Pete McMartin in Postmedia’s Vancouver Sun puts a few things together in an article today. He takes CP Rail’s CEO’s view of fossil fuels, and follows with the BC Provincial Gov’t and its focus on . . .you guessed it . . . fossil fuels.
The headlines are worth quoting:
Pete McMartin: Look to the future and what do you see? Not fossil fuels
Sunset industry: But still the province seems intent on accommodating shipment of coal, oil and LNG from Port Metro Vancouver
First — McMartin writes on E. Hunter Harrison of CP Rail, speaking to the J. P. Morgan Aviation, Transportation and Industrials Conference in New York City:
Speaking to Big Money in the Big Apple, here was one of North America’s most influential transportation executives eulogizing fossil fuel. Its death wasn’t imminent, he said, but it was an eventuality. It was a sunset industry even if that sunset was decades off — and his industry had to adapt to that reality, not just for profit but out of an environmental obligation. He accepted the science, he said; he’d leave the climate-change denials to the cranks.
Next, Mr. McMartin reviews the new Westshore Terminal’s Delta coal port, planned on the basis of shipping some 4 million tons a year from Fraser Surrey Docks, and the bridge that enables much bigger ships to service it:
Notice Harrison’s reference to Powder River Basin coal. It’s thermal coal burned to produce electricity. Environmentally, it’s filthy. Communities on the U.S. west coast wanted nothing to do with it, but Delta’s Westshore Terminals (largest shareholder, Jimmy Pattison) shipped it, and late last year, Port Metro Vancouver approved a $50-million project for Fraser Surrey Docks to ship four million tonnes of it annually. All of it will go to Asia.
The price of coal, however, has slumped by 25 per cent since last year, as Harrison foresaw. Faced with the price collapse, Westshore halted its shipment of Powder River Basin coal this year and Fraser Surrey Docks is re-evaluating the new project’s construction — which is to say, it’s waiting for the wind to change. It may not.
All of which brings us, circuitously, to a Province freedom-of-information request that showed that in 2012-2013, both Port Metro Vancouver and Fraser Surrey Docks lobbied the provincial government to do away with the George Massey tunnel. They wanted a bridge built so that larger, deep-draft ships could get upriver.
And behold, soon after, the provincial government announced a bridge would be built, a 10-lane, $3.5-billion behemoth that would replace the tunnel because, the government said, the tunnel had passed its due date.
Mr. McMartin seems to me somewhat conflicted about the future, and concludes by noting that these are two very different views of it, heading in two different directions.
The bridge will be built. It will cater to a growing car-dependent culture south of the Fraser. The big ships will come up river. E. Hunter Harrison’s vision of the future will proceed inexorably in one direction, and our vision of the future will proceed in the other. One of them will flourish.
Personally, I hear views like those of of people working on climate-change issues, those of Mr. Harrison, and then those of the Clark Gov’t, and I fear that short-term profit-seeking will outweigh long-term concerns. And I despair for my grand-nieces and nephews, who will inherit a world that they never made.
