The Vancouver Sun’s Gordon Hamilton reports that the IPP lobby, BC Citizens for Green Energy, has
released a Letterman-like top ten reasons for the development of more
of their run-of-river and other ‘green’ power projects. Though not as
funny as Letterman, the BCCGE’s top ten could bring out a laugh, except
for the serious environmental and economic issues involved.
The BCCGE states that more development of their projects would:
1. Eliminate the need for BC to import electricity from coal-fired generators in Alberta and the United States. (What
they don’t say is that it would also restrict BC Hydro’s ability to
import surplus hydro power during the spring run-off on the Columbia
River system in the US, or the ever-increasing amounts of surplus wind
power, produced at times when not needed in Alberta or the U.S. — very
cost-effective clean energy imports that could greatly benefit BC
Hydro’s customers).
2. Create jobs for people in BC. (True, it would create some
jobs during construction, but very few during operations. On the other
hand, and not mentioned by BCCGE, it would do so by driving up BC Hydro
rates more than necessary, to the detriment of BC households and
industry).
What you don’t know about a deal you haven’t heard of
In coming days, Canadian and European officials will intensify
negotiations on a new trade agreement most Canadians have never heard
of. The Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement
is by far the largest free-trade deal this country has ever undertaken.
If
it goes through, CETA will open up the rules, standards and public
spending priorities of provinces and municipalities to direct
competition and challenge from European corporations. Ottawa refuses to
even discuss the environmental implications, but a recent trade
sustainability impact assessment commissioned by the European Commission has sounded alarms in several areas.
The report says the kind of liberalizing trade deal envisioned will lead
to increased European investment in the Alberta tar sands, and thus to increased greenhouse gas emissions. Trade lawyer Steven Shrybman
has sounded a similar warning in a recent legal opinion, noting that
CETA will give corporations the right to ignore or challenge existing or
new rules aimed at reducing the current heavy footprint of the tar
sands. He posits that the Conservative government sees international
trade regimes as an important tool for defeating efforts to address
climate change.
What kind of year in politics is 2011 going to be? Very
likely another year (or at least ten months) of gridlock at the federal
level, with no sign of any so-called game changer on the horizon.
A spring election is looking less likely as
the Conservatives try to make a deal with the NDP — swapping its
support for the budget for increased support for seniors and hopefully a
halt to scheduled corporate tax cuts. Harper seems resigned to
remaining a minority government and doesn’t want an election. Canadians
are no more willing to give him a majority today than they were last
year or in the last election. As soon as a Harper majority appears
possible, a whole whack of voters change their minds and the
Conservatives go back to their maximum maintainable level of 36-38 per
cent.
So if there is so little meaningful action
on the parliamentary political front, we should look to
extra-parliamentary politics for action. And here the movement seems to
defy the polls. Because while environmental issues are still taking a
back seat to economic ones, it is on the environmental front that stuff
is actually happening. While the media seem to focus on the lack of
action on climate change, other enviro issues are witnessing intense
activity and campaigning by dozens of groups.
They have demonstrated that Stephen Harper,
a man who doesn’t like to blink, can be defeated when opponents fight
smart and are in for the long haul. The rejection of the B.C. Prosperity
copper-gold mine proposal and the saving of Fish Lake was a good
example. Approving the mine in the face of very effective publicity on
the part of opponents proved just too much for even Stephen Harper to
pull off. Defying many of the pundits’ predictions, the Conservatives
backed off and actually listened to their own environmental review
panel.
Coming down the pipe
While the fight isn’t over yet, Harper
faces another major defeat and it will happen this year. He will
confront another Fish Lake-like decision, except this time it is a much
bigger issue: the so-called Northern Gateway project, Enbridge
Corporation’s plan to construct a 1,200 kilometre pipeline (across 1,000
streams and rivers) that would carry unrefined bitumen from the tar
sands to Kitimat on the West Coast. That would result in some 200
supertankers a year loading the stuff up and taking it to markets in the
U.S. and Asia through the pristine and treacherous waters off the B.C.
coast.
