How do you expect Trans Mountain to pay for itself when oil demand is set to peak before the end of this decade before going into permanent decline? In that kind of market, the most expensive, dirtiest, most difficult to process versions of a product get dropped first, and the oil sands tick all three boxes.

But, please, don’t take my word for it. For international markets, just look at what major oil companies have been saying and doing. https://www.theenergymix.com/oil-companies-investors-talk-down-trumps-drill-baby-drill-as-prices-stay-low-exploration-budgets-shrink/ For the future prospects of the oil sands — with all the lavish subsidies already available to them, why do you think the six members of the Pathways Alliance aren’t investing their own massive profits in the carbon capture venture they say they need and want?

Strong agreement here that governments can and should invest in things that work, and we should say job well done when they do. Can you imagine how many heat pumps, deep energy retrofits, and solar/battery microgrids we could have been celebrating if the money going down the drain on Trans Mountain had been invested in something worthwhile?

TM makes all Canadians more independent from USA. Gives us more options. Will pay itself off even if it will take a long time.

What more do we want seriously?

For once let’s just say job well done and move on shall we? Time to set our eyes on the next big thing to inspire the next generation and the next problems to overcome.

That’s a very incomplete assessment! Trans Mountain was delayed for a very long list of reasons, many of them related to the size and complexity of the project, poor planning along the route, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very real possibility that it was simply too big to succeed, as megaprojects very often are. Author Bent Flyvbjerg calls that an “iron law”. https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/heres-why-fossil-fuel-projects-are

So, yes, lawsuits and massive local protests that were appropriate in a democracy and absolutely necessary in a climate emergency were one part of the picture. But it’s interesting that you blame the entire cost overrun on the one factor that could and should have been taken as an early warning. Decades ago, in a subject area quite distant from fossil fuels and climate change but pretty much as heavily contested, I helped document a public participation workshop where some of the discussion turned on how project developers should listen to and incorporate public input. I remember two participants, in particular, whose approach (in their own words, more or less) was to go in with their backs to the wall and their elbows up, to win their battle and make sure they were the last ones standing. One of the moderators asked them why they would spend so lavishly on public affairs and litigation when they could simply make the right go/no-go decision, stop that contentious project before it started, and invest instead in something communities actually liked and wanted.

Others have pointed out how many heat pumps, solar microgrids, or whole-building deep energy retrofits the Trans Mountain budget could have bought, how many years of transit operating funds it could have covered. Not to mention the millions of hours of effort, both building and trying to stop the pipeline, that could have been put to productive use. Spending those dollars as if they mattered, and as if communities mattered, would have held out zero profit potential for a pipeline company in Houston that was a stepchild of the Enron empire, or for mostly foreign-funded oil companies operating in Alberta — and now, as you point out, would have saved Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars. The benefits would have flowed to the rest of us instead, almost certainly including you.