Category Archives: Energy and Resources

Video: Eco-Footprint Founder Dr. Bill Rees on Resources, the $7 Billion and You

Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas
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Throughout this fascinating hour and a half SFU-sponsored discssion, Dr. Bill Rees, the founder of the “eco-footprint” concept, poses the question: Can the world really support the future population? Drawing on well-researched ecological, historical and sociological evidence, Rees suggests that the combination of human nature, technology and access to cheap fossil fuels has led to “a four-fold compounding of human numbers in just a hundred years.”

“What we have become accustomed to – this inordinate period of growth – is the single most abnormal period in the history of humankind. There has never been anything like it,” Rees told the audience at SFU Harbour Centre last month.

With human demand for resources fast outstripping supply, can the world address issues like poverty in developing nations and accommodating a further predicted 2.5 billion people by 2050 – all while reducing total consumption of energy and materials to sustainable levels?

In this must-watch presentation, Rees calls for “a new cultural narrative that shifts the values of society from growth (getting bigger) to development (getting better) – from competitive individualism, greed and narrow self-interest toward community, cooperation and our collective interests in repairing the earth for survival. We need to begin to exercise those uniquely human qualities of high intelligence, forward planning and moral judgement.”

“Why should we do this? Because we’ve reached the point in the history of our species where our individual interests have essentially converged with our collective interests. No individual, no nation can be sustainable on its own in a world entrained in climate change, ocean acidification and a dozen other trends. We need to come together to exercise our almost infinite capacity for cooperative arrangement to solve these problems is ways is which all of us can survive into the future.”

Rees sees the “contraction of the human enterprise” by conscious choice, deliberate planning and working together as the only logical conclusion – resulting in a “well-planned, orderly and cooperative descent toward a sustainable, steady-state economy of sufficiency for all. It’s just a question of whether we have the intelligence and the capacity to plan together to live within nature’s capacity.”

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Five Oil Spills in One Week: ‘Accidents’ or Business as Usual?

Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, Water and Hydrocarbons
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UPDATE: Since publication of this story this morning, yet another oil spill has come across the wire – a CP Rail spill from a derailment in northern Ontario – raising the total of spills this past week to SIX.

It’s been another appallingly bad week for proponents of pipeline safety and new oil infrastructure. If the industry’s woeful historical record – from the Exxon Valdez to BP’s Gulf of Mexico catastrophe to Enbridge’s trashing of the Kalamazoo – isn’t enough to turn people off of new pipelines and tanker routes, this slew of recent spills should seal the deal.

These incidents couldn’t have come at a worse time for the oil and pipeline industries, as US President Barack Obama prepares to announce his final decision in the coming months on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands to Port Arthur, Texas.

Let’s review the record over the last week:

  • This past friday, ExxonMobil’s Pegasus Pipeline coated the streets of Mayflower, Arkansas with what CNN describes as a “smelly, asphalt-like crude” (i.e. diluted bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands – the same kind the proposed Keystone XL would carry). These photos illustrate the effects of the spill on the sleepy Little Rock suburb – see the viral video captured by a local resident below.
  • Enbridge was back at it again last week, with the fourth recorded spill in two months along its Norman Wells Pipeline through the Northwest Territories. The company has leaked an estimated million litres of oil since February, 2011, from this one pipeline, prompting the National Energy Board to order an engineering assessment of the chronically malfunctioning line.
  • Meanwhile, back at the Alberta Tar Sands, Suncor was dealing with (and furiously downplaying) a leak from one of its massive waste ponds into the Athabasca River. This comes on the heels of a leaked memo to Conservative Resources Minister Joe Oliver, which acknowledged routine spillage from these ponds throughout the Tar Sands.
  • Over the weekend, Michigan was hit with another spill – this time up to 500 gallons of hydraulic oil spilled into the Lansing Grand River during an equipment malfunction at a local utility.
  • For those who would look to rail as an alternative to pipelines for transporting oil, there was the derailment last week of a CP Rail train, spilling an estimated 30,000 gallons of its crude cargo in western Minnesota.

This latest spate of spills should give pause to President Obama as he contemplates the Keystone XL – and to Canadian citizens and lawmakers debating several new pipeline proposals of our own.

It’s time to put to rest the notion that oil spills are “accidents”. They are, rather, a routine function of the business of extracting, transporting, and consuming oil – a good reason to spend our energy and resources on developing sustainable alternatives, not further entrenching our dependence on fossil fuels through new oil infrastructure.

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Site C Dam: A $10 Billion Taxpayer Subsidy for LNG, Fracking

Energy and Resources, Fracking, Hydropower, LNG
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Christy Clark argues the need for Site C Dam to power LNG on Global TV last week (screen capture).
Christy Clark argues the need for Site C Dam to power LNG on Global TV last week (screen capture).

Premier Christy Clark wants BC citizens to subsidize the oil and gas industry with a $10 Billion taxpayer-funded dam. Though she won’t put it quite like that, that’s precisely the implication of the policies she’s promoting in the run-up to May’s provincial election.