The following letter is from environmental activist and Central Coast resident Ingmar Lee to Enbridge’s manager of “aboriginal consultation & regulatory compliance, BC Region,” Jody Whitney – following a recent public meeting in Bella Bella regarding the company’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. As it encapsulates many local residents’ concerns about the project and the public and aboriginal consultation process, we thought we would share it with our readers.
Re: Enbridge Pipelines Inc “Community Consultation” – Oct 2010 Heiltsuk First Nation community of Bella Bella, BC
Dear Jody Whitney,
I haven’t heard back from you since we met at your Enbridge Gateway Pipelines presentation to the Heiltsuk community of Bella Bella BC in October, during which you saw an overwhelming demonstration of emphatic and unanimous opposition to your corporation’s appalling scheme to pipe tar sands oil products out to BC’s pristine coastal waters.
The meeting was inaugurated with a powerful demonstration by the Heiltsuk Singers, singing songs from their ancient (more than 10,000 years) and thriving culture. That was followed by a presentation by the children of the Bella Bella community clearly expressing their opposition to your project. After the second slide of your Enbridge Power Point discussing technical trivia, which was clearly designed to eat up most of the time allotted, the moderator shut your presentation down and opened the floor to the full-house turn-out, who let you all know, for about 2 hours, unequivocally, in no uncertain terms, that your Pipeline/Supertanker project, which hopes to deliver massive quantities of Alberta Dirty-Oil Tar-Sands product across our province, to be loaded onto hundreds of giant supertankers annually for global distribution, was absolutely unwelcome in Heiltsuk territory. It was also made clear that BC Coastal First Nations are unanimously, and adamantly opposed to your project.
During the meeting, you and your four Enbridge colleagues promised the people of Bella Bella and environs, that you were truly interested in their views, were open and accountable to the community, and that you wished to return on numerous occasions to communicate with people about your Enbridge project. After the meeting you reaffirmed to me that you were open to communicate with everyone, and you gave me your business card. You asked me to help you to understand why people were so passionate about protecting the region from the inevitable oil catastrophe that will result if your project manages to proceed. I agreed to this and sent you a few examples (see below) of what is so very special about the area. I then asked you to send me whatever feedback about the meeting you and your colleagues reported back to your Enbridge superiors. Since then I have not heard back from you.
You acknowledged receipt of that information, but when I asked you to send whatever report you submitted to your Enbridge superiors regarding the meeting, I have not heard from you. So why did you give me your card after the meeting if you had no intention of communicating?? You and your colleagues promised the Bella Bella community that Enbridge wanted an open process, that you intended to return on numerous occasions to discuss your plans and that you were open and willing to communicate.
It is of great importance, not only to the Bella Bella community, all of the First Nations of BC, and all of the people of BC, that we hear back on what you, the face of Enbridge Pipelines Inc., are reporting back to your superiors after you go about “consulting” with people along your proposed pipeline and supertanker route across this province. Your title states that you are in charge of “Aboriginal Consultation.” Consultation is where you ask people about their concerns. Why would your feedback to your boss after he meeting, in which a unanimous aboriginal concern was expressed, be a secret that cannot be freely divulged?
At the meeting, you were personally asked to divulge the 10 corporate sources of Enbridge Pipelines Inc.’s $100 million Public Relations fund, from which I assume you draw your salary. You stood up in front of the Bella Bella community and said that you were not permitted to divulge that crucial information. The people of this province are demanding to know the source of Enbridge’s massive propaganda fund. Why are you keeping such critical information a secret??
Your refusal to communicate puts the lie to Enbridge’s claim, one that you yourself promised to the community at Bella Bella, that Enbridge was genuinely interested in communicating with the community, regardless of what people’s opinion of your project. Therefore you are lying, something which must be made clear to every community you reach as you travel along your proposed pipeline corridor across our province, “consulting” with First Nations and other communities along the way.
In looking ahead to 2011, I see a very troubled environmental scene. This is because of one thing mainly: with our governments money talks and big time money talks big time. This will reflect itself in several ways and places.
In order to understand this, I think, it must be remembered that corporations don’t give a rat’s ass about the environment. They would pollute all water, destroy wildlife, and desecrate the environment generally. Every tiny bit of environmental restraint has been and always will be imposed by government and it will be resisted and ignored by the corporate world. Many of my generation and others have been brought up to respect government authority and to assume that the world was full of “good corporate citizens.” We, in fact, marveled at the great construction taking place such as Alcan even reversing rivers and creating huge artificial lakes. We developed a public mindset that marveled, uncritically, at development.
