HARTLEY BAY, B.C. – The women of the Gitga’at Nation of British Columbia planned to erect a symbolic blockade made of yarn across the Douglas Channel on Friday to protest the federal government’s approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline.
The crochet chain was expected to stretch 2.5 nautical miles, or about 4.5 kilometres, across the opening of the narrow channel tankers will have to navigate to a marine export terminal set to be located in Kitimat, on the north coast.
“It’s to show that we’re prepared to do what it takes to stop them because we can’t let it happen. It’s the death of our community, our culture,” said Lynne Hill, who came up with the crochet blockade.
[quote]And if there was an oil spill there would be nothing left.
[/quote]
Members of the community in Hartley Bay — best known for rescuing passengers from the Queen of the North ferry as it sank in 2006 — initially planned to set out at 6:30 am to string the crochet chain across the water.
That departure was delayed by weather, and a flotilla of boats planned to set out by noon to drape the multi-coloured yarn, decorated with community memorabilia and messages of hope, between buoys across the ocean. The slender chain is more than six kilometres long to ensure it will reach from one side of the narrows to the other.
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Hill, 70, said the protest began in Hartley Bay and spread, with supporters sending in crochet links from all over Canada. One woman knit an entire kilometre-long link by herself, she said.
On Tuesday, the federal government granted final approval to the pipeline that will bring oil from Alberta to the B.C. coast for export, with 209 conditions. Hill said it was a devastating day for the Gitga’at.
She said community members will see the tankers from the project pass right in front of the remote community at the mouth of the channel, about 630 kilometres north of Vancouver. The village is reachable only by boat or plane.
“We thought right down the line that somebody that cared would be listening to what we were saying. Not just us — to what lots of people were saying,” she says.
[quote]When the joint review panel was here we thought they were listening. We thought they heard what we had to say.[/quote]
Hill says the crochet chain is a warning that the Gitga’at will do what it takes to stop the pipeline.
“We get our food from the sea. We travel on the sea,” she says.
Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard is putting green jobs on the back burner (Photo: facebook)
One thing Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, BC Premier Christy Clark and new Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard all share in common is the dated notion that economic and sustainable development are competing concepts that need to be reconciled, with great difficulty. And in hard times, the economy must take precedence.
New Quebec government disappoints with green jobs policy
Among its first public statements on the natural resource sectors and environment, the new Quebec Liberal government announced:
A one-year strategic environmental evaluation study (SEE) of the development of fossil fuels in Quebec to be completed in 2015
The continuation of the strategic environmental evaluation (SEE) of the shale oil potential of the pristine Anticosti Island
A new variant of the previous Charest goverment’s Plan nord, a key component of the Liberal an economic development plan calling for the development of mining potential in Quebec’s northern most regions
Approvals for small hydro facilities on rivers all over Quebec.
What has become clear with the above and other pronouncements by the Couillard government to date is that it is preparing the terrain with inadequate or smoke screen environmental analyses to facilitate full-tilt fossil fuel and natural resource development in the province.
China invests $70 billion a year in renewable energy
It will do so without assessing the economic costs and benefits – only paying lip service to the opportunities of the green economy. With regard to the latter point, China is now the world leader in clean energy technologies, having installed 28 GW of new wind and solar capacity in the single year of 2013 while also being a world leader in electric vehicles. Meanwhile, there are currently 3.5M jobs in the EU green sectors.
Accordingly, in a May 30, 2014 press release, the Liberal government stated that while it is favourable to the development of fossil fuels in Quebec, it wanted to assure the population that the environment would be protected and safety would be addressed.
As for the rationalization of its interest in the development of the fossil fuel sectors, the Couillard government argues that while awaiting the shift to a green economy, it’s best that Quebec produce its own fossil fuels, rather than importing them. A rather strange line of reasoning since the prime focus on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources diverts funds that could otherwise be directed towards to the high-growth and high-job-creation green sectors.
Investing in the green economy would offer better returns on public funds and the logic of Couillard’s yesterday’s economy club could entrench new fossil fuel economic dependencies, thus further impeding the migration to a green economy.
Shale gas and oil moratorium in jeopardy
Quebec currently has a moratorium on shale gas development. But all the signals are that the new Quebec government wants to put an end to this moratorium, under the guise of an environmental report which said that with certain precautions and regulatory tweaking, all will be well. Nothing to worry about.
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Indeed, Couillard and company want us to think that a one-year strategic evaluation study (SEE) on the development of fossil fuels in the entire province will be more exhaustive than: 1) the two-and-a-half-year study on the development of the shale gas in the St-Lawrence River valley; and 2) the findings of the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) (the public consultation office on the environment), which is now reviewing shale gas issues a second time.
Some very substantive, scary, empirical evidence is coming to the fore, but, as with the case of the early reports on the impacts of smoking on human health, the private and government lobbies for shale gas development are implying that the absence of hard, one-to-one cause-effect data means the practice of fracking is safe.
Concerning shale oil, the Quebec Liberals said they will be an investment partner with the private sector to explore the shale oil potential on the of the pristine and huge Anticosti Island. The exploration will proceed this summer, long before the Strategic Environmental Evaluation on the matter is completed in 2015!