Clark confirmed her vision for powering a new, much-ballyhooed Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) Industry to Global TV last week (a must-watch). The premier has promised in recent months a $100 Billion windfall of provincial revenues from the yet-to-be-developed LNG industry, a boast which has drawn justified ridicule from pundits.

LNG requires enormous amounts of energy to super-cool gas in order to liquefy it and load it onto tankers. Numerous global energy companies – including Shell, Chevron, and a number of big Asian players – have lined up over the past year to build LNG plants in Kitimat and Prince Rupert, in order to access Asian markets which are currently paying significantly more for gas than the North American market.

Clark acknowledges the province doesn’t have enough electricity to supply the demands of multiple proposed LNG facilities. Her solution? Flood an 80 km stretch of the fertile Peace Valley in northeast BC to build a new dam. Dubbed Site “C” because it would be the third dam on the Peace River, the project would flood some 20,000 acres of high quality agricultural land and wildlife habitat.

Clark was blunt with Global TV reporter Jas Johal:

[quote]You can’t power up these huge [LNG] facilities without more power, so BC Hydro’s going to have to build Site C – we’re in favour of making that happen.[/quote]

The statement came as the window for public comments to the environmental assessment process for Site C winds down, drawing to a close Thursday, April 4.

Last year, at a press conference in Fort St. John, near the location of the proposed dam, Premier Clark spoke to the need for Site C to power LNG. She acknowledged that just one of the 5 or 6 planned LNG terminals on BC’s coast – a proposal by Shell and its Chinese, Korean and Japanese partners – would eat up the entire 1,100 megawatt output of Site C.

So even with this new dam – which won’t be up and running until 2020 at the earliest – BC has nowhere near the energy required to power the energy-hungry LNG industry. To that end, Premier Clark created a loophole in the Clean Energy Act to allow gas companies to generate power for their plants by burning their own natural gas. Which begs the question: why the continued need for Site C?

Perhaps it’s because the power from Site C would be offered to gas producers at a steep discount, which is the standard for large industrial users, who typically pay less than half what residential and small business customers pay for hydroelectricity in BC.

When pressed by Johal on the taxpayer subsidy issue, Clark brushed it off – “That’s not part of what we’re negotiating…We aren’t going to ask residential taxpayers to subsidize this.”

And yet, the dam itself, pegged at $8 Billion but sure to balloon beyond that (a study of 70 large dam projects funded by the World Bank found that the average overrun was a whopping 27%), will be on the shoulders of taxpayers and crown corporation BC Hydro – already drowing in massive debt. And unless the plan is to make the LNG industry pay top dollar for this new power (which defeats the purpose entirely), then residential hydro customers will bear the full burden through much steeper power bills.

While Site C is a looming taxpayer boondoggle, it will also destroy precious farmland at a time when we produce just 40% of our own food in BC. And as this recent report from the David Suzuki Foundation shows, it will compound the enormous industrial footprint that has marred over 65% of the Peace Valley over the past half century – making it easily one of the world’s most heavily impacted regions already.

A major source of those impacts is the natural gas industry, which relies more and more on environmentally risky “fracking” to extract the gas that would flow to these LNG plants through multiple new pipelines.

So Site C and LNG mean a major ramping up of increasingly controversial fracking.

Clark’s opposition in the upcoming provincial election on May 14, the BC NDP, are showing signs of backing away from Site C. The party’s Energy Critic John Horgan told the Vancouver Sun in February, “I’m confident that in the first two years of an NDP government we won’t be building Site C.”

For more information on Site C and tools to help you submit your comments to the environmental assessment process by the April 4 deadline, click here.

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The Bitumen Cliff

Climate Change, Energy and Resources, Tar Sands
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Bitumen is the current subject of much discussion in Canadian economic and energy policy. Getting Alberta’s version of this carbon-intensive crude from the tar sands to market by pipeline is the cause of considerable concern, study, frustration and tension. The proposed Northern Gateway to BC’s treasured West Coast is laden with controversy, as is the Kinder-Morgan expansion to Vancouver.

The Keystone XL pipeline that would send bitumen south to be refined in the US Gulf Coast has become more complicated than the “no brainer” envisioned by those promoting bitumen exports. Now a report released jointly by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) and the Polaris Institute (PI) is casting doubt on the wisdom of the federal government’s avid promotion of resource extraction as its primary economic strategy (Shawn McCarthy, Globe and Mail, Feb. 2/13).

Alberta may be the best example of this economic folly. The so-called “bitumen bubble”, the hollowing out of Alberta’s oil prices, has left the seemingly wealthy province with a staggering budget deficit of billions. With an economy now mostly dependent on the value of its bitumen, the province is vulnerable to price fluctuations determined by international market forces.

Now, with new extraction technology flooding the market with oil and gas from shale deposits, Alberta is cornered and in financial crisis. The federal government’s attempts to establish Canada as an “energy superpower” is now in doubt. The report by the CCPA and PI refers to this situation as the “bitumen cliff”.

