As anyone who has ever tried to build an industrial plant, run a transmission line, or put up a new commercial building knows, managing community opposition is one of the most intractable challenges involved.
Community resistance is often chalked up as Nimbyism - Not in my backyard – or one of its variants:
• Niabyism (Not in Anyone’s Backyard)
• Numbyism (Not Under My Backyard);
• Nambism (Not Against My Business or Industry), or in the worst case;
• Bananaism (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone/Anything) and finally …
• NOPE (Not on Planet Earth)
But dismissing local opponents with a witty acronym ignores the reality that we’re all Nimbies at heart. It's simply human nature to resist change and development, particularly when the change appears to provide no obvious direct benefit; indeed, the reverse may well be true. It is also our nature to be hypocritical about these matters.
This desire to have our cake and eat it too happens more than we might think. Don’t we all want a conveniently located gas station to fuel our cars, just as long as it’s not on our street?
Nimbyism is a pervasive problem in energy development because the infrastructure required to generate energy is always huge and rarely pretty. All energy projects contend with local opposition, whether it’s pipelines in British Columbia, nuclear and wind in Ontario, shale gas and hydro in Quebec, or, of course, oil sands in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Even “good” (also known as renewable) energy initiatives are not exempted from nimbyism, here in Canada and abroad. Take Germany, for example. Despite leading Europe in renewable energy development, large scale wind and solar energy continue to face serious local opposition, and from the same people who just elected a regional government which pledged to close all the country’s nuclear power plants. As someone once said, in politics, logic is your weakest argument.
We all find it hard to carry an extra burden for the greater good. At least with energy sources like oil sands, most of the activity occurs well away from large population centres. But for other energy sources, this is not possible. Power plants, for reasons of efficiency, need to be located near the large urban areas they serve or have large transmission lines to get the power there. Less dense sources, such as wind and solar, require large land footprints to generate energy.
Nonetheless, as populations continue to rise and energy demands increase, we do have to find new places to site energy development. As we have noted in previous OSQAR editions, energy, environment, and economy are interlinked. All energy development comes with tradeoffs. But this should not be an excuse not to develop it at all.
