Oil's Not Well

Yesterday, I spent time with Jerome Ringo, a long-time activist and former oil worker from Louisiana. He's witnessing the Gulf oil disaster unfold around his home - the suffocating oil-soaked birds, the protective marsh buffers dying, the fear of hurricane season. He's in Toronto to talk about how this needs to serve as a wake up call for Ontario and others to reduce dependence on dangerous and polluting oil.

It used to be that talking about getting off oil was seen as a fringe view of peak oil theorists and some radical environmentalists. But now, in the wake of the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, people are asking: What would it actually take to get off oil?

The oil industry and their proponents in government would have us believe that it just isn't possible. Yet solutions are at hand to transition our transportation system away from oil to clean energy sources, and Ontario can act now to kickstart that transition.

Each year, Ontarians send between $13-22 billion dollars out of province to buy oil. To put that amount into perspective, the price tag for Metrolinx's regional transportation plan is $2 billion per year, and the 2010 Ontario budget for education is $23 billion. We're shipping out vast sums of wealth to create jobs in other places.

Here are some quick numbers we've pulled together on Ontario's oil addiction:

- Global warming pollution from transportation in Ontario in 2008: 61 million tonnes

- Global warming pollution emitted by the entire country of Portugal, population 16,803,952: 60 million tonnes

- Number of passenger vehicles in Ontario in 2008: 7.2 million

- Kilometres driven each year by passenger vehicles: 113 billion

- Electricity needed to power all passenger vehicles for one year: 22.6 million megawhatthours

- Electricity generated in Ontario in 2009: 139 million megawhatthours

- Wind potential in Ontario: 1,711 million megawhatthours

- Number of wind turbines needed to power Ontario’s passenger transportation: 3,767

- Percentage of Ontarians that support laws and policies to accelerate a transition from oil to other energy sources, even if it means changing how people use transportation: 67%

- Percentage of Ontarians support spending by government to transition from oil to electric vehicles, with funding from new fees and taxes on oil and gas pollution: 62%


So what if we invested in building effective public transit and the infrastructure for electric cars instead of sending all that oil money to other places? We could keep jobs here in Ontario - building trains, producing green energy, manufacturing electric vehicles - and reduce smog and the amount of time we spend in traffic.

It's within our reach. Israel and Denmark are already making the game-changing investments needed to get off oil. In Ontario, powering all passenger transportation by electricity would take about 16% of electricity generated in the province. But, because electric vehicles mainly charge over night when electricity demand drops, going electric wouldn't require that much new generation. For example, it has been estimated that 65% of passenger vehicles in the U.S. could be converted to electric without additional generation because they would charge at night.

We as consumers can't do it alone. We need governments to adopt laws and policies to spur the transition away from oil, and to invest in infrastructure needed rather than new highways. Ontario has the potential to lead in building a greener, oil-free transportation system, and the time to start is now.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager
Environmental Defence