As Tony Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute explains, “Canada’s current bitumen strategy is not only damaging to the environment, but is leaving our economy highly vulnerable to shrinking markets for bitumen as the world moves to less polluting fuels” (Ibid.).

The problem is the intensive energy required to extract bitumen from the tar sands. As climate change advances and the international community becomes more sensitive to carbon emissions, the preference for cleaner fuels will rise and the demand for bitumen will fall. In an age of growing environmental concerns, bitumen becomes a sunset fuel.

But the “bitumen cliff” is expressed in more serious structural effects. As a primary economic strategy, resource extraction offers a questionable future. One of Canada’s famous economic historians, Professor Harold Innis, succinctly identified the danger of relying on resource extraction as the source of national wealth. In summarizing Innis’s thinking, the CCPA report notes, “As staples are exported in raw form to more industrialized trading partners, Canada is left to buy back processed, value-added products and services at a much higher cost. The combined outcome is a self-reinforcing staples trap (a phrase borrowed from Professor Innis), whereby the faster Canada exports its latest staple, the less diversified and capable the economy becomes and hence all the more dependent on finding more staples to export” (Ibid.).

However well-intentioned, a strategy of resource extraction drifts a country downward in status, sophistication, wealth and stability.

A lack of economic diversity means a lack of economic resilience and greater economic vulnerability. Not only do boom-and-bust cycles become more common but a country’s economic health is wholly dependent on the needs of other economies. Bitumen is a classical example. It seemed like a good idea when the world was facing peak oil — the federal plan, in concurrence with Alberta, was supposed to make Canada an “energy superpower”. Now that other oil and gas is flowing freely from multiple shale deposits around the world, bitumen is in danger of becoming an expensive burden.

As well as the environmental risks and costs associated with the production and distribution of bitumen, such a resource comes with other consequences that are not so obvious. Economies that are dependent on a single resource are compelled to safeguard its production, to cater to its interests and to those who control it. The inevitable result is a deformation and erosion of democracy.

Saudi Arabia is an extreme example. But the economic power of oil almost invariable comes with a politically corrupting influence. Economic diversity invariably creates better government, greater resilience and more social stability — and broadly educated societies that are healthier and happier.

The most valuable resource in a modern society is its people. They are nourished and developed by schools, universities, health care, open inquiry and the free-flow of information. Informed people invent their own wealth. A country such as Canada has the raw resources that are best used by Canadians. Professor Innis’s “staple trap” is an economic cliff to be avoided.

Short term political objectives are inclined to exploit the immediate cash of raw resource extraction. But the best and most enduring investments are made in the people themselves. They, after all, are the real substance of nations.

And finally, at the bottom of the “bitumen cliff” is environmental mayhem. In Alberta, it’s open pits of toxic wastes, and an endangered Athabasca River which flows northward to expansive valleys and deltas ecologically rich with fish and wildlife.

In adjacent places, it’s pipelines, tankers and trains with the certain threat of disastrous spills. For the planet, it’s greenhouse gas emissions, a polluting process with unfolding consequences that science describes as being catastrophic to both natural ecologies and to human societies.

So the “bitumen cliff” also comes with a moral dimension. Is it strategically wise to develop a resource that comes with a suicidal component? Shouldn’t our human energy and ingenuity be applied to avoiding weather extremes, rising oceans and the plethora of other environmental disasters awaiting a hotter planet?

The most important discussions today are no longer about the economy and oil but about the fate of future generations. Bitumen belongs in this broader and deeper conversation.

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Mother Nature, US Govt Chase Shell Out of Arctic

Energy and Resources, International, Oil&Gas, Politics, Water and Hydrocarbons
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The Shell drilling rig that ran aground, The Kulluk (Greenpeace photo).
The Shell drilling rig that ran aground, The Kulluk (Greenpeace photo).

Shell Oil, the first energy company granted coveted Arctic drilling permits by the US Government, is shutting down operations for all of 2013, nearly as quickly as they began. Shell’s hand is being forced by the Interiror Department, following a scathing report which castigated the company for a series of misadventures in 2012 and early 2013.

The cancellation of this year’s drilling program represents an about-face from the confident predictions made last year by the Shell executive heading up the operation, David Lawrence. The Arctic drilling would be “relatively easy”, Lawrence told Dow Jones at the outset of Shell’s foray into Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

The report by the Interior Department, released earlier this month, found Shell was unprepared for Arctic drilling and failed to properly oversee its contractors. Department Secretary Ken Salazar put it succinctly on a telephone press conference discussing the report. “Shell screwed up in 2012,” remarked Salazar, who stipulated that future drilling would be contingent on more detailed plans and an independent audit of the company’s management systems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV4UY52FegU

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Oil Pipeline, Tanker Spills not a ‘Risk’ but a Certainty

Energy and Resources, Pipelines and Supertankers, WATER, Water and Hydrocarbons
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Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. It looks like the gods are doing just that with the Premier and her government.

