The main reason it’s not easy being green is that becoming genuinely green in business and politics is far more complicated than just talking about it. Talk being cheap, however, that is all that is usually delivered from political pulpits.
Consider the number of business spike belts politicians keep laying across the road to revenue and profit for B.C.’s resource extraction industry, which remains vital to the province’s economy. B.C.’s resources minister recently noted, for example, that it directly provides in the neighbourhood of 30,000 jobs – the good-paying variety that supports families and builds communities.
But more than jobs, the sector is fundamental to the world’s efforts to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. That does not always register with green factions that prefer simplistic sloganeering and one-dimensional social-media-think.
The minerals used to build and power renewable energy initiatives need to be mined; they also need to be shipped from where they are extracted to where they can be turned into the energy storage, transmission and transportation technology for the new greener world. For the most part the movement of those raw materials is still provided by fossil fuel machinery. The world can’t get to a newer greener destination without the resource industry’s basic building blocks and economic backbone. But in B.C., carbon taxes that are no longer revenue neutral and now penalize mining companies’ operations at home and their ability to compete abroad threaten to eliminate the province’s opportunity to contribute to the green economy. That bottom-line market disadvantage is magnified when the province’s high fuel and power costs are added to the business payload borne by miners.
Green needs some old-fashioned ground-level grit to become the sustainable reality most people want it to be. New economy still needs old economy, but old politics keep getting in the way of new and old working together to build a better world.
