I’m all for reinvesting in our northern communities, becoming self sufficient, and improving our economy.
We just have to be careful and not repeat the same mistakes we made in the early 1900s. We can do this quickly AND cleanly, it just takes more effort
There are dozens of lakes in northern Ontario polluted by mine tailings. We thought “oh, this poison can’t hurt anyone if we dump it in a lot of water”. And we were wrong.
Decades later we discovered the arsenic cycle. All those poisons and heavy metals we dumped in lakes continuously interact with organic materials and enter a cycle where they constantly continue to leach into the water, but are also constantly pulled out of sediment and mud, perpetually keeping the poison at the top.
There is still no research on how to fix this.
This is our drinking water. The lakes where kids swim. The animals we hunt drink from. And it’s indigenous lands that we share with them. Ontario is our home.
We know the risks, now let’s build and plan for them, and not make the same mistakes again and again.
“Quickly” is relative. We can move more quickly than we are certainly, while maintaining the forethought to prevent unnecessary harm, but we have to take a balanced approach. We don’t want to let perfect become the enemy of the good, but we also don’t need to make mistakes that cost us more down the road than we ever benefit from the development in the first place.
Yes, that’s very well put, thank you.
I really want to see us do good, and revitalize the north, and liberate our country from having to pick the best evil in the moment.
I wrote them for information on the development. They never got back to me.
We need to develop technology to preserve the environment before we start mining.
I am generally extremely pro workers right and pro environmental protection, but environmentalists really need look at the situation practically and holistically.
This article seems to suggest that it’s impossible to mine ethically, and while I get that it causes inherent damage and destruction, the alternatives will cause more damage and destruction, just not here.
The sad reality of bill 5 is that environmental laws have been used to block infrastructure projects numerous times. And while local environmental concerns are obviously valid, in the real world that we live in, it is not obviously ‘more ethical’ to let them block the project so that it instead gets built in say Peru, or doesn’t get built at all and we keep using fossil fuel infrastructure.
I think another piece of the puzzle is making sure a sizeable chunk of the earnings from extraction projects are captured by the government and set aside for remediation, as well as in something akin to Norway’s Soverign Wealth fund. It’s a shame that we didn’t end up in the same boat as Norway given how long we’ve been exploiting our oil sands. Money like that could be put to use solving all sorts of environmental problems.
Wholeheartedly agree.
While I agree that those dynamics can exist, it doesn’t have to be that way.
We could be saying to manufacturers “you are not allowed to sell products that contain materials or parts that are produced in ways that harm people and the environment in the following specific ways: …”
and forming agreements with other countries and trading blocs (ideally through institutions like the UN) to that effect.
This stuff doesn’t have to be a race to the bottom.
No we cannot.
We literally need those minerals to build things like solar panels and electrical infrastructure that will let us transition away from fossil fuels.
There is no perfectly clean energy source, and we need energy to keep humans alive, healthy, and happy.
Sorry but I don’t think you understood my comment correctly. Unless you’re saying that no, we have to accept poor labour practices and rampant environmental degradation - which obviously are things antithetical to the happy, healthy, and alive humans you are claiming to advocate for
I didn’t say anything about poor labour practices, but we do have to accept some environmental degradation.
There is literally no practical way to keep this many people alive without some environmental degradation.
OK so I was right that you did miss my point.
What I was saying is that it is not a binary choice between pushing damaging projects here or accepting damaging projects elsewhere, but instead wherever possible we should be doing what we can to mitigate and limit the environmental and social impacts of extraction, insofar as there are things we need to extract.
I see no reason why we can’t have high standards.
What I was saying is that it is not a binary choice between pushing damaging projects here or accepting damaging projects elsewhere, but instead wherever possible we should be doing what we can to mitigate and limit the environmental and social impacts of extraction, insofar as there are things we need to extract.
I mean, yes but there are always tradeoffs and time is a massive factor. If doing everything we can to mitigate local environmental damage means a process that delays the mining of minerals needed for mass-electrification and slows it down, then we’ll end up doing more overall environmental damage as we continue to burn fossil fuels.