As for the much-touted economic benefits of the industry, we only have to look south of the border to see that the shale gas sector in the US is going through a boom to bust cycle, because after one has drilled to get to an easy to access sweet spot in a given well, it’s too expensive to go after the rest. US shale oil is on the same path and a decline in shale oil production may come as early as 2016.
Offshore oil development: Old Harry
The Old Harry potential offshore development area is on the Quebec-Newfoundland border, not very far from the Îles-de-la-Madeleine (Magdalen Islands), an area for which the economy is largely about fishing and tourism.
Couillard has already indicated he will sign an agreement with Harper for the development of fossil fuels in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. The 2014-15 Budget confirms this intention.
Proposed offshore oil development at Old Harry (Council of Canadians)
With the possibility of developing Old Harry on the horizon, a 3-year, 800-page strategic environmental evaluation report on the Gulf, published in 2013, highlighted the deficiencies of exploration and development technologies – and the biological and human impacts of spills in the region. These risks are particularly high, given the region is covered with ice for much of the year. The study concluded that Quebec does not havethe capabilities to deal with a tanker spill.
The fishing industry in the Gulf represents $1.5 billion/year and tourism $800 million, while the development of Old Harry site on the Quebec side of the border would only generate about $300 million
Included in the “package” of Coulliard’s gung-ho development of the fossil fuel sectors are favourable views on pipelines running through Quebec to ship tar sands oil for export as well as meet Quebec “needs”. Such is the case with respect to the TransCanada Energy East pipeline to bring Alberta bitumen to the Cacouna port, in the eastern section of the St-Lawrence River.
In this region, any spill would be devastating to both the fragile beluga population and a dozen important natural marine habitat zones. A spill during the winter would be especially destructive, since there aren’t any adequate means to clean up bitumen in the presence of ice. It would also be devastating to the tourism industry, with $80 million in annual revenues.
Under the Couillard government – not all that different than the position of BC’s Christy Clark government on pipelines – Quebec would take all the risks as a transportation region for the sake of something in the order of 200 jobs. The main beneficiaries would be the exporters of the bitumen to foreign markets via tankers from Cacouna, carrying 80,000 to 200,000 tons of bitumen.
Despite Quebec’s surplus electricity capacity, for which hydro power represent 94% of the supply, the new Quebec government favours building more dams – much like the BC Liberal government’s private “run-of-river” policy.
Carried over from the preceding PQ government without any changes proposed by the Liberals, on Hydro Quebec’s, site one finds a glowing synopsis from Hydro-Québec on the 1550 MW Rivière Romaine projects. The web site informs us that, in the name of sustainable development and clean energy supplies for future generations, the 3 new power stations make sense. No mention is made of Québec’s electricity surplus or that the Romaine is one of Québec’s last “damable” wild rivers.
Not content with having targeted all of Quebec’s great rivers with high hydro power potential, the new Couillard government has also announced approvals for small hydro facilities on rivers with modest hydro potential.
In this regard, this article – “10 Things You Should Know About Dams” – offers a global portrait on dams to the effect they are are far less environmentally friendly than their proponents care to admit.
Plan nord, Version 2.0
The Couillard government picks up where Jean Charest left off, with an enhanced version of the former Liberal premier’s Plan nord. What Couillard has not factored into his economic vision is the fact that natural resource prices – relative to the prices of finished products manufactured with these very resources – have been declining for the last half century.
Subsidizing cement factories, cutting electric car budget
Last but not least are the following two amazing decisions of the Couillard government.
First, there is the amazing approval under an Liberal austerity Budget 2014-15 of the Port-Daniel cement facility, in the easternmost part of Quebec – the Gaspésie area. The government allotted $450M to support the $1B project, despite the fact that existing cement factories in Quebec are operating at 60% of capacity.
Moreover, the intention is to use the petecoke residues from petroleum/tar sands bitumen refining as a fuel. Petcoke is cheaper than coal but has much higher emissions.
Second, to keep his promise to the preceding PQ government, Couillard has agreed to maintain the transport electricification initiative. However, unlike the PQ, which allocated $500M for this initiative, the Couillard government has de-funded it, with responsibility transferred to Hydro-Québec. Meanwhile, the Liberals are putting a similar amount of funding into the unnecessary and high-GHG emission Port-Daniel cement plant.
This while China’s BYD is manufacturing electric buses and cars and recently built an electric bus manufacturing plant in California. Meanwhile, two Quebec urban transit commissions – the STM serving the Montreal area and the STO serving the Gatineau area – have run pilots projects with BYD electric buses.
That said, battery manufacturing and electric motor stakeholders in Quebec all have to take a back seat to the top priority given to the mining industry under Plan nord. So does the Volvo-owned Nova Bus urban transit facility in Ste-Eustache, which is working on the development of an electric bus.
Also reflecting Couillard’s sense of priorities are the nomination of his economic Executive and Cabinet ministers, with the Minister of Finance Carlos Leitao, President of the Treasury Board, Martin Coiteux, and Jacques Daoust, Minister of l’Économie, de l’Innovation et des Exportations (Economy, Innovation and Exports). All of them have strong economic backgrounds.
