When my grandfather came to Canada in 1930 at the age of 13, his family cleared 19 acres of land, by hand in their first year. They didn't have tractors, chain saws or electricity. They had horses, saws, axes and plows. And for heat, they burned wood.
If you listen to the protestors in Washington marching against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, that's how we should all live from now on.
The New York Times reported Feb. 17, "On Sunday, thousands rallied near the Washington Monument to protest the pipeline and call for firmer steps to fight emissions of climate-changing gases. Groups opposing coal production, nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing fornatural gaswere prominent; separate groups of Baptists and Catholics, as well as an interfaith coalition, and groups from Colorado, Toronto and Minneapolis joined the throng."
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2011, these were the primary energy sources in that country: petroleum (36 per cent), natural gas (25 per cent), coal (20 per cent), renewables (nine per cent) and nuclear electric (eight per cent).
Since the protesters don't want petroleum pipelines (oil sands, fracking, global warming), natural gas (fracking again, global warming), nuclear (no global warming, but glowing in the dark), or coal (global warming), then they really have no other option than to return to the lifestyle my late grandfather had in 1930 - agrarian, sustenance living, when most people grew their own food. And if you had a bad crop that year, you had a hard winter.
Having grown up on a farm, I feel guilty when I realize how dismissive I can be when it comes to farming. I think that unfortunate tendency has come around because, frankly, there are few farmers left. There doesn't need to be that many anymore. I know one family that farms 17,000 acres among them. Other farms in southeast Saskatchewan are 6,000 to 10,000 acres, easily. It's a tremendous change from the 160-acre homestead.
The advances in energy production - especially petroleum fueled equipment, combined with fertilizers that also have a petroleum base, plus all the modern technologies that have come along mean people can do things other than growing their own food and still survive.
You can't make computers without petroleum, or run them without energy. You can't pull 73-foot air hoe drills with horses.
It's precisely because of all these advances that those protesters have the time to march on Washington, instead of having to head home to milk the cows and slop the pigs as my grandparents did.
You can't get rid of the 91 per cent of energy production and expect to continue living life as we know it now. You either have to magically replace all that energy, or you have to regress to a previous time.
Europe did that about 1,500 or so years ago. They were called the Dark Ages. If we turn off the lights, they will be dark, indeed.
How many of those protesters walked to the National Mall in Washington? Were there busses fueled by oil that came via Enbridge's mainline? Did their planes burn jet fuel?
No energy source is perfect - far from it. But we can't live as a modern society without them. Over time we have moved from a coal-based energy system to petroleum. Natural gas may soon start to displace coal for power production and oil for transportation. Coal smoke no longer blankets London, England as it did 100 years ago. But coal will never be eliminated, nor will the oil sands. They are both simply too plentiful to ignore.
When it comes to a growing population and an energy strategy to service it, the world will continue to work on an "all of the above" basis. We need all the energy we can get, including oil sands oil pumped through the Keystone XL.
The alternative is getting an axe and chopping firewood. I hope there's enough to go around for seven billion people.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