What I’ve seen the past several weeks forces me to ask, Madame Premier: Is that thing on your shoulders just for photo-ops?

For starters. Is the Kitsilano Search and Rescue Centre really a bargaining chip with the federal government over the Enbridge pipeline proposal? Do you really believe that David Black’s proposed refinery is going to make things better? That 3 pipelines carrying bitumen are safer than two?

I’ve got to say it, Premier: you don’t know a damned thing about pipelines and tankers.

Do you not understand that the rupture of a pipeline or “accident” with a tanker is mathematically inevitable? That we’re not talking risks but certainties? Your friends in the business community like to call these things “risks” in order to convince people that they’re not likely to happen. Think on this, Premier – if an accident is not going to happen, why make multimillion dollar facilities to clean them up?

The theorem is not that something can be an “acceptable risk” but that an “ongoing risk” is a certainty waiting to happen. You simply must understand this, Premier, or you are selling out the Province. As they say, shit happens.

You would have laughed, as we all would have on March 21, 2006, to think that a BC Ferry would sink, yet the following day that is just what happened.

Prior to June, 2012, we would all have scoffed at the thought that a luxury liner, on a fine day, would sink, causing several deaths and injuries.

Having agreed on that, we must assess what the damage will be. With an airplane we know that. When we get on a plane we’re betting on the odds being in our favour, but the fact that there will be crashes is a certainty. We are also prepared to concede that if our jet crashes, we’ll be dead.

If we’re to be honest, Premier, what we’re asking is not what are the odds of this happening, since we know that it will. As long as human beings are involved, there will be human error. It’s not a matter if airplanes will crash but what are the odds on it happening, say, in a month.

It is the same with pipelines and tankers – we know that these calamities are certainties but today nothing will likely happen. Even if we disagree on the odds, that doesn’t alter the fact that it will happen. We are only really calculating when or how often – the same thing an insurance company does, or we do when we bet on the odds at the race track.

Knowing the inevitable, we must now consider the consequences. It’s rather like calculating how long you can put to your head a revolver with 100 chambers and one bullet and keep pulling the chamber. You know you’ll kill yourself – the only mystery being when. If, however, you don’t put a bullet in the chamber, but marshmallow instead, you don’t care, for you won’t be hurt.

We’re not talking marshmallow here.

With oil spills and tankers, we know that the result, whenever it happens, will be hideous, catastrophic. With diluted bitumen (dilbit), there is no such thing as a small accident and you and your government must begin to understand that.

Now, to cleanup. The fact is that there is little that can be done except to the stuff you can see and access and even then very little.

I hope you know about the Enbridge “accident” in Michigan at the Kalamazoo River in July 2010. This spill was described as “not serious” by the government but it hasn’t been cleaned up yet!

Where our pipelines spill, it will not be easy to access for men and machines. Look at the proposed routes. When a spill occurs in the Rockies, the Rocky Mountain Trench, the Coast Range or the Great Bear Rainforest, how the hell are you going to get there? So you are faced with the facts that spills of dilbit are catastrophic and with our proposed pipelines you can’t get to them.

Just what makes you think that David Black’s proposed refinery will make things better?

It will be bringing bitumen from the same tar sands over the same terrain as the proposed Enbridge pipeline. The only possible plus is that instead of dumping dilbit into the ocean it will be refined oil, just like the Exxon Valdez did.

It’s been said that the Kinder Morgan line has been safe. I put this to Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace and an authority on these matters and here’s what he says:

• There have been a number of incidents related to the Trans Mountain pipeline – including the spill in Burnaby in 2007. Trans Mountain Pipeline (Kinder Morgan) pleaded guilty pleas to a 21-count indictment in B.C. Provincial Court.

• In 2009, oil spilled from Kinder Morgan’s oil Westridge terminal in Burnaby.

• There was another spill in January, 2012, near Abbotsford at Kinder Morgan’s tank farm. In that case, the National Energy Board charged that Trans Mountain Pipeline operators ignored warning alarms, spilling 90,000 litres of bitumen crude oil.

• Just a few months later, the same Abbotsford facility was home to yet another spill.

That’s 5 spills in this region in the last 6 years. There have been more – over 70 spills along the whole Trans Mountain Pipeline route since it began operation in the 1950s.

Below is an interesting video that discusses the 2007 spill, and the extreme problems with Bitumen.

Premier Clark, you owe it to your province to deal with the issues raised – not with industry slogans and bullshit, but with logic and facts. It’s getting late.

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BC’s Fossil Fuel Folly

Energy and Resources, Fracking, LNG, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers
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Perhaps the big white banner with black letters at the recent American protest of the Keystone XL pipeline summarizes BC’s fossil fuel folly. “Fossil Fuels? Fossil Fools,” it declares. The “o”s are painted a hazardous yellow, and within each is an unequivocal “x”. The protest’s specific target is the pipeline intended to carry carbon-intensive crude from Alberta’s tar-sands to refineries in the US southern Gulf Coast; the protest’s broader target is the industrial development that is adding carbon dioxide to an already stressed biosphere.

