I have been trying to understand the reasoning behind the recent announcement from Gordon Campbell on the Green Energy Advisory Task Force.
Campbell has included the "green" word to pretend this energy is clean and it will help with reducing BC' carbon footprint and fight global warming. If you read the News Releases about this Green Advisory Tasks Forces, it says they are “dedicated to ensuring BC remains a leader in clean and renewable energy”.
I am afraid that the core idea behind this Green Energy Advisory Task Force is for more economic growth in BC. And there is no question that there will be huge profits for a few corporations from the recommendations from this Task Force, unfortunately, the companies that will profit from all this will not necessarily be from BC, not even Canadian.
There are four task force groups, reporting directly to the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action and Clean Energy. These groups are:
1. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Procurement and Regulatory Reform,
2. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Carbon Pricing, Trading and Export Market Development,
3. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Community Engagement and First Nations Partnerships, and
4. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Resource Development
Boy, they know how to make very pompous, complicated titles, indeed!
No matter the way I read all this, I can’t see how these groups will make any improvement for the resiliency, or the sustainability, of this province. They don’t even use those terms, nor they mention anything about reducing our insatiable demand for more energy. To me, that should be priority numero uno for this Task Force.
As far as I understand it, Campbell is creating this "green machine" to justify more growth. For him, that is what progress means.
Let me share a few words from Dr. Richard Bruce Anderson that describes this situation very nicely. In his essay "Resisting the Juggernaut", he writes:
" the imperatives of growth and profit drive the behaviour of the whole system. Like a machine, the economy has all the awesome power of mechanism but also its inhuman indifference to consequences. The machine isn't evil, any more than a shovel or a hammer is evil, but it is complex enough to have its own agenda, which is not a human agenda. Because it's inhuman and because it has amassed so much power, it is, in mythic terms, the Juggernaut, beyond control, growing ever more vast and more destructive.
"To fulfill its simple imperatives for growth and profit, the machine must create insatiable desire. It must cause us to want more than we need, more than we've ever wanted before, and it must continue to do this forever in order to grow and generate profit.
"The influence of the machine is responsible for much of the psychic pain and dysfunction we encounter. Logic and reason have little effect on how it operates. To change our minds and hearts, the machine appeals to the worst aspects of human nature. Greed, pride, fear, sloth, lust --the deadly sins-- are the openings, the doors to demand for more products. The machine exaggerates the normal human tendency towards materialism. It encourages narcissism and self-indulgence. It displaces and subtly discredits healthy human attributes and practices such as compassion and thrift. The influence is more than sufficient to account for the malaise in society, in the same way that the physical effects of the machine's operation are sufficient to explain the destruction of the natural world."
He finishes the essay like this:
" and who's to say that nothing can be done, that we're helpless in the face of the Juggernaut? Our challenge in this time is to live with integrity, to face reality and to save and heal whatever we can"
What we need to understand is that Campbell has created this insatiable desire for more growth as his mantra, as his religion. He doesn’t get that there are actual limits to growth. And we need to stop him.
I expect that at least a few of the members of this Green Energy Advisory Task Force still have integrity, compassion, thrift, that they care for future generations, that they show their reverence for life, that they recognize there are limits to growth, and that they will have enough courage to stop this Green Juggernaut.
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