By contrast, the Minister of Développement durable, de l’Environnement et de la Lutte aux changements climatiques (Sustainable Development the Environment and Climate Change), David Heurtel, has no background in environmental fields.
As for the Minister of Énergie et des Ressources naturelles (Energy and Natural Resources) Pierre Arcand, he was the Environment Minister in the previous Liberal Charest government, where he played the role of an eternal apologist for weaseling out of the responsibility for defending the environment.
It’s clear that the environment will not play a key role in Philippe Couillard’s government – despite the clear financial benefits of investing in the green economy.
A Vancouver rally against proposed pipelines earlier this year (Damien Gillis)
By Dene Moore, The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER – One of the biggest hurdles for the Northern Gateway project is one the company has never had the means to address.
Now that the project has received federal approval, the next phase of the pipeline fight will not focus on the Calgary pipeline company but on the government that many B.C. First Nations ultimately blame for the dispute.
More than a pipeline issue
Said Peter Lantin, president of the Haida Nation, Wednesday:
[quote]For us, it’s a rights and title discussion. It’s not necessarily about a pipeline.[/quote]
The Crown has failed to resolve aboriginal rights and title in B.C. for generations, he said. Now, native communities are united for a sweeping legal challenge against the federal government approval, he said.
The expected legal challenge involves a coalition that includes all three major aboriginal organizations in the province: the pro-treaty First Nations Summit, the anti-treaty Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and the regional branch of the Assembly of First Nations, as well as dozens of individual bands.
They will meet in the coming weeks to decide on the course their case will take, Lantin said.
Lantin said the Haida recognize the importance of natural resource projects and the national interest, and he said they would be happy to have that conversation — about another project.
“There is no compromise. There is no mitigating measures that we could talk about that would satisfy or change the Haida position,” he said.
[quote]I don’t believe that after the fact we can somehow hit a reset button…The damage is done.[/quote]
Enbridge: ‘We believe that we can move past this’
The company said it will continue trying to engage aboriginal and other communities.
Janet Holder, vice-president of western access for Northern Gateway Pipelines, said there have been some discussions and more are planned.
Enbridge (TSX:ENB) and its partners remain committed to the project, she said.
“We believe that we can move past this,” Holder said. “I don’t think we’ll get 100 per cent support. There’s never anything, any significant issue, that’s ever been dealt with in Canada that has ever had 100 per cent support.”
But the project is worth working on, she said. Canadians are losing billions of dollars a year in revenue without access to the coast for export, she said, and Enbridge and its 10 partners will push forward and find a way to make it work.
“They truly understood before and understand now what the issues are, what needs to be done to move forward, and they’re still willing to fund the project,” she said.
Enrbidge shares dip amid analysts’ pessimism
Analysts and shareholders appeared less optimistic. Shares in Enbridge dropped slightly the morning after the federal announcement.
Said an analysis by CIBC World Markets:
[quote]All told, we see the federal government’s approval largely as academic at this point, with B.C. provincial, environmental and First Nations challenges likely stalling further progress, potentially for years. We do not believe it likely that a consensus can be reached on the project; the environmental and First Nations groups have become entrenched in their positions.[/quote]
In announcing approval, Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford said the company has more work to do to engage aboriginal groups and local communities.
Onus on federal government to deal with First Nations
But it’s not necessarily the company that has work to do, said one legal expert.
First Nations have legal rights, but in the absence of treaties in B.C., it’s not clear just what those rights entail, said Gordon Christie, an expert in aboriginal law at the University of British Columbia.
“The federal government has the responsibilities to First Nations, not the company,” he said. “This is all about the government making a decision to allow the pipeline to be built.”
Legal challenges could take up to two or three years to resolve, he said.
The Conservative government already faces another challenge in Federal Court that could affect the approval.
The Mikisew Cree and Frog Lake nations in Alberta have filed for a judicial review of changes to the federal environmental assessment rules and the Fisheries and Indian acts included in the Tories’ omnibus budget bill two years ago.
They argue the changes undermine environmental protections and the Crown’s duty to consult aboriginals.
NEW YORK – The energy world is not keeping up with Elon Musk, so he’s trying to take matters into his own hands.
Musk, chairman of the solar installer SolarCity, announced Tuesday that the company would acquire a solar panel maker and build factories “an order of magnitude” bigger than the plants that currently churn out panels.
“If we don’t do this we felt there was a risk of not being able to have the solar panels we need to expand the business in the long term,” Musk said Tuesday in a conference call.
Musk is also a founder and the CEO of the electric vehicle maker Tesla Motors, which is planning what it calls a “gigafactory” to supply batteries for its cars.
In both cases, Musk’s goal is to make sure that the components critical to his vision of the future — electric cars and solar energy — are available and cheap enough to beat fossil fuels.
Musk’s future customer could ignore traditional energy companies completely. They’d have SolarCity panels on their roof that would generate enough power to also charge up a Tesla in the garage. A Tesla battery could then power the home at night with stored solar power.