There is no question that much of the world will need power; more and more every year. What’s interesting is the lack of an intelligent debate on the subject both at a local and global level.
We have industry and environmentalists fighting but it’s scarcely a fair fight. On the Enbridge proposal to build two pipelines from the Tar Sands to Kitimat and back, industry is out-spending the environmental community 100-1. All the magazines I read carry huge touchy feely ads from huge corporations who tell us in full page ads that they are working just as fast and as hard as environmentalists to make all their creations green.
Much of the problem has been created by an uninformed and ill-informed public which refuses to critically consider anything they’ve been brainwashed into believing or disbelieving. We in the environmental field, me very much included, have decided that certain issues cannot be discussed. These beliefs have become a hardened catechism that brooks no debate.
I have written in the past about nuclear power, for example. This is wrong, we all agree. They explode like atom bombs or melt down. If you live near them or work in them, you’ll be nuked. And there are the calamities at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
In the first case there was a disaster, and at Three Mile Island there was a dangerous near-miss. And these and other scares tell us that if you do nuclear power and don’t keep up safety programs it’s only a matter of time before you have very bad news. Nuclear plants are hugely expensive to maintain and no one has found a safe way of dealing with the waste.
Does this mean that nuclear can never be debated again? Do any of us know what research has been done in recent years? In a moment I’ll tell you why this is an important question.
On the other side we’re told that wind power is the way to go because it’s “green” and that’s good. (“Green” is now a weasel word used by polluters to gloss over their destructive policies). The fact that wind power is hugely expensive and invariably set up with taxpayers money, that it is unreliable and environmentally unsound is not dealt with, for this is the reverse of the uranium argument – nuclear is bad and wind power is good, now let’s have no more arguments. While we’re at it, the future is electric cars and that’s that! Never mind asking where the electricity is coming from and how green that source is – this matter has been decided, period!
Right behind nuclear power comes fossil fuel power. This source of power is evil, so no more discussion please.
I would advise one read the lead argument for the use of coal in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. Here is a pretty strong argument which, in a nutshell says “we’re not going to eliminate coal as a source of power for a very long time to come. Isn’t the object to lower carbon emissions, so if we have no alternative for coal we should work harder at reducing the carbon footprint of this and other fossil fuels? Are there not, coming out of China for God’s sake, new techniques which have dramatically reduced the unhappy consequence of burning coal for power?”
My point is that of a British Columbian who wants to save his province’s environment. If I fight on the mantra that fossil fuels and nuclear are bad for the environment so that their use must be eliminated, doesn’t that lead to the conclusion that hydroelectric power is the only way to go? Of course we have wind power, tidal, and solar power but until they can supply the world’s needs for power, what is left?
Do we not see that by saying that other countries must stop all nasty sources of energy we are inviting them to look to us to supply the power from our rivers?
The demand for energy must go somewhere and rudimentary economics tells us the demand will lead to and find a supply – and we’re it! That demand is going to increase so that every piece of water that moves in BC will become a potential source.
This is the great evil of the Campbell Energy Plan (based largely of private river diversion projects), which has been sold on the basis of our own needs – which is plain barnyard droppings. Not only is it going to outside consumers, it is saying “look, neighbour, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about designing your own sources of energy and don’t bother for a moment with conservation because there’s lots more where that came from!”
I will soon be accused of all the usual sins – Rafe Mair favours nuclear, fossil fuel power, etc. – but I am not. What I’m saying is that our energy policy has us financing, out of taxpayers’ pocket, large international corporations who build their plants to produce power for somewhere else.
How are we financing these corporations? This is not hyperbole at all. We buy their power at 2-3 times what we can sell it for and that is money in the bank that otherwise would have to be borrowed or used out of the company’s assets. British Columbians are, therefore, not giving away power to other jurisdictions so that they needn’t make any sacrifices themselves – we’re financing the operation!
We’re saying to American governors: don’t worry about your environment, don’t fret about how you deal with carbon emissions, don’t give more than a passing thought to conservation – BC rivers and streams are yours for the asking!
