who in their right mind could imagine that 18 armed miscreants could cavalierly saunter on to Parliament Hill and seize the buildings?

The Greenpeace protesters showed just how easily it can be done. And whether they intended to or not, highlighted once again the link between terrorist activity and the industrial world’s addiction to fossil fuels. Three of the world’s four largest oil reservoirs – Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq – are controlled by regimes with known and proven links to the propagation of violent ideologies and the overt and covert support of terrorism.

As has been made clear in the last several decades, the consumption of oil from opaque regimes exerts a tyrannical grip on the way of life in industrial societies. Moreover, most of the world’s oil is in the control of tyrants. None of this bodes well for the future of the planet. On the road to ultimate independence from oil, a necessary first step is to source oil from stable, transparent, accountable nation-states bound by the rule of law. Among the handful of these, the only one with abundant, long-term oil supplies is Canada.

This is a sobering lesson one ought to remember, as we grapple with the obvious necessity of Canada to develop its oil sands resource in a sustainable and responsible manner. Despite all the lurid denunciations of Canada on the world stage, it ought to be remembered that greenhouse gas emissions from the production of the oil sands amount to one tenth of one per cent – 0.1 per cent – of global emissions. This is in effect a rounding error. This fact in no way diminishes our responsibility of stewardship. But it must be remembered that nearly 90 per cent of all emissions from a barrel of oil come from exhaust pipes.

Dramatic though the Greenpeace protest might have been, a prime goal of the Copenhagen conference should be to reduce consumption of fossil fuels. The United States and China account for nearly half the greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Until those consumption patterns change, “stopping” the oil sands will achieve little.

The consensus view of scientists, expressed in the 2007 release of the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), urged a radical reduction in the consumption of fossil fuels to mitigate the calamitous effects of climate change. Most greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries come from fossil fuels emitting carbon dioxide when they are burned.

Nor should we pay much attention to the sterile debate on whether there is a “hoax” reflected in purloined e-mails from a group of British scientists. It doesn’t matter how much of climate change is attributable to human activity. The overwhelming reality is that the climate is changing, and we must adapt.

Of course some of it is a natural cycle, all proven by studies of the past: periods of heating and cooling, the tropical forest that once covered the Arctic, the glaciers that scoured Europe long after homo sapiens emerged, all these are etched in our Earth.

Science invites itself to be proven wrong: it is the very nature of scientific inquiry to propose a thesis in the expectation that it will be challenged. This is how knowledge advances. Today, the collective weight of the findings and theories that have yet to be disproved shows that the combustion of fossil fuels is accelerating the warming of the planet.

The IPCC, jointly established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme with the mandate to assess scientific information related to climate change and to evaluate the environmental and socio-economic consequences. It was asked to devise realistic response strategies. The resulting IPCC reports led directly to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was established in 1992, and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which resulted in an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The stolen e-mails of a handful of scientists cannot undo the weight of accumulated scientific inquiry. As the Copenhagen summit moves into deeper consideration of what can be done, let’s not be distracted by side-shows.

Satya Das