This week, the Joint Review Panel has been holding hearings in Victoria about the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. Just today, the Dogwood Initiative tweeted:

Final speaker of the day makes it official! 141 OPPOSED - in favour, ZERO at the #yyj #Enbridge #JRP hearings #bcpoli

Followed by:

That's a wrap for tonight! 185 #JRP speakers in #yyj - ZERO in favour of #Enbridge tanker and pipeline proposal #bcpoli #oil

Feeding our energy appetite is top of mind for many people these days. Some argue we should get coal, oil and gas out of the ground as quickly as possible, build more pipelines and make as much money as we can selling it here and abroad. Their priorities are the economy and meeting short-term energy needs so we can live the lives to which we’ve become accustomed.

Many others question those priorities. Do we gain comfort and happiness by driving inefficient automobiles, buying and scrapping and then buying more stuff that we must work harder to pay for, and selling resources to enrich the fossil fuel industry and to allow other countries to follow our unsustainable path?

Yesterday in British Columbia, Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to sound a note of reason on the subject of the increasingly unpopular proposal to build 1100 kilometres of pipeline through the northern British Columbia wilderness between the Alberta oil sands and a proposed super tanker port in Kitimat, B.C. Here is what he said:

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We can't live without clean water. Canada is blessed with an abundance of lakes and rivers and has a global responsibility to manage them well. But if we really want to protect freshwater supplies and the ecosystems they support, we must understand how human activity and natural disturbances affect them.