Economics,
politics and morality change.
If there is
one thing that I can guarantee in this life it is that things will change.
There is nothing wrong with change as long as we realize that it's good and
bad. Very often the same change is viewed in opposite ways by different
people.
I was a child
right after a great war and most of the people I knew were survivors of the
war. They were a different crowd from what we are today. People who survived
the hardships and the fighting, who lost their families and all that they had
were not the type to demand protection from governments. They were self-reliant
risk-takers who accepted whatever came and regularly prepared for whatever may
come. Another mark of hard times was the ability to help each other even by
risking themselves. My mother told stories of Nazis coming through the front
door and Jewish children hiding in the basement. My ancestors risked themselves
and their families for people they didn’t know.
As I got
older, the future changed into the past. Taking risks became a bad thing where
it used to be admired. In our attempt to spread the risk around and make
everyone share in it, we became very conscious of safety. First, it was good as
we gained socialized medicine, police, fire protection, and even unemployment
insurance and crop insurance. We are fighting for more and it is a good idea.
However, we lose some freedom in the process and we should consider if it is
important. Often the elimination of risk makes us less concerned with the price
of doing so, in which we give up freedom to do “our thing.”.
Two examples
come to mind immediately. Take the Canadian tobacco industry. In the 1950s and
sixties, tobacco was a major industry in Ontario. In the Niagara Region, we had
the thriving Ontario Tobacco belt famous around the world. In came the fight
against smoking and devastated the region.
Another
example is the thriving Asbestos mining in Quebec. Again in the sixties, Canada
was supplying 40% of the world’s need for that “miracle Fibre.” I remember
asbestos everywhere including at the bus stop where I was waiting for the bus
to take me to school. We all had asbestos sheets behind the wood stoves to
prevent fires and all the heating plumbing was insulated with the substance. It
provided jobs for many thousands of Quebecers and was a very good investment
opportunity.
In came
safety concerns, about smoking and about asbestos both being cancer-causing.
Politicians and governments fought fiercely to keep it on the markets but lost.
The need for safety convinced the public to ignore economics and champion
safety and safety won. The mines and tobacco farms went bankrupt, and the world
carried on as if nothing happened. In many cases, the fight went overboard but
when change gains momentum, there is no way to break it.
Now, we the
people of Alberta find ourselves in the same fight in a big way. We have around
a third of the world’s oil reserves buried in our backyard and we developed
ways to mine it. In our minds, we were all rich, but the change was faster.
First, our greatest competitor and market, the USA, found cheaper oil that
costs less than what we produce. They flooded the market leaving us with
having to sell to China. While we were working on that, we were handed the
biggest Trump Card. Studies that began a long time ago brought safety against us.
We are not risk-takers.
This time we
are not talking about the workers and consumers getting cancer, but about the
earth itself sustaining irreparable damage. We tried all we could to minimize
the concerns, but the risk is too consuming. If the mother earth is hurt none
of us will be left untouched. Critics try their best to deny the facts but the
younger people are not willing to take the risk. These youngsters will soon be
voting and they are saying “we will not forget.”
It hurts to
give in or lose an important game, especially for proud men. I know the
feeling. We will scream and go down kicking, but we will not win against
“safety” in this reality. We will have to cut down our carbon emissions, give
up on exporting solid liquefied oil and find new ways to make a living. Oil and
gas are needed for plastics, for heating until new ways are found, and for
lubrication. This is a time of big changes and the more we resist the harder we
will hurt ourselves. My advice is, let’s innovate and roll with the punches. We
can be a leading force in the new world if we focus on innovation instead of
fighting what we can’t beat. The young people we are chastising are our ticket
for a bright future, so let’s invest in them.
I prefer to
spend whatever is left in oil revenues on building a future than on trying to
fight to make us great again in impossible ways, if anyone cares about my
opinion. There is always change and we choose how we deal with it.
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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/734086807982991571/
Looking at
this poster that was published in the fifties shows how far we have changed as
a society.
Here
is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/ Feel
free to check other articles and comment.
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