People who are concerned about global climate change are watching the steep rise of global carbon dioxide emissions. While a few nations have been heroic in their efforts to cut these emissions, international efforts have been eminently unsuccessful. So BC’s strategy to export energy — massive amounts of LNG, increasing quantities of coal, and perhaps a tide-water port for Alberta’s bitumen — is generating justifiable scrutiny, criticism and concern. People are counting carbon, dreading the consequences and registering their objections.

Not surprisingly, numerous rallies are being held opposing the Keystone XL pipeline. Natural gas is also the subject of worry. Although it’s an energy that produces only half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, some experts think that the massive drilling required, combined with the escaped methane from fracking, may make natural gas as carbon intensive as coal. Coal, too, is a target of protest. It causes ecological damage when mined, produces numerous toxic pollutants when burned, and its industrial use generates the world’s largest single source of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Since we all live on a planet with one shared atmosphere, BC cannot embark on a strategy of exporting fossil fuel energy without calculating the global consequences. So it must expect both criticism and resistance from those who are counting carbon. Indeed, BC cannot even claim the virtue that its forests are sequestering carbon because new evidence suggests that the mountain pine beetle infestation is so massive that the province’s forests are now carbon negative — they are producing more carbon dioxide than they are presently storing. Even BC’s claim that natural gas is a carbon bargain is suspect because any gains in reducing CO2 emissions will likely be lost by the energy-intensive process of compressing huge quantities of it for export as liquid natural gas (LNG). Then more greenhouse gases are emitted when transporting the LNG by ship to distant destinations.

If BC were truly interested in its carbon virtue, it might note a study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Jane Petch, Island Tides, Feb. 28/13) which found that all BC’s energy needs could probably be met by hydro electricity. Electrical consumption in the province is flat and any increase in demand can likely be met by efficiency improvements. This ethical option is undermined by the expanding industrial demands of mining, gas production and LNG projects.

BC is attempting to justify its strategy of exporting LNG by arguing that this relatively clean fuel — a debatable claim — will displace the use of coal elsewhere, thereby reducing net global carbon dioxide emissions. But a global review of coal use suggests otherwise. And BC’s argument is further compromised by its record coal exports. A province more idealistic and less opportunistic could at least stabilize its share of global carbon dioxide emissions by cutting its coal exports to compensate for its LNG exports — something it is not considering.

Between 2001 and 2010 the US was able to reduce its coal use by 5 percent, helping it cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 1.7 percent (NewScientist, Nov. 17/12). But during that same period, global coal consumption increased by 47 percent, simply because other countries are dramatically increasing their consumption. As a fuel, coal is cheap, readily available, and its carbon dioxide output is wholly unregulated, unsanctioned and free. It now produces 40 percent of the world’s electricity. And global consumption is at record levels. China, which uses three times the US consumption of coal, is showing no signs of reducing its use. In fact, China has new coal-fired electrical plants in construction that will exceed the entire coal-fired production of electricity in the US.

According to statistics in NewScientist, the amount of coal used on the planet is staggering. “Global consumption is about 71 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, which is equal to the daily oil output of more than eight Saudi Arabias” (Ibid.). This means that any coal exported from BC will simply go to feed the voracious global hunger for energy. And any LNG exported will not displace coal; it will simply be added to the climate crisis already unfolding. And any export of LNG will will eventually compromise BC’s own energy needs.

If BC is going to export massive quantities of its natural gas, how is it to meet its own long-term energy needs? What are the environmental consequences of producing the extra energy required to power the drilling, compressing and mining of resources for export? What are the monetary and social costs of such a strategy? What are the economic traps in such infrastructure investment, considering that countries such as Australia already have 17 LNG plants in development? And what are the ethical implications of exporting fossil fuel energy to a world that is already wounding itself with excessive carbon dioxide emissions? Are these not valid questions that must be considered in BC’s energy strategy? From a considered perspective, BC is joining the march down the path of fossil fuel folly.

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Big-picture Thinking Needed to Protect Nature

Energy and Resources, Fracking, Mining, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, Species At Risk
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Few places on Earth have been untouched by humans, according to a study in the journal Science. Satellite images taken from hundreds of kilometres above the planet reveal a world that we have irrevocably changed within a remarkably short time.

Although industrial projects like the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline or the recently defeated mega-quarry in Ontario typically grab the headlines and bring out public opposition, it’s often the combined impacts of a range of human activities on the same land base that threaten to drive nature beyond critical tipping points. Once those are passed, rapid ecological changes such as species extinction can occur.

For example, in British Columbia’s booming Peace Region, forestry, energy and mineral leases and licences are widespread and often multilayered in the same area. As various industries have exploited these “tenures”, a sprawling patchwork of large clearcuts, oil wells, dams and reservoirs, fracking operations and thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, roads and pipelines have come to dominate the landscape.

