Create a Metro Vancouver municipal party to cope with peak oil
By Charlie Smith
Here’s an idea for a regional citizens’ group called Vancouver Peak Oil: form a political party and run a maximum of one candidate in every municipality across Metro Vancouver in the 2011 election.
The membership of Vancouver Peak Oil should choose the candidates, and each should run with the party label “Peak Oil” after their names.
If the group runs too many candidates in each municipality, they'll dilute their support and nobody will get elected. The public is never in the mood to hear bad news, and there's no news that's more unpalatable than peak oil (unless, of course, we're discussing a pandemic like SARS).
In Vancouver, this candidate could be someone from the Greens, like Stephen Kronstein, or architect Rick Balfour. Each has wrapped his mind around the issue.
In Richmond, it could be farmland advocate Michael Wolfe or transportation expert Stephen Rees. Both are intelligent and both ran for the Greens in the recent provincial election.
An obvious candidate in North Vancouver is filmmaker Jon Cooksey, but he's not the only one.
It's time for people to put their egos aside and run only one candidate with peak oil after their name in each municipality in 2011. This will increase the likelihood of victory and spur copycat campaigns across the country.
If several peak-oil politicians are elected, provincial parties will be more likely to embrace the issue in time for the 2013 election.
Forget about putting Green labels beside the person's name. That will undermine the importance of preparing for peak oil. Running a slate of peak-oil candidates will force the mainstream media to pay attention to this issue, particularly if some of these people get elected.
Why bring this up now? I interviewed Jeff Rubin yesterday (June 5) about his fine book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (Random House Canada, $29.95). His comments, which you'll read more about in the coming days, reinforced to me how out of touch most B.C. politicians are about the implications of peak oil.
B.C. spent almost $900 million on a convention centre and will spend billions more on road and highway projects. It’s all designed to promote international trade at a time when globalization is about to recede, according to Rubin, a former chief economist of CIBC World Markets.
Premier Gordon Campbell obviously has no clue about the peak-oil issue, just as his brother Michael had no concept of the reality of global warming when he used to write silly articles on the topic in the Vancouver Sun.
The NDP isn't much better, though it deserves credit for calling for a stronger Agricultural Land Commission.
Perhaps the Opposition party's clever young researchers can distribute a copy of "The End of Cheap Oil", which appeared in Scientific American in March 1998, to the caucus and the NDP communications staff.
Written by petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere, it was a landmark piece in elevating understanding about global oil supplies.
So why create a regional peak-oil party? It's because many municipal politicians are too gutless to take strong action to deal with the obvious: declining oil production combined with rising oil consumption in petroleum-producing countries has the potential to cripple the world economy for a long time. This is an emergency.
In the words of Rubin, peak oil also means peak GDP. The economy has nowhere to go but down after the world surpasses peak oil production.
Combine this with climate change—and the likelihood of brutal droughts in the U.S. Southwest—and Metro Vancouver residents are eventually going to have to figure out new ways to feed themselves.
This region might also have to cope with an onslaught of migrants from the United States and other parts of Canada as a result of peak oil and climate change.
If there was one peak-oil politician on each municipal council across the region, this person could keep the pressure on municipal governments to promote wise energy, agricultural, and housing policies.
A truly progressive municipal party would put one fewer candidate on its slate to make room for a knowledgeable peak-oil rep to get elected.
It's not good enough to rely on environmentally inclined politicians who belong to mainstream parties. That's because once they get sucked into the party system, they'll be forced to make compromises.
The proof is in Vision Vancouver's Andrea Reimer's decision to go along with a one-lane bicycle trial on the Burrard Bridge. Even COPE's David Cadman and Ellen Woodsworth didn't object publicly to the removal of former councillor Fred Bass from the board of TransLink, even though Bass was well-suited for the job.
In the end, it’s going to be the municipalities that will help us cope with the fallout from peak oil.
Forget about the provincial and federal governments. They’ve already proven how useless they are in addressing the biggest challenge of our lifetime.
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