Regarding Coun Greenlaw’s letter on why she supports the Sue Big Oil movement in The Squamish Chief Oct. 31, there is little doubt that her concern is well-founded.
Whether Sue Big Oil is a solution requires more scrutiny. It is appealing to suggest “recovering” these costs from the enormous profits of the petrochemical industry as if the industry has put it all aside in case it is asked for.
However, past profits have been paid to shareholders—that means to the Canada Pension Plan, corporate pension plans, and individual investors—either directly or through mutual funds.
In other words, we have already collected these funds.
Future liability will be paid like any other expense of producing a product— added to the cost and passed on to the consumer (us) every time we purchase anything that derives from fossil fuels.
Or maybe it pushes the company into unprofitability or bankruptcy. Who does that cost? Us again when our pension plans and investments lose value.
And it is appealing to demand “reparations” as if Big Oil was some independent entity deliberately doing battle with us.
Or try to draw a parallel with tobacco because they deliberately deluded us, so we’d continue with our addiction.
Make the users pay; make those who profited from it pay. For Big Oil and fossil fuels, we are the users, and the ones to whom profits are distributed.
Through Sue Big Oil, Greenlaw wishes to hold our provincial and federal governments accountable.
That’s what elections are for.
Legal action is for extracting a monetary penalty for misdeeds.
The only source of money the provincial and federal governments have is through income or consumption taxes—us. So, whatever we (the District of Squamish) get as a settlement from higher governments will again be paid for by whom? Us.
Not to mention that lawyers will do all these legal shenanigans. They will get their cut paid for by us long before we collect any benefit from a lawsuit.
Suggesting a parallel with tobacco misses the point that if tobacco disappeared instantly from the face of the Earth, apart from some withdrawal symptoms from the smoking community, the world would function just fine or better than before.
Do the same with Big Oil and our economic supply chain shuts down. Road vehicles, ships, trains, planes—they all rely on fossil fuel.
Electric vehicles and machines require Big Oil products to manufacture and operate.
Crops can’t be fertilized. No machinery to harvest them. No synthetic fabrics.
No concrete, great limitations on industrial and home construction products. And more to the point, nothing in the Sue Big Oil movement to create solutions or replacements for our present use of fossil fuels.
Finally, selling this as “a low-risk, low-cost” initiative with a financial contribution capped at $1 per resident is misleading.
According to the suebigoil.ca website, that contribution is to lobby local governments to join a class action lawsuit that would appear to be pursued by an affiliated non-charitable organization.
So, Squamish council is spending taxpayer money to pay an outside organization to lobby it—hardly an ethical approach.
The impacts of climate change are enormous, but that doesn’t mean we’re in trouble; it means we have a challenge.
There is no easy way forward. This complex issue has developed since we learned how to light fossil fuels on fire.
Its solutions cannot be local; they must be global.
I humbly suggest to the council that your job is to spend our tax dollars to work with other levels of government on real solutions to impending problems, not to grasp at some superficial, over-simplified “feel-good” scheme.
Rae Simpson
Squamish
