Lessons from Lytton

Our dependence on fossil fuels a leading cause of climate change, extreme weather

It seems only yesterday that I was tramping carefully behind my engineer father dodging the big D-8 and D-12 Caterpillar machines constructing highway 125 near our North Sydney home.

My father was part of that post-war generation with an almost child-like belief in unlimited progress through the application of science and engineering. And new highways were the very epitome of progress, in his view.

Now many years later, as we travel toward our provincial capital to again see family and friends, I encounter a sight that would have made him smile broadly. Between Antigonish and Truro, we see an army of huge carry-alls, dozers, and power shovels reducing large hills to rough planes of reddish soil, ready for culverts, bridges, and eventually gravel plus asphalt.

With some knowledge of the enormous cost of such construction from his days with then-named Nova Scotia Department of Highways, I am gob-smacked by the scale and cost of what I see. (An official April 30, 2021 provincial government update put the cost of this construction at $717.9 million!)

I can't help but wonder if the huge expenditures being made on highway construction in Nova Scotia would not be better deployed to improve our overburdened health-care system, replace run-down classrooms or provide better housing for our senior citizens in long-term care.

In one of the most incisive analyses of our North American dependence on the automobile, former CIBC World Markets chief Jeff Rubin calls the Unites States simply, “the land of the car.”

Although Rubin's analysis, Why Your World is About to Get Much Smaller, was inspired by the last big economic shutdown during the banking crisis of 2008-09, many of his insights about the real costs of our dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and manufacturing apply to our current COVID recession.

Among his more stunning revelations is the quite sinister destruction of North American electric tram systems and the market for the EV-1 electric car in the 1970s by conglomerates General Motors formed to buy up and close down public transportation systems across Canada and the United States. Needless to say, Rubin did not make a lot of friends telling big petroleum and the Detroit automakers what they did not want to hear.

Despite my dear father's enthusiasm for all things highway and automotive, it is distressing in the era of 50C temperatures in British Columbia to see the lack of vision in Nova Scotia's transportation planning. Our current dependence on fossil fuels to power inefficient cars and trucks is a leading cause of climate change, global warming and extreme weather. And while we have so far escaped the horrendous wildfires of B.C., California and Australia, heads up, Atlantic Canada: your turn for extreme weather is coming!

Meanwhile, some construction companies have used roadside barns to proclaim: “Twinned highways save lives.” In the short run, perhaps. But as Rubin points out in his many corrections to flawed energy policies, better highways mean more miles driven; and more miles driven, inexorably, mean more accidents and more lives lost.

It is no coincidence that Warren Buffet, widely regarded as one of the world's shrewdest investors, is invested in railroads, not toll roads. According to the American Rail Institute, railroads can move one ton of freight an average of 479 miles on a single gallon of fuel. Find me a truck that can come anywhere close to that! And one double-stacked train can transport the same amount of freight as 280 trucks.

At present, Nova Scotia seems locked in a selfdefeating cycle that allows continued contributions from construction companies to our political parties, which then agree to build more roads that further enrich the construction companies, which then contribute a portion of their profits back to the political parties, etc. This begins to look like a legalized kickback scheme that imprisons our transportation thinking in a cars-and-trucks-first, short-sighted policy dead end.

One railcar transports the equivalent of four 18-wheeler trucks with a tiny fraction of the environmental damage. Ask any Nova Scotian unfortunate enough to live along a major haulage route for wood, gravel, coal or other heavy goods what highway transportation of these materials does to their neighbourhood or to nearby public roads. In some parts of Nova Scotia, deep ruts caused by truck transport, even on 100-series highways, cause dangerous driving conditions and wet-weather hydroplaning that has already cost lives.

Perhaps it is too much to expect our elected officials who receive political contributions from construction, trucking and transport companies in this current election season to lead Atlantic Canada toward a saner, more responsible energy future. But for those candidates and their backers who remain enamoured with inefficient fossil-fuel transportation and who support the obscenely expensive highway system this policy requires, some inspiration might be found in the astonishing temperatures now visiting Western Canada and coming soon to a theatre near you.

Whoever expected to see temperatures in B.C. reach 50C in our lifetime? Or witness the New York subway system flood with seawater from the East River and the Atlantic Ocean?

In its continued dependence on highway construction to improve the transportation of people and goods, Nova Scotia is on the wrong road.

The right road is the railroad, and we are missing the train!

Brian Joseph of North Sydney grew up around highway construction with his engineer father. As a summer student, he worked at a scale house, weighing gravel trucks near the quarry in Frenchvale. Now a grandfather of five, he transports these future Nova Scotia voters in a hybrid-electric automobile averaging 4.5 litres of gasoline per 100 kilometres.