No easy way out of the energy crunch

(June 10) - There are connecting lines joining apparently unconnected things. They’re not usually straight lines with arrow heads pointing clearly from one cause to a resulting effect. Sometimes they are round, or oval, or confusingly squiggly. No matter what, they are always there.

If we squint up our eyes and look closely at the events of the past couple of weeks, we can see a line joining Detroit, Rome, Quebec City and Guelph.

If we plot the line on a graph, it goes from point E to point N, back to point E, up to point R, down to point G, and way up to point Y. That’s my hokey way of saying it’s all about energy. Or the impending lack of it.

I don’t have Detroit on the list because of the Stanley Cup. It’s true enough that I ran out of the energy needed to watch hockey after the first third of the baseball season was in the books. There's more to it than that.

Detroit is about a lot more than talented Swedish athletes. It’s also the home of General Motors. The world is running out of the energy needed to drive many of GM’s vehicles. Thousands of workers will suffer the consequences when the company closes the Oshawa truck plant.

Buzz Hargrove is understandably upset because it’s only been a few weeks since he concluded an early collective agreement with GM. It froze wages across the Canadian operations for three years in return for job guarantees from the company. If the job guarantees are not there, the contract should be declared null and void. Wages should be unfrozen until they get back to the table in September.

It is absurd for the company to claim they were taken by surprise by a two week decline in truck sales or a two week spike in the price of crude oil. No one else was surprised.

They weren't surprised in Rome where a recently concluded UN conference looked at the crisis in the world’s food supply. Soaring oil prices bring more biofuels which bring soaring food prices.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Lots of people want to save the environment without giving up the creature comforts that are killing it.

We can’t have it both ways. Every litre of ethanol in the tank of an SUV lifts the price of corn around the world. People go hungry. The higher the price of corn, the more land is given over to growing it. Rainforests disappear.

At the Rome meeting, the United States, Brazil, Canada and some European countries blocked a clear statement linking biofuels to food prices. These countries are leading the global charge to convert arable farmland from food to fuel production.

At least biofuel doesn’t directly emit greenhouse gases. In an effort to deal with companies that do, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec got together in Quebec City a week or so ago. They reached a carbon “cap and trade” deal that is supposed to help us meet our Kyoto targets.

These schemes are accurately described as free market environmentalism. There’s an interesting article about this in the April 19 edition of New Scientist magazine. If you are a library member, you can read it on the their web site. The bottom line is that a polluting company can buy carbon credits on an open market. The article points out: “You can gain carbon credits for burning biofuels in Europe, even if the crops from which they are produced are grown in fields created by draining peat swamps or cutting down forests.”

Meanwhile back here at home, the province is still trying to sell us their dream of a new and improved Hanlon and its money-pit-cousin, the GTA West transportation corridor. There are lots of cloverleaf interchanges, tons of steel and cement, lots of money and fast moving traffic. What it doesn’t have are traffic circles, common sense and a clear vision of the future.

It will be a highway designed to meet the faltering vision of a GM executive. That’s about as sensible as building a fourth multi-level parking garage downtown when we should be getting away from our dependency on cars.

There is no easy way out of the energy crisis. The only sure thing is there is no free lunch. Whatever we do carries a cost. One way or another, sooner or later, we are going to have to pay.