stopping global warming means leaving oil in the ground

To pick up a point from the last post, I think it's worth making clear that reducing and eliminting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases means reducing and eventually eliminating usage of oil and natural gas.

Which means leaving oil in the ground. Which means not selling the oil. This is pretty straightforward, but the globe's editorial on the issue betrayed a lack of understanding and confusion on these points, so maybe others aren't clear on this either.

They worried that reducing carbon dioxide would harm "a vital canadian industry" and annoy Alberta. That is true, but it's something we'll have to figure out how to deal with, not a reason to throw our hands up in the air and say it's not a good idea to prevent climate change.

Business as usual means that there will be most likely hundreds of millions or billions of deaths over the next century as crop yields decline and drought makes growing food more difficult, as weather patterns change and ocean ecosystems collapse due to acidification.

Not business as usual means that Alberta will be a bit poorer in conventional terms, and annoyed because it is sitting on oil that it could sell for more than it costs to extract it, and not destroying the world means preventing them from making those profits.

The choice is rarely put that way though, so I think it's worth doing. One more time:

Stopping global warming means not extracting, selling and making money from oil which we possess.

Stopping global warming means shutting down oil the oil industry.

Eventually, anyway. Saying "but this will hurt the oil industry!" is not, on it's own, a valid objection to CO2 reduction plans.

That's the point.