This week, the city of Victoria, B.C. announced plansto launch a class action lawsuit against the oil and gas sector. The idea is to tally up the various damages done to the city by climate change and send the bill to the likes of Suncor or CNRL.
It’s the latest salvo of a movement that seeks to singularly blame the oil industry for climate change while conveniently ignoring the millions of daily consumer choices, often made by activists themselves, that contribute to Canada’s fossil fuel addiction.........
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Victoria is Canada’s busiest cruise ship port of call
At the same time that they’re itemizing damages they can expense to ExxonMobil, Victoria is aggressively trying to attract more cruise ships. Mayor Lisa Helps, in fact, has championed a campaign that would make Victoria a home port for vessels. “It’s a great opportunity not only from the room nights from a tourism perspective but also for the spinoffs it would generate for the local economy,” she told local CBC. Tourism is very important to the B.C. capital, and a lot of that is indeed sustained by the estimated $130 million brought in by the city’s more than 200 cruise ship visits per year. But it all comes at the cost of enormous, heavy-oil-powered pleasure vessels idling just out of sight. The size and efficiency of cruise ships vary, but an analysis by the Global Sustainable Tourism Dashboard estimated that the average cruise ship passenger is racking up a carbon bill of 0.82 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent; roughly the same as a trans-Atlantic flight. The European Committee on Transport and Tourism, meanwhile, has estimated that a cruise ship passenger does about 36 cents of environmental damage for every kilometre they travel. It’s essentially a marine equivalent of Victoria’s economy being dependent on a sprawling parking lot filled with constantly idling RVs. Oh, and Victoria also just opened a dedicated marina for mega-yachts..........
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/youre-all-hypocrites-why-its-a-colo...
But, but only oil tankers bother Orcas - Suzuki said so.
I believe that Trans Mountain was flawed from the get-go because a project of this size is just plain wrong for a metropolitan area, a river estuary with world class fish resources, a congested harbour and and a very busy waterway to open ocean that threatens ocean species.
Limit the impact by reducing the size and increase the volume of refined products to the coast and revisit Gateway with either an indigenous ownership component or a merger with Pacific Spirit consortium.