It’s a far-off vision — solar power is still much more expensive than conventional power, even before the enormous cost of a battery backup. And electric cars are just a fraction of the total auto market. But Musk has made a career of thinking far into the future. He is also the CEO of SpaceX, the rocket company with an ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.
SolarCity, based in San Mateo, Calif. is one of the nation’s largest installers of rooftop solar systems. It was founded and is now run by Musk’s cousins, CEO Lyndon Rive and Chief Technology Officer Peter Rive. The company also offers financing for solar systems, and last year it bought a manufacturer of mounting systems used to hold panels in place.
The acquisition of Silevo is a risk for Musk and SolarCity because it gets the company into panel manufacturing at a time when a global glut of panels has decimated the profits of panel makers. Some, including onetime industry leader Suntech Power, were forced into bankruptcy. Others were forced into solar development and installations, the kinds of things SolarCity already excels at.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SolarCity shares were up almost 14 per cent in midday trading Tuesday.
SolarCity says it won’t try to turn out more of the garden-variety panels now clogging the market. Instead, it wants to make panels that are more efficient, and make them at a low cost in huge factories in order to reduce the overall cost of solar electricity. Silevo’s relatively complex panels generate more power per square foot than typical panels.
SolarCity said it is negotiating with the state of New York to build what would be among the biggest factories in the world in the next two years. It would manufacture enough panels each year to produce 1 gigawatt of peak power — roughly enough panels to outfit 200,000 homes with a typical-sized rooftop system.
That would be “just a start,” Musk said. Future factories would produce 10 gigawatts worth of panels.
And these panels wouldn’t even look like typical solar panels, he said. Just as he drew customers to electric vehicles by making sleek, fast sports cars, Musk wants to attract homeowners to solar with pretty panels.
“We want to have a cool-looking esthetically pleasing solar system on your roof,” he said.
Health concerns plague many who worked to clean up the BP oil spill (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Energy giant Kinder Morgan was recently called insensitive for pointing out that “Pipeline spills can have both positive and negative effects on local and regional economies, both in the short- and long-term.”
The company wants to triple its shipping capacity from the Alberta tar sands to Burnaby, in part by twinning its current pipeline. Its National Energy Board submission states, “Spill response and cleanup creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and cleanup service providers.”
[quote]It’s not about going back to the Dark Ages. It’s about realizing that a good life doesn’t depend on owning more stuff.[/quote]
Sad but true
It may seem insensitive, but it’s true. And that’s the problem. Destroying the environment is bad for the planet and all the life it supports, including us. But it’s often good for business.
The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico added billions to the U.S. gross domestic product! Even if a spill never occurred (a big “if”, considering the records of Kinder Morgan and other pipeline companies), increasing capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day would go hand-in-hand with rapid tar sands expansion and more wasteful, destructive burning of fossil fuels — as would approval of Enbridge Northern Gateway and other pipeline projects, as well as increased oil shipments by rail.
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The company will make money, the government will reap some tax and royalty benefits and a relatively small number of jobs will be created. But the massive costs of dealing with a pipeline or tanker spill and the resulting climate change consequences will far outweigh the benefits.
Of course, under our current economic paradigm, even the costs of responding to global warming impacts show as positive growth in the GDP — the tool we use to measure what passes for progress in this strange worldview.
It’s not about going back to the Dark Ages. It’s about realizing that a good life doesn’t depend on owning more stuff
Full steam ahead with fracking, pipelines
A fracking drill in BC’s Horn River Basin (Two Island Films)
And so it’s full speed ahead and damn the consequences. Everything is measured in money. B.C.’s economy seems sluggish? Well, obviously, the solution is to get fracking and sell the gas to Asian markets. Never mind that a recent study, commissioned by the Canadian government, concludes we don’t know enough about the practice to say it’s safe, the federal government has virtually no regulations surrounding it and provincial rules “are not based on strong science and remain untested.”
Never mind that the more infrastructure we build for polluting, climate-disrupting fossil fuels, the longer it will take us to move away from them. There’s easy money to be had — for someone.
Conservation must be top priority
We need to do more than just get off fossil fuels, although that’s a priority. We need to conserve, cut back and switch to cleaner energy sources. In Canada, we need a national energy strategy. And guess what? That will create lasting jobs! But we must also find better ways to run our societies than relying on rampant consumption, planned obsolescence, excessive and often-pointless work and an economic system that depends on damaging ways and an absurd measurement to convince us it somehow all amounts to progress.
It’s not about going back to the Dark Ages. It’s about realizing that a good life doesn’t depend on owning more stuff, scoring the latest gadgets or driving bigger, faster cars. Our connections with family, friends, community and nature are vastly more important.
Yes, we still need some oil and gas
Yes, we need oil and gas, and will for some time. Having built our cities and infrastructure to accommodate cars rather than people, we can’t turn around overnight. But we can stop wasting our precious resources. By conserving and switching to cleaner energy, we can ensure we still have oil and gas long into the future, perhaps long enough to learn to appreciate the potential of what’s essentially energy from the sun, stored and compressed over millions of years.
