Sunday 6 October 2019

Economics, politics and morality change.


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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