Letter to the Editor

Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson respond to our Spring 2013 poll question regarding the Northern Gateway Pipeline.

The choices you offer in your poll on the pipeline (as does almost all of the media discussion about it) miss the main issue—which is not the significant, but local and temporary danger of oil spills on land or sea.

The real problem is that the pipelines—and any further development of fossil fuels—move us further in the wrong direction, perpetuating our way of life at the expense of future generations', and the planet's health.

When we were born, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was about 280 parts/million; it is now over 400, higher than at any time in the past 20 million years, with increasingly noticeable effects.

Building the pipelines will make it much more difficult to turn off further development of Tar Sands oil, a failure that will drive that concentration much higher.

A brilliant discussion of the reasons why we keep failing to act on this problem is University of Washington philosopher Stephen Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (a book we consider in our Wilderness, Technology, and Creation course this summer). Gardiner stresses that one of the main problems with the issue is that the bad consequences of our behaviour now fall mainly on future generations, so we can make stupid decisions—like Tar Sands development—now and think they are rational.

Another good source is the website of James Hansen, a long-time climate scientist for NASA. Hansen has also written a book called Storms of My Grandchildren.

Another book worth reading is Bill McKibben's Eaarth (not a typo—it's his way of saying that we now live on a different planet than previous humans.

Christians especially need to think clearly about this issue.

Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson