What if? Whatever...

Have you seen that Irving Oil TV commercial, the one about saving the right whales by moving the shipping lanes?

At the end, a woman is paddling across the bay, talking about the partnership between industry and the environment, about giving nature the right of way. “That’s my ‘what if,’ ” she says.

What is my "what if"?

How about this…

What if K.C. Irving never built that first refinery, the most visible symbol of this heavily industrial city?

What if heavy industry hadn’t so thoroughly dominated the city’s economy for the past 50 years? Would we now be building a true post-industrial economy, one that didn’t rely on the burning of fossil fuels?

What if we didn’t have to sell out the planet to become an Energy Hub?

Our beautiful coastline is already blighted by an oil refinery, the Canaport oil and gas terminal, the Colson Cove generating station, and the Point. Lepreau nuclear power plant.

Now, the provincial government wants to build a second reactor at Lepreau, and the Irvings are adding two more soiled gems to the landscape – a second refinery and the liquefied natural gas terminal.

What if we could be like Germany, which has become an alternative energy superpower. It’s created 240,000 jobs in renewable energy industries like solar and wind power.

What if consumers – me included – could reduce consumption and eliminate the business case for building new refineries?

That’s my “what if.”

Then again, what if I just had an active imagination like the folks at Irving Oil?

And I talked up the fact that Irving Oil burns clean fuels, the low-sulphur ones the company’s always bragging about. It’s kind of like manufacturing light cigarettes, I guess.

And what if I just focused on Irvings Oil’s environmentally friendly symbols that mask the polluting nature of the fossil fuel industry?

Take Eider Rock, for example, the name for the proposed refinery project. An eider is a cute little duck. These hardy little fellas don’t migrate; they stick it out in the cold northeast all winter. Irving Oil says they represent Saint John’s strength and permanence.

It’s a heart-warming contrast to the oil soaked birds that made the nightly news after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

In the environment section on Irving Oil’s web site, they talk about employees biking around the refinery site rather than driving motor vehicles, thereby doing their part for the environment,

That’s their “what if.”

Whatever.

- Mark Leger