It’s one thing to be a good neighbour but don’t you think this is a bit too much!
As another year draws to a close, news outlets the world over are running down their lists of best and worst (fill in the blank) and biggest news stories of 2010. In the latter category, recent issues still fresh in our minds like WikiLeaks, the European debt crisis, the Heathrow fiasco, and the Chilean miners are likely to figure prominently. But make no mistake, 2010 was unquestionably the “Year of the Oil Spill.”
I wasn’t alive in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I can’t begin to imagine what people felt during those 13 days of Cold War terror. But in my lifetime, the blow-out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is the single scariest event we’ve experienced. If you think that’s overstating things, let me explain.
Some would point to the financial crash of 2008, or 9/11, for that matter, as the most traumatic events in our recent history. But in neither case did we face such a fundamental threat to the planet itself, and thus our collective survival upon it. The BP tragedy saw us staring both literall and figuratively into the abyss.
It is thus a testament to our 24-hour news cycle, tabloid-saturated, overworked, short attention spanned society that we have largely already forgotten the sense of sheer powerlessness and intense fear that gripped the world in the months of the Gulf crisis. It is with good cause that Gore Vidal uses the term “the United States of Amnesia.”
I certainly have not forgotten what it was like to hear the daily reports tracing the dramatic upward arc in the scale of the disaster – from 1,000 barrels a day to 100,000 billowing into the Gulf; not ten days but over 3 monthsto stem the flow(of course there is no real end to the damage, much of it hidden beneath the surface by way of illegal, toxic chemical dispersants)…The exasperation of seeing, for a time at least, no way out of the whole sordid mess. Various increasingly far-fetched solutions – such as the much-parodied golf ball “junk shot” – left us wondering, “Is this really the best they can come up with?!”
We steadily came to realize that we could not trust one iota of what the mainstream media, the US government, and, most of all, BP, were telling us. We found ourselves sifting through youtube videos and purported “experts” on the fringes of the blogosphere, just to cobble together our own sense of what was really happening. Your yoga instructor or coworker were as likely to know the truth as was Katie Couric. Maybe this thin could never be stopped…Would it flow into the Gulf Stream, spreading its deathly red-black ooze all the way to Europe’s shores, destroying the whole Atlantic Ocean in the process?
All the while, a slew of breathtaking images poured forth –
the oil-soaked sea birds, the multi-coloured slicks, captured from helicopters by the likes of National Geographic, that spread for hundreds of miles over the horizon.And the live web-cam producing the single most iconic image of the year: that spewing underwater geyser – a constant, undeniable visual reminder of the havoc being wrought before our very eyes.
On it gushed, as ecosystems and livelihoods were lain waste. Economic damages ranged from $20 Billion and way up from there. The world’s best experts, one of its largest corporations, and its mightiest government all seemed powerless to stop it (while the CEO of BP produced a string of appalling soundbites that would have been comical if they didn’t highlight such a tragic disconnect with the widespread suffering his company was causing). These gut-punching images brought us face to face – in a way we hadn’t perhaps experienced since the Exxon Valdez, 21 years earlier – with the dirty business upon which we’ve all become so dependant.
But it wasn’t just the BP catastrophe that made 2010 the year of the oil spill. Far from it.
Enbridge – the pipeline company currently proposing to pump over half a million barrels a day of Tar Sands bitumen across the heartland of BC, into supertankers on our North and Central Coast – had three major spills of its own, in Michigan, Illinois, and New York State. The massive explosion of a tanker terminal in Dailan, China, produced some of the most graphic images – of any nature – ever recorded. The Boston Globe’s website carried a jarring reel snapped by a Greenpeace photographer that made the Gulf shots seem like Bob Ross canvases by comparison.
The Gulf itself played host to a second rig explosion – lost in the shuffle o the BP fiasco. A collision between an oil tanker and heavy bulk carrier i the Malacca Straight, off the coast of Singapore, caused a leak of 15,00 barrels of crude oil. In September, disaster was narrowly averted when tanker carrying 9 million litres of diesel fuel ran aground in the Canadian arctic.