If we dig it up and sell it so it can be burned around the world, we consign ourselves to a polluted planet ravaged by global warming, with nothing to fall back on when fossil fuels are gone.
Waste not, warm not
Scientists around the world have been warning us for decades about the consequences of our wasteful lifestyles, and evidence for the ever-increasing damage caused by pollution and climate change continues to grow. But we have to do more than just wean ourselves off fossil fuels. We must also look to economic systems, progress measurements and ways of living that don’t depend on destroying everything the planet provides to keep us healthy and alive.
Written with Contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.
Citizens recently lined the highway outside Squamish to oppose Woodfibre LNG (My Sea to Sky)
The BC Environmental Assessment Office is now open for public comment on the proposed Woodfibre LNG project near Squamish, BC. The comment period, which includes an open house session in Squamish on June 18, will run for 30 days (more info here).
The project, designed to cool and export gas from BC to Asian markets where prices are currently higher, would be built on the 212-acre site of an old pulp mill at the head of Howe Sound. It is part of conglomerate of companies under the Pacific Oil & Gas Ltd. banner, controlled by Indonesian magnate Sukanto Tonato.
BC LNG’s ‘Trojan Horse’?
With a 25-year licence to export 280 million cubic feet of gas per day, which the proponent received last December, Woodfibre is on the smaller end of proposed LNG projects in BC. Because of its size and a decision to power the plant with hydroelectricity instead of burning some of its own gas, the project is being held up as a positive example of the proposed industry for BC.
But the BC Tapwater Alliance’s Will Koop sounds a cautionary note:
[quote]Woodfibre is the Trojan Horse of BC LNG – the project Premier Clark is using to open the door to a much larger industry in the province.[/quote]
And despite the effort to minimize carbon emissions from the plant, the considerable energy requirements for cooling gas into liquid will add pressure to develop several local private river diversion projects, which have been shown to cause significant damage to fish populations.
Howe Sound faces industrial onslaught
Moreover, the proposed LNG plant and hydro projects are just two among a wide range of industrial projects that threaten the ecology, tourism, and recreational values of Howe Sound – including a proposed gravel mine at nearby McNab Creek, a waste incinerator at Port Mellon, a 4,000 home development at Brittania Beach, and Fortsis BC’s $350 million Eagle Mountain gas pipeline expansion to supply the Woodfibre plant.
As The Common Sense Canadian’s Rafe Mair, a resident of Howe Sound’s Lions Bay, recently remarked:
[quote]A revitalization program – partly official, mostly just people taking care – has brought Howe Sound back, not quite to where it was when I was a boy, but considerably back to where it should be. Herring came back, salmon increased, Orcas abound and humpback whales have appeared for the first time in years. The fishing industry has restarted. This, unfortunately, was not to last. Industry has reappeared, big-time.[/quote]
Map of Howe Sound with proposed industrial projects (with help of Future of Howe Sound Society)
All this proposed industrial development – and specifically the $1.7 Billion Woodfibre LNG project – raises concerns amongst local residents like Tracey Saxby that the region’s sustainable tourism and other modern industries will be pushed out, just as they’re gaining real momentum.
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Representing local citizen group My Sea to Sky at a recent summit on LNG at SFU’s Habour Centre campus, Saxby told the crowd of 250, “Squamish is such a special place and this is such an exciting time to be there. It’s a community in transition from the old way – the extraction and resource-based industries – to a new economy that has a broader economic base and more diverse and resilient economic base,” Saxby explained, noting the various new industries being developed in the community – from academia to the emerging recreation technology sector, to enticing entrepreneurs with the region’s spectacular wilderness.
[quote]These things make sense. LNG does not.
[/quote]
Proponent promises 100 jobs
For its part, the proponent is promising 600 jobs during the construction phase and 100 long-term jobs operating the plant, which it is aiming to have up and running by 2017, assuming it secures its environmental permits.
At a recent conference on LNG which her government hosted, Premier Clark and other government spokespeople hinted that Woodfibre is expected to be the first LNG project completed in the province.
Submitting feedback
Comments can be submitted by online form, by mail, or by fax – see details here. The open house takes place on June 18 from 5-8 pm at the Executive Suites Hotel (40900 Tantalus Road, Squamish, BC).
I will also be speaking on the project and LNG development in general alongside the Wilderness Committee’s Eoin Madden at an event hosted by My Sea to Sky on Sunday, June 27 (details here).
The Council of the Haida Nation (CHN) is vowing to support The Fort Nelson First Nation’s tough stand on proposed Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) development and the 600% increase in controversial shale gas fracking it would represent for their northeast BC territory.
According to The Northern View, a recentvisit to Haida Gwaii by FNFN Chief Sharleen Gale was met with sympathy from the Haida audience. Gale was there to bring to light the upstream implications if CHN were to support the province’s vision for LNG development, which would also mean significant tanker traffic through Haida waters.
