The key to any company getting the go ahead for their environmentally sensitive project and getting buy-in from the Canadian and world public is to identify all the externalities that concern the environmentalists (and governments) and deal with them as part of the cost of doing business. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project, a new oil drilling area, or the placement of a wind-farm full of windmills, the problems have to be identified from amongst the rhetoric and dealt with reasonably and rationally.
Externalities - those aspects of the cost of an environmentally sensitive project that are not dealt with directly by the project funding, but instead are left for those "external" to the project to deal with; primarily the governments at various levels but in effect, the general population.
These externalities can be directly economic (costs money now or in the future for something like infrastructure; roads, water, etc.), indirectly economic (creates situation that will have to be dealt with at some time in the future at a cost to be born by others than the investors/customers), social (displacement of people or other direct impact), or simply annoyance of some sort (installation is ugly and not in keeping with the general surroundings)
The typical struggle between business and the environmentalist movement obfuscates the fact that it is all about externalities. Only if we can lift the discussions from the morass of almost religious ferver to properly address the core problem will we be able to come even close to dealing with the real problems this world has in terms of coping with our population growth, earthquakes and tsunamis and other aspects of Mother Nature's effects on our planet.