Today, more than 65 per cent of the region has felt the impact of industrial development, leaving little intact habitat for sensitive, endangered species such as caribou to feed, breed or roam. Degradation or destruction of habitat has convinced scientists that remaining herds in the region are no longer self-sustaining and are spiralling toward local extinction. First Nations, who have relied upon caribou as their primary source of food for thousands of years, can no longer hunt them. This is a clear violation of treaty rights.

This dire situation didn’t happen by accident or because of a laissez-faire approach to resource and land management. Numerous industries in the area have been operating legally and according to rules and regulations set by government.

But legal experts, such as those at the nongovernmental organization West Coast Environmental Law, believe a root cause of the problem lies in laws about land, resource and water management that are “hardwired” to fail communities and the environment. The narrow focus of those laws enables industries to operate in isolation from one another.

B.C., for example, has developed numerous individual laws, like the Forest and Range Practices Act, Oil and Gas Activities Act and Mines Act, alongside the regulated industries they enable. But the province lacks a legal framework to proactively and comprehensively manage the cumulative impacts of multiple resource industries operating within the same area.

Because of this, WCEL and its First Nations partners are engaged in a multi-year law reform project that aims to overhaul the way we currently oversee and regulate cumulative impacts, ranging from declining water quality that may arise as a result of multiple industries using a common resource, to emerging threats such as climate change.

A cumulative-impacts approach to governing resource development would upend the current management paradigm. It would focus on the management needs of the land, water, air, wildlife and indigenous communities that depend on them first, rather than the resources to be extracted. In practical terms, this would mean that, rather than focusing on what we should take from nature to create wealth and employment, we should first consider what must be retained in nature to sustain both wildlife and the well-being of local communities – such as clean air, safe drinking water and healthy local food.

At a recent symposium on managing the cumulative impacts of resource development in B.C., numerous speakers – from First Nations to academics to business leaders – stressed that effectively managing cumulative impacts will require new institutions and governance mechanisms, even new legal tools. More importantly, it will require our leaders to adopt a more proactive and holistic way of thinking about the world – one that recognizes that far from just being a place to extract resources like fossil fuels, timber and minerals, nature is our home. Nature provides our most fundamental needs and dictates limits to growth and so its protection should be our highest priority.

Managing our massive, growing human footprint on this planet more sustainably will require leadership, much of which is emerging from First Nations peoples who are on the frontlines of the day-to-day realities of cumulative environmental change. We need to look at the big picture rather than individual elements in isolation.

Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Ontario and Northern Canada Director-General Faisal Moola.

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Premier’s calculations for pipelines, fish farms, Site C Dam don’t add up

Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, Politics
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Gary Mason’s column in the March 12 edition of The Globe and Mail, on Christy Clark, is very interesting. The premier is complaining about the lack of precision in the NDP’s plans and calls upon Adrian Dix to spell it all out.

What is most interesting is Ms. Clark’s position on issues and what she deems those issues to be. (Remember that the Liberals have raised the provincial debt and other taxpayer obligations by some five fold, which should limit the generosity of both leaders).

“So not only are the people going to compare me with Adrian Dix,” said Clark, “they will be comparing leadership with an absence of courage to tell people where his party where his party stands on things. If we get into a competition of ideas in this campaign, I believe we can win that battle because I believe the things I stand for are what British Columbians want: a strong economy, smaller government, jobs for our kids, a prosperity fund, lower taxes.”

Leaving aside the prosperity fund nonsense for a moment, these words could have been attributed to all premiers I have listened to going back to my own days in the Legislature. Mindless crap, motherhood and apple pie – but predictable.

Clearly, there are a number of things Ms. Clark does not wish to debate, especially the deplorable fiscal situation and scandals galore, with two fresh ones ongoing right now.

Let’s have a look at the promise involving the chimera she calls a “prosperity fund”.

This is simple barnyard droppings wrapped in a pretty package. You will remember that in the Throne Speech this “fund” would come to pass in two years. In an interview with Justine Hunter she admitted that might be up to five years – how long will it be Ms. Clark?

How about “never”.

The plain truth is that it will never happen. Even if LNG plants (the proposed sources of funds) sprang up all over the province, which they won’t, any revenue would be required for general taxation for a province Ms. Clark’s government, and the Campbell one before it, has left broke.

It would be just as accurate for Premier Clark to promise that our economy under a Liberal government – our “prosperity” – depends upon the Easter Bunny.

Let’s turn now to what the premier is not talking about – the environment.

Readers will recall that the environment has never been a major issue in elections. The media types who conduct and participate in the traditional debate never raise this as an issue because their bosses won’t tolerate anything that smacks of being anti-Liberal.

We have had a recent environmental question arise over a refinery to be built in Kitimat by David Black. Now this is the issue in a nutshell: Premier Clark, who has raised red flags regarding the proposed Enbridge pipeline to Kitimat, has hinted at her support for Black’s alternative venture, which would see diluted Alberta bitumen refined in Kitimat before being loaded onto tankers destined for other markets.