CHN has been mulling its official position on LNG over the past year. The elected government of the Haisla Nation – across Hecate Strait from Haida Gwaii – has bought into the industry, forging partnerships for LNG terminals in Kitimat. The Haisla quit the Coastal First Nations alliance in 2012 over internal disagreement around LNG development.
CHN and other Coastal First Nations members have also been examining the potential impacts of the LNG industry on the coast – everything from air quality and climate issues to the impacts of tanker traffic and dumping bilge water in the marine environment.
Province’s ‘less-than honourable dealings’
According to The Northern View, CHN President Peter Lantin and Vice-president Trevor Russ have twice ventured to northeast BC to learn about the impacts of LNG development on Treaty 8 and Fort Nelson First Nation territories.
“It would be irresponsible for us to take a position without understanding the effects on the people most affected,” said Lantin following Chief Gale’s speeches to CHN and public gatherings in Massett and Skidegate.
Added Russ:
[quote]Their story is of a people and landscape being overrun by natural gas exploration and extraction and less-than honourable dealings from the provincial government.[/quote]
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, went one step further at a recent town hall meeting on LNG at SFU’s downtown Vancouver campus. “The economy of this province is being built on the destruction of the Northeast,” said Phillip. “The pipelines that are being contemplated by LNG will further destroy the North.”
No support for LNG until First Nations’ concerns addressed
Following these Haida Gwaii meetings with Chief Gale, the Haida Nation decided not to take an official position supporting or opposing LNG “without ensuring that the interests of the people at the source of the LNG are taken care of,” says The View.
VANCOUVER – Some time in the next 10 days, the federal government is supposed to announce its final decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline — the multibillion-dollar political minefield dividing the West.
Even detractors expect the federal government to give the $7-billion project the go-ahead.
But the nod from Ottawa would not be the crest of the mountain Northern Gateway must climb before the oil — and the money — begin to flow. The path to the British Columbia coast has many hurdles left for Calgary-based Enbridge (TSX:ENB) and its partners.
“The bottom line is there are 113 conditions that need to be met before construction can begin. That’s going to take a lot of time,” said company spokesman Ivan Giesbrecht.
If approved, that would be merely one more step in an ongoing process, Giesbrecht said.
“We have a lot of work to be done before we would be able to begin construction.”
There are also the five applications before the Federal Court for judicial review of the federal panel recommendation, and further court challenges are likely.
Pipeline faces years of legal challenges
The opposition of environmental groups was always a given. Expansion of Alberta’s oil sands has become an international target for climate activists.
“Approval seems obvious. At the same time, opposition is so strong,” said Nikki Skuce, a resident of Smithers, B.C., and a campaigner for the environmental group Forest Ethics Advocacy.
[quote]It’s going to be caught up in the courts for years and it’s going to be ugly on the ground. People are willing to do what it takes.[/quote]
That is no idle threat in a province that saw a decade-long War in the Woods over logging of old growth forests, which ended with new government regulations.
And opposition is not limited to environmentalists and First Nations.
Kitimat showed resolve of communities to block Enbridge
Kitimat is no stranger to industry, born of an aluminum smelter in the 1950s, but for a majority of those who voted the risks outweigh the rewards.
Liberal govt flip-flops on pipeline
Even the provincial government officially opposed the project at review hearings.
Victoria appears poised to reverse itself, deploying key ministers to a flurry of recent federal announcements on marine and pipeline safety. But the Liberal government may be waiting to see which way the political wind is blowing before they change direction.
“There’s a question of whether going along with the approval of the Northern Gateway pipeline will make LNG development in B.C. more challenging by angering First Nations so adamantly opposed to the oil sands pipeline,” said George Hoberg, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s school of forestry and founder of UBCC350, a group pressing for action on greenhouse gas emissions.
There is deep resistance in B.C., he said.
[quote]I think it’s likely to be approved, but I would not be shocked if it was delayed or even denied.[/quote]
The product that the pipeline would carry is a hurdle.
The pipeline west would transport molasses-like diluted bitumen. Studies and previous spills have found that dilbit sinks in turbulent water conditions.
The greatest obstacle is the unflagging opposition of First Nations. Hamstrung by the federal government’s failure to negotiate treaties in decades of talks, the company has been left in a legal limbo.
The company said the project has 26 aboriginal equity partners and consultations continue but Clarence Innis, acting chief of the Gitxaala Nation on the North Coast, said they haven’t heard from anyone and no talks are planned.
“We’re going to do whatever we need to do to protect our territory,” said Innis, whose community is located on an island at the mouth of the Douglas Channel.
The Gitxaala are already preparing a legal challenge.
“We played by the rules,” Innis said. “We’ve been ignored.”
The fight is far from over on either side. There are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, the company has said.
“It’s in the national interest to be able to diversify the markets that we have for our most valuable natural resource,” Giesbrecht said.
“We believe the project is the right thing for Canada, we’ve felt that way right from the very beginning and that’s why we’ve pursued it.
Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan is taking a tough stand against Kinder Morgan (Photo: Vimeo)
A pair of skirmishes over access for pipeline companies to landowners’ properties in the Lower Mainland suggests the debate over Canada’s energy future is washing up on local streets.
