Future is renewable energy, not more pipelines

Posted on September 24, 2026 by Sunny South News

For the past month, almost everyone in Canada has been impacted by the wildfires. Climate change isn’t tomorrow’s crisis. It’s today’s rising insurance bills, cancelled harvests, smoky skies, sweeping floods, and deadly heat waves.

As global warming worsens, each year brings a more severe wildfire season. Yet Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Smith want to double down on the root cause and build a one-million-barrels-a-day pipeline, with a price tag of $43 billion.

The original Memorandum of Understanding on this project promised that any new pipeline would require a private proponent and that all production emissions would be captured by a new Pathways carbon capture and storage (CCS) project. Both promises have been broken.

And now, the public is on the hook for a $43 billion pipeline. We did not sign up for this, and polling is showing people in Canada are not on board. Every public dollar spent subsidizing fossil fuels is a dollar not spent on healthcare, housing, public transit, or preparing communities for climate disasters.

We need to learn from past mistakes. In 2018, when the federal government bought the TMX pipeline for $4.5 billion, the public was outraged. Delays and cost overruns have now cost the people of Canada more than $34 billion, and the government still hasn’t found a private buyer.

We need to invest in the economies of the future. The future is renewable energy; Carney and Smith would do well to remember that.

Charlotte Holmes

Lethbridge