The premier says she opposes Enbridge because it doesn’t give BC sufficient revenue to compensate for the environmental ‘risk’. Black’s alternative involves a pipeline carrying the same product from the same place, along the same route, to the same destination, where it would then be refined before being loaded onto tankers. And yet, Clark somehow seems amenable to the newer proposal.

The only apparent difference is the greater share of provincial revenue and local jobs which Black’s proposal offers and the perceived lower risk of shipping refined products vs. diluted bitumen (only for the tankers – the pipeline would be moving the same Tar Sands product).

In essence the Liberal position is we will not approve these pipelines and tanker traffic unless the bribe is sufficient to permit us to overlook the risks.

Here is the crux of the matter. Surely all would agree that in order to meet the money versus pipelines and tankers issue we must assess what that risk is. That’s only common sense.

What, then, Premier Clark, do you assess these risks to be?

Surely there must be a formula. Tell us that it isn’t just flying by the seat of our pants, or pantsuits!

What studies has your government done to assess these risks? Have you looked at the history of pipelines the world over? Have you, more to the point, assessed the risks associated with Enbridge, whose record is appalling? Black, for his part, has zero experience moving oil products – hardly any more reassuring.

But it’s more than that, for you surely agree that before making this “risk for dough” assessment you must not only deal with the possibilities of a spill but what damages would flow.

What about, say, a spill in the Rockies, or in the Coast Range, or in the Rocky Mountain Trench or in the Great Bear Rain Forest? Or by tanker. In the case of pipelines, how in hell is a company going to get men and heavy machinery to the site?

I’m sure you’ve seen by now that you must not only assess the risk of harm in various sensitive areas, be they in a fjord, Vancouver Harbour, and in all sensitive areas, which, Premier, means everywhere in the province, but what the cost will be.

Are you familiar, Ms. Premier, with the Enbridge spill in the Kalamazoo River in July 2010? There, the spill was easily accessed yet 2½ years later it has still not been cleaned up.

I shouldn’t have to ask if you know the difference between dilbit (diluted bitumen) and refined oil.

But do you? Do you know what the consequences of dilbit accidents are?

Let’s call these spills/accidents for what they really are.

They are not risks but catastrophes waiting to happen. It’s not “if”, Premier Clark, but “when”.

What you are saying to the people of BC is that you are prepared to take a certain sum of money for inevitable “accidents”, wherever they happen and whatever damage they do.

At least be honest on this score so that the voting public has a clear understanding that for money you will abandon our heritage.

There are two other issues that I will go into in depth with as the days pass.

Your government is continuing to grant fish farm licenses in spite of Commissioner Bruce Cohen’s report. Indeed, your government is the landlord for all BC’s fish farms (signing off on the tenures they require to site and operate their farms), yet you have done no policing and the only fines ever imposed came from an NDP administration and the Campbell government gave them their fines back.

The only way these farms can make a profit is by sending their sewage (fish excrement, unconsumed food, anti-lice compounds, unconsumed medicines, drugs and colourants) into the oceans as raw sewage.

Quite apart from the appalling impact these hideous farms have had on wild salmon runs, the above should have you forcing these farms on land, as a recent federal government report recommended.

Will you do this – and if not, why not?

The weasel words, “run of river” projects, have decimated our rivers and, as with fish farms, no inspection of them takes place even though there have been 1000s of broken rules. BC Hydro, the jewel of our crown would be bankrupt if it were in the private sector because of the sweetheart deals your government has forced them to pay to private companies.

This is just one of the scandalous policies that have beset your government. What are you going to do about this issue?

Finally, Premier, why Site C Dam?

Is this really a process to provide energy to gas prospectors who can use that energy to “frack” for natural gas to make energy? And to power the liquefaction of natural gas (LNG), for which, in all likelihood, there will be no customers?

(By the way, Ms. Clark, have you even the faintest idea what the fracking process is all about, and the undetermined environmental impacts?)

Yes, Mr. Dix must come clean with his program and I intend to ask him questions like these. But you are the premier. You must deal with these issues and do so in specific terms, not barfed up stale marshmallows.

I assure you that you will hear about these issues again, for many British Columbians, including me, believe our environment and the fauna and flora it creates and protects is worth more than simply a token amount that they consider, and write off, as a cost of doing business no matter how much that may be.

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Under the Radar: Howe Sound Gravel Mine an Environmental Catastrophe

Energy and Resources, Mining, Politics, Western Canada
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There is a new axiom in BC, evidently, which says, ‘You can’t be against EVERYTHING.”

Unhappily, this had led the NDP and Energy critic John Horgan to support Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plants in northwest BC for export. This is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster and my prediction is that there will be no LNG plants in BC thus no market.

But this new axiom, so critical to those who would take away our heritage, is also permitting a gravel pit to be developed in Howe Sound at McNab Creek. This is not for want of private opposition – it is alive and very well indeed. What it’s lacking is public awareness.

