I woke an hour earlier than usual this morning to head off to the west-end of Edmonton to locate what now looks to be the last bastion of free parking in the city of Edmonton – Beulah Alliance Church. At eight blocks north of the West Edmonton Mall it was an easy find but a long drive as Edmontonians were caught, not just with their pants down, but with their all-season-radials in all-winter weather. I sought out this particular church amongst the plethora of other Albertan evangelical options not, however, for salvation or bake sales, but for a free bus that would take me to meet none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper at, what was at the time, an ominous undisclosed location, where he would be speaking about an unnamed topic. Tantalized, I braved almost an hour in slushy gunk to get to the upper-middle class and mostly white riding of Conservative party member Rona Ambrose.

“Beulah Alliance Church, what an interesting choice,” I wondered if there was any subtext to this folksy Jewish name relevant to the meeting that I was about to attend. Beulah, in Hebrew, of course, roughly means “married woman”. In Christian theology it is most famously used in the book of Isaiah verse 62:4. The NIV renders it: “No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah, and your land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married.” The conservatives, it would seem, perhaps had some innuendo planned. It is also equally possible that they only attempt to appear clever in public. Well to that conundrum I can be swayed neither way.

The purpose of our attendance (aside from the obvious role of audience fluffers to appear to other Canadians on TV that other Canadians actually care what any politician says) was to listen to Mr. Harper give his endorsement of a carbon-capture coal program for the coal burning, electricity generation station still under construction at Wabamun just west of the city. For the initiative itself I have to applaud the conservatives in endorsing a technology that will make safer the use of coal burning but I have to take away points from Premier Ed Stelmach who incoherently thinks that adding this project to a coal plant still under construction will reduce CO2 emissions. Sorry Mr. Stelmach, they will only reduce future, other-wise planned to be dirty-as-hell, emissions. We should all forgive Mr. Stelmach for his rhetorical incompetence, however, as his only formal education is in animal husbandry (don’t worry Ed, we all know what you really meant).

Grammar and vocabulary aside, the future use of coal in much of the world is a reality and can be seen in nations like China and India, not to mention swathing portions of the African Continent. While some might argue that the sheer cost of this particular endeavor (some 780 million) may put developing nations off, it can be quickly countered that labor, engineers, and pensions are all considerably cheaper in developing countries making it highly likely, considering that energy is even more highly subsidized abroad than it is here, that such initiatives may very well be studied and implemented abroad. So today I am cautiously optimistic.

What was particularly annoying, and predictable, was the incoherent rant of NDP environment critic Linda Duncan, whose credentials as a lawyer make her as equally suspect as an environmental activist, as say, the histrionic and dreadfully gullible Mrs. May of the Greens. Linda, in whose scrubby and poverty-subsidized riding I am currently residing, was quick to slam an important new environmental initiative as dangerous to farmers and ground water. Well, I don’t recall environmental law syllabi in law school being filled with anything much more than arm-flailing against Monsanto Grains. I do recall that such courses were certainly devoid of anything resembling scientific principles, and it would seem to me, though I have no doubt that coal plants certainly do risk groundwater, that carbon capture would reduce overall environmental impact. This, however, seems to go unnoticed by a woman who has spend the better part of 15 years on boards and committees reviewing Alberta’s emissions outputs! Fine, one could say that she is doing her job as a critic and going against the government and opposing fossil fuels and that opposing the government in power is her duty irrespective of the outcome. To that I say this: the coal output of Canada as compared to the output in China is negligible. While Alberta is definitely the top air-polluter in Canada there is also a lot that can be said in being an energy leader in fossil fuels. The minuscule contributions that Canada makes to CO2 emissions, in comparison to all that lays beneath the Asian brown cloud, can allow us to innovate, experiment, and export our ideas (patented and sold for profit I might add) to other nations for a global benefit. The fact that we dirty a bit of our backyard to do so is a small thing to gripe about given the cost of cleaning up the neighborhood. Besides, as Duncan failed to point out and Ed understated, the air would be a hell of a lot dirtier without the initiative now wouldn’t it?

I returned to the parking lot in at Beulah Alliance Church, quickly driving off so as to avoid gospel invitations and the mere possibility of hearing the gut-wrenching squeals of Brian Doerksen-inspired Christian three-chord rock. Mid-escape I thought to myself: “…the land will be married?” A strange fusion perhaps of eschatology and environmentalism? A longing for ecological balance and the socially-just kingdom of heaven? Who knows? In Alberta’s mostly Christian north, thoughts on our material existence have tended to stay on more classical religious views: “give no thought for the morrow”, and “in last days the sky will darken and the moon turn to blood.” Beulah, a time of heaven on earth in respects to the land in particular is, in a Christian context, an occurrence after the destruction of the earth, but then why be bound by tradition? Good governance is, after all, one that improves, not hinders, development and conservation, a tradition that expands rights including above all, the right to an environment in which humans can thrive. So I decided that while coal is still mostly bad, and the environment is still mostly being destroyed in this province, that what I bore witness to today was, in the scope of things, a reason for optimism.

Cheers.

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Tags: c02, Carbon Capture, greenhouse gas

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Economy, Environment, Federal Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.