To the editor,
Re: Pipeline raises questions around jurisdiction, Letters, April 17.
It is amazing how the issue of the Kinder Morgan pipeline has become one of pitting governments against one another apparently to hide the fact that the project cannot proceed without even more public subsidy. This notion of exporting the diluted bitumen became economically dead since U.S. president Trump changed the law that allows American companies to export their cheap, ‘sweet’ crude. Why would China want to buy Alberta’s far inferior quality diluted bitumen at double the price, especially when it is far harder to refine and far worse for the environment?
Even if exporting the highly corrosive and toxic diluted bitumen could work economically, expanding the oil sands would destroy Canada’s greenhouse gas targets. Allowing the project to die a natural death, then, is in the national interest.
If the big oil companies and traders know that the bitumen will not be exported then is this ‘national crisis’ not simply a ploy to get us taxpayers to subsidise a dead-in-the-water project? Oily, eh?
Ian Gartshore, Nanaimo
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