Howe Sound is a world-class area. It’s taken a hell of a beating since my Dad, Mom and I fished it back when if you didn’t get a fish you must have forgotten to put a hook on your line. Eagles have returned to how they were in the days when I was a boy and so have porpoises. Whales are being sighted again. Salmon runs, except the ones dependent on the Ashlu, which has been ruined by a private power company, are returning. Howe Sound is for boaters, canoeists, and a paradise for kayaks, as it may well become again for fishermen.

This hasn’t all happened by accident. There are a number of organizations and individuals who have put their hearts and sweat into making these good things happen.

Now in the midst of this recovering of our heritage, a company called Burnco wants to build a 77-hectare gravel pit, running day and night, all year. In doing this they will excavate the entire estuary from one side of the valley to the other, thus eliminating one of only three estuaries in Howe Sound.

This horrid enterprise will change the movement of water through the valley thus threatening the entire estuary and the ecology it sustains. There are 21 species at risk, including Roosevelt Elk, introduced there in 2010 by the BC Ministry of Environment (one of my old stamping grounds) as well as our usual coastal wildlife.

There are other serious problems – like a gravel pit being worked 24/7/365, bringing noise and light pollution in a big way.

Here is the bad news – the really bad news. The project has already got approval in principle and is moving towards environmental hearings. This is the beloved “process” of the MP for the area, John Weston. He has never seen government-style “process” at work. I have and at the risk of repeating myself I’d rather have a root canal without anesthetic than go to another of those democratic disgraces.

When you go to such a meeting to protest the project, period, you are ruled out of order. You’re only there, you see, to help frame the environmental principles to be imposed. The unstated reality, none the less a fact for not being stated, is that this is a done deal.

Even the environmental review is cold comfort, for whatever constraints are put in place, the company will ignore them. You don’t have to go far to see what I mean – wander up to the Independent Power Project (IPP) on the Ashlu River. Though they crossed their heart and hoped to die that they would live up to their commitment they haven’t. The environmental destruction they have inflicted has been enormous.

Just 16 private power projects in this region – a quarter of the total in operation in BC – generated a staggering 749 environmental violations in a one year period, according to recent documents pried loose by freedom of information request. These companies faced virtually no consequences for their actions.

It’s a bit long but worth reading is what Gwen Barlee of the Wilderness Committee wrote on the subject:

Last year (2011) I received a tip that there were serious problems with the Ashlu private power project. The person who called me said: ‘they are killing the river.’

We had been hearing rumours that private power projects have significant problems with fish kills, so when I got that phone call I immediately submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to confirm what was happening.

FOIs are a tool used by civil society groups like the Wilderness Committee, reporters and private citizens to gain access to government documents that might not otherwise see the light of day. They can be an important part of keeping government open and transparent…

…After waiting for more than eight months for our FOI to arrive, we received more than 3000 pages of government documents about environmental problems at the Ashlu project. Those documents showed that there were repeated problems with fish being stranded on gravel bars resulting in fish kills and that efforts to get the owners of the project, Innergex Renewable Energy Inc, to address these issues were “not satisfactory.”

In those documents staff from the provincial Ministry of the Environment and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) where quoted as saying things like “FYI: lotsa dead fish from yesterday’s Ashlu episode . . . will be interesting to see DFO’s response” and “I agree, their requirement is to keep the fish ladder functional, and this is the key time of year regardless of whether they think they are ‘losing too much water’ to keep it operational.”…

…One of the most concerning revelations of these investigations is an industry practice known as ramping, which increases and decreases flow levels downstream of the power project. Ramping down the river flow has the potential to strand and kill fish and can also result in egg dewatering and cause spawning interference.

The private power industry has often claimed that their projects would not be built in fish habitat but we have seen that in far too many cases that is not the case. According to … Watershed Watch, 72% of river diversion projects are located in known or suspected fish habitat. Private power proponents have told us that their projects would not impact fish but now we are seeing serious problems in regards to fish stranding, kills and habitat damage.

Let’s put it plainly – once you get to the environmental assessment stage, it’s all easy as pie to agree to anything and know that no government inspectors will trouble you – and even if they do, there will be no charges laid.

All is not lost.

First Nations have a special connection to this area and will no doubt fight the project.

Secondly, if the people make enough fuss, the project can be stopped, as the Glacier-Howser private river power project was stopped by irate citizens. There’s a story there to end on.

The company, which gets the right to put on the meeting, doesn’t like too many tiresome citizens around, so instead of holding this hearing in Nelson, the population centre, they hold it in Kaslo, a town with but 1,000 people.

Over 1,100 people showed up! And the project was effectively stopped because the company couldn’t or wouldn’t put in proper safeguards for the Bull Trout population.

The motto is, as the great Scottish Bard, Sir Harry Lauder put it, “Keep right on ‘til the end of the road.”

Or as I put it after the Alcan victory in 1993, you never know you’ve won until you’ve won.

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