Today, we learned that Burnaby Council – long an outspoken opponent of Kinder Morgan’s plans to expand its TransMountain pipeline to a tanker facility in Burrard Inlet – is blocking the company’s access to Burnaby Mountain. In yet another proposed route change, Kinder Morgan is now mulling tunnelling through the mountain, for which it requires permits from the city.
Meanwhile, a group of local farmers has brought a countersuit against gas pipeline operator Spectra and its subsidiary Westcoast Energy. The claim, filed in BC Supreme Court last week, is in response to Spectra’s attempt to force its way through the courts onto Fraser Valley farmland in order to install new pipeline equipment – a step it resorted to after failing to negotiate mutually agreeable terms with landowners.
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Both incidents foreshadow the future landscape of pipeline disputes, as they filter down to local streets, farms and backyards.
“Every inch of the way”
Despite Kinder Morgan’s claims of longstanding good relations with Burnaby, Mayor Derek Corrigan tells a very different story. Ever since it spilled oil in north Burnaby’s streets in 2007, Corrigan and council have been wary of Kinder Morgan. Now, with plans to triple the flow of Alberta bitumen through the community, Burnaby’s municipal leaders are upping the ante. “We’re fighting them every inch of the way,”Corrigan told The Vancouver Sun.
[quote]We’ve made it clear we are opposed to the pipeline, and they’ve made it clear they want to impose it on us whether we want it or not.[/quote]
Now the company says it’s prepared to take the extraordinary step of going over the city’s head to the National Energy Board, which in rare cases can trump municipal authority over such matters. The move can hardly improve relations with Burnaby, so it looks increasingly like we’re in for a long, nasty battle in the trenches of a local community.
Existing pipeline damaged soil, hinders farming
Meanwhile, in the Fraser Valley, farmers claim that the old Westcoast Energy pipeline, which carries gas from northeast BC to the Lower Mainland, has violated the terms of its easement. They claim the pipeline has:
Damaged soils
Increased soil temperature, leading to crop mutation
Segmented harvesting, which raises costs to unfeasible levels
Wrought other constraints on harvesting
They further claim that Westcoast has failed to provide adequate compensation for these impacts – all of which add up to a breach of the original terms of the easement, meaning the company has forfeited its right to further access.
The landowners are seeking an injunction to block Westcoast and its agents from accessing their properties until these historical impacts to their land have been rectified.
The NEB’s big stick
While the above dispute is playing out in BC’s courts, the National Energy Board is being asked to intervene in the Burnaby matter, marshalling special federal powers it holds for such situations.
We’re starting to see a backlash on the ground in local communities who want to exercise their own democratic say on these issues – including Kitimat’s recent plebiscite, which rejected the proposed Enbridge pipeline. Judging by the considerable resources and boots on the ground Enbridge invested in its losing campaign there, pipeline companies are wary of the power local communities can wield, even where the law is not technically on their side.
In communities like the Hazeltons and the Kispiox Valley in northwest BC, local landowners and First Nations are getting riled up over TransCanada and Spectra’s attempts to push through gas pipelines bound for LNG terminals on the coast.
With municipal elections looming around the province, we can expect to see these energy issues play out on an increasingly local level. Alberta energy companies dominated campaign funding on both sides of BC’s recent provincial election. Now watch for Kinder Morgan, Enbridge, TransCanada, Spectra and their emissaries to start investing heavily in municipal politics this year. But in doing so, they risk further polarizing the debate and galvanizing local opposition, as they’re already beginning to see.
In an open letter, 300 scholars poke holes in the Joint Review Panel’s recommendation of the proposed Enbridge pipeline, urging PM Stephen Harper to reject its final report.
May 26, 2014
Dear Prime Minister Harper:
Based on the evidence presented below, we, the undersigned scholars, have concluded that the Joint Review Panel’s (JRP) assessment of the Northern Gateway Project (the Project) represents a flawed analysis of the risks and benefits to British Columbia’s environment and society. Consequently, the JRP report should not serve as the basis for concluding that the Northern Gateway Project is in the best interests of Canadians. We urge you in the strongest possible terms to reject this report.
The Canadian electorate expected the JRP ruling to present a balanced and appropriate consideration of the risks and benefits of the Project, drawing upon the best available evidence, and expressing a cogent rationale for the final ruling.
By our analysis, the Canadian electorate received a ruling that is not balanced or defensible due to five major flaws. The Panel’s review:
Failed to adequately articulate the rationale for its findings,
Considered only a narrow set of risks but a broad array of benefits, thereby omitting adequate consideration of key issues,
Relied on information from the proponent, without external evaluation,
Contradicted scientific evidence contained in official government documents,
Treated uncertain risks as unimportant risks, and assumed these would be negated by the proponent’s yet-to-be-developed mitigation measures.
Below, we expand on these five fundamental flaws that invalidate the report as an appropriate basis for your Cabinet to approve the Project.
