EKOS Communications, Inc.

Over lunch yesterday at a Thai restaurant in Vancouver, I engaged in a lively and friendly exchange with individuals closely tied with oil and gas and mining industries during which we touched on climate change, tarsands, fracking, pipelines, renewable energy, and the global economy. What disturbed me was the way they so easily promoted the benefits of these extractive activities without acknowledging or taking into account the known and unknown environmental and social threats posed by them. Yet, when I probed, they agreed that the situation was getting very grim, for both the global ecology and the global economy.

But what can be done about it? They challenged. The world needs more energy, and most especially the fuels of oil and gas. Non-renewable and heavy in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases though they are. Renewable energy capacity sufficient to completely substitute for fossil fuels is still several decades away. Canada must continue to exploit the tarsands and it needs to get the pipelines built and for the fracking to increase, they insisted.