After question period in the House of Commons yesterday Leader of the Opposition, Thomas Mulcair, is reported as saying that the government is allowing the oilsands to develop, "without applying basic rules of sustainable development, without applying the one rule of sustainable development, which is polluter pays."
"If you don't include those costs, we're doing the same thing as if we had a factory where we were pushing the garbage into a river in the back. It's not the real profit, it's not the real price."
CBC News: Is Canada suffering from 'Dutch disease'?
Unfortunately this truth is being obscured by the debate about whether and to what extent exports of crude oil from the oil sands are driving up the Canadian dollar to the detriment of Manufacturing - so-called Dutch Disease; the implication seeming to be, if it's not causing Dutch Disease to a significant degree then it's OK to dump our garbage in the river for someone else to clean up.
This is not peculiar to the Alberta oilsands, nor to Canada. It is vital to include this "garbage in the river" principle in any debate about the economic merits and demerits of different methods of energy generation and storage, particularly when people laud the "low cost" of carbon emitting power generation and how squeaky clean nuclear power is. Regarding the latter, we do not yet know how to "finally" store nuclear waste, let alone the cost.
We'll simply let my grandchildren and their generation worry about that - and pay for it!
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