1. Failure to articulate a rationale
The panel failed to articulate a rationale for numerous findings, and failed to satisfy the criteria of “justification, transparency and intelligibility” expected of administrative tribunals. Such a rationale is fundamental to both scientific and legal judgment. The Panel’s charge was to determine whether the Project is in the public interest of British Columbians and Canadians, based on a critical analysis of the Project’s economic, environmental and social benefits, costs and risks over the long term. Instead of such a balanced consideration, the panel justified its recommendation of the project by summarizing the panel’s understanding of environmental burdens in five short paragraphs and judging that these adverse environmental outcomes were outweighed by the potential societal and economic benefits. Without a rationale for why the expected benefits justify the risks (e.g., why must an environmental effect be certain and/or permanently widespread to outweigh economic benefits that themselves are subject to some uncertainty?), any ruling of overall public interest is unsupportable.
2. Consideration of narrow risks but broad benefits, omission of key issues
The panel included in its deliberation a broad view of the economic benefits, but an asymmetrically narrow view of the environmental risks and costs. The need for the Project as stipulated by Enbridge includes consideration of the enhanced revenues that would accrue from higher prices for oil sands products in Asian markets. These enhanced revenues are benefits to producers from production. The environmental risks, however, were only considered if they are associated with transport, not production or later burning/consumption. All negative effects associated with the enhanced production of oil sands bitumen, or the burning of such products in Asia, were excluded, as were greenhouse gas emissions generally. This exclusion of the project’s contributions to increased atmospheric emissions undermines Canada’s formal international commitments and federal policies on greenhouse emissions. Other key issues omitted include the difficulty of containing freshwater spills under ice, as has already been demonstrated on the Athabasca River from oil sands developments.
3. Reliance on information from the Proponent, without external evaluation
On critical issues, the panel relied on information from the proponent without external assessment. For example, on the pivotal matter of the risks of a diluted bitumen tanker spill, the panel concluded that a major spill was unlikely. Yet, a professional engineers’ report concluded that the quantitative risk assessment upon which the panel relied was so flawed as to provide no meaningful results. Regarding the consequences of such a spill, the panel relied on the proponent’s modeling to conclude that the adverse consequences of a spill would not be widespread or permanent, even as it acknowledged that there is much uncertainty about the behavior of diluted bitumen in the marine environment. That modeling discounted the prospect that diluted bitumen could be transported long distance by currents, when the product submerges, as it does under a wide range of conditions. Thus, the panel may have underestimated the scale of potential damages. Because the proponent is in a clear conflict of interest, an independent assessment of potential oil spill damage should have been commissioned.
4. Contradiction of official government documents
A decision on the potential for significant adverse environmental effects on any species or habitat must be consistent with the government’s own official documents. The panel’s conclusions that marine mammals in general will not suffer significant adverse cumulative effects stands in direct contradiction to the government’s own management and recovery plans. For example, the Recovery Plan for large whales (blue, fin, and sei whales—species-at-risk under the federal Species at Risk Act, SARA) lists “collisions with vessels, noise from industrial … activities, [and] pollution” as imminent threats —all three threats are associated with the NGP proposal. Contamination has also been identified as a threat for other marine mammals: the management plans for both the sea otter and the Steller sea lion identify a risk from marine contamination—in particular the acute effects of large oil spills, but also from the toxicity of smaller, chronic spills that are likely to increase proportionally with vessel traffic. The panel also failed to account for newly identified critical habitat of the humpback whale and failed to specify how the proponent’s mitigation plan would reduce the significant risks from increased shipping, a serious threat identified in the recently published Recovery Strategy for the species. A plan to manage the threats to the species and its habitat is a legal requirement given that the humpback whale is a species of Special Concern under SARA.
5. Inappropriate treatment of uncertain risks, and reliance on yet-to-be-developed mitigation measures
The panel effectively treated uncertain risks as unimportant. For instance, Northern Gateway omitted specified mitigation plans for numerous environmental damages or accidents. This omission produced fundamental uncertainties about the environmental impacts of Northern Gateway’s proposal (associated with the behaviour of bitumen in saltwater, adequate dispersion modeling, etc.). The panel recognized these fundamental uncertainties, but sought to remedy them by demanding the future submission of plans. However, the panel described no mechanism by which the evaluation of these plans could reverse their ruling. Since these uncertainties are primarily a product of omitted mitigation plans, such plans should have been required and evaluated before the JRP report was issued. To assume that such uncertainties would not influence the final decision of the panel, is to sanction the proponent’s strategic omissions, and effectively discount these potentially significant risks of the Project, to the detriment of the interests of the Canadian public.
Conclusion
The JRP report could have offered guidance, both to concerned Canadians in forming their opinions on the project and to the federal government in its official decision. However, given the major flaws detailed above, the report does not provide the needed guidance. Rather, the JRP’s conclusion—that Canadians would be better off with than without the Northern Gateway Project given all “environmental, social, and economic considerations”xvii—stands unsupported.
Given such flaws, the JRP report is indefensible as a basis to judge in favour of the Project.
Sincerely,
Kai MA Chan – Associate Professor, University of British Columbia
Anne Salomon – Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University
Eric B. Taylor – Professor, University of British Columbia
Read original letter with 300 additional signatories and supporting evidence here.