Incidents in Mexico, the Middle East, and elsewhere exposed other vulnerabilities for fossil fuel supply lines – namely, crime and terrorism Thieves attempting to siphon off oil were blamed for the explosion of a Mexican pipeline that took 28 lives, while a Kurdish separatist grou claimed responsibility for the bombing of two pipelines in Turkey – on carrying natural gas, the other oil.
Meanwhile, various authorities and citizens in Tennessee were still dealing this year with the clean-up and lingering environmental effects o the disastrous bursting of a toxic coal ash tailing pond in Tennessee – a catastrophe 50 times bigger than the ExxonValdez oil spill – that occurred at the tail end of 2008. In October, 2010, Hungary experienced a similar tragedy when a sludge reservoir at a metals plant burst, spilling som 35 million cubic metres of toxic waste on the town of Akja…And we end this year with a fresh round of alarms rung over leaking tailing ponds and the impacts of the Tar Sands on water, human and ecological health, and climate change.
And those are just the big ones. A cursory study of the business of oil, gas, and coal exploitation and use reveals a litany of small-scale – bu nevertheless environmentally significant – pipeline leaks, tailing pond malfunctions, and myriad problems with the extraction, refining transportation, and burning of fossil fuels. They’re all just standar externalities – part of the cost of doing business, born by the planet, whil corporations reap record profits.
Many people – and pretty much every mainstream media outlet in the world – have failed to connect the dots, thus missing the lesson to be
learned from these very visible disasters in 2010. They see them as isolated incidents, rather than part of a larger systemic problem.
The truth is, none of these disasters is an “accident” – rather they are manifestations of an until now largely theoretical concept known as “Peak Oil.” They bring us face-to-face with the real-world implications of this phenomenon. This is what happens when you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for fossil fuel energy, which Barack Obama himself aptly referred to as “dirty, dwindling, and dangerous.”
Offshore wells like the Deepwater Horizon are being drilled at greater depths today, as easier sources dry up, presenting far greater operational and environmental risks.
The Alberta Tar Sands and their Venezuelan Orinoco counterpart are among the dirtiest and most capital and resource-intensive oil (or bitumen, rather) sources in the world.
Natural gas fracking is a relatively new and enormously damaging process, with severe impacts on our aquifers we’ve barely begun to grasp while we plough forward with new projects.
So long as we remain dependent on fossil fuels (which looks at this point to be a long time – as long as we can, that is), there will be ever-increasing BP blow-outs, pipeline leaks, and tanker crashes. Despite the assurances of the likes of Enrbridge that we have nothing to worry about with their new proposed projects, we have now seen irrefutable evidence, in gory, high-definition detail, of the inability of human beings to eliminate the risks that attend these operations.
My wish for the New Year is that these powerful images remain indelibly burned in our consciousness. I, for one, will continue to draw upon them in my work – not to score cheap emotional points, but to ensure they serve their purpose, namely, helping us to make better decision regarding our exploitation and use (and hopefully lack thereof) of fossil fuels going forward.
One of the highlights of my 2010 was spending several weeks amid BC’ Great Bear Rainforest, traveling the very coastline Enbridge wishes to se plied by the world’s largest oil tankers. Having witnessed and documente firsthand the rugged terrain, navigational hazards, and extreme weathe along that stretch of coast – one of the most perilous on the planet – the mere contention that the company could guarantee the safety of thes shipments, or their ability to clean them up should they occur is, simpl put, so preposterous as to be insulting.
So it is heartening to see the lessons of the Exxon Valdez, BP blow-out and pipeline leaks being deployed in the battle to stop Enrbridge in BC With the recent passing of a federal motion(albeit non-binding, at this stage) for a North Coast tanker ban that would effectively kill that project were it made into legislation, and a growing coalition of First Nations, conservationists, and citizens standing together against the project, it appears we may be learning something after all.
So here’s hoping that 2011 is the year of conservation, clean energy solutions, and beginning to seriously confront our dangerous addiction to fossil fuels. Clearly, that’s naively idealistic – but we’ll always have February through December to be cynical about the future.
Re: Oil tanker ban plays into hands of U.S. foundations, Column, Dec 18
Vivian
Krause’s article poses an interesting conspiracy theory. However, she
neglects the key fact that governments since Liberal Prime Minister
Pierre Trudeau 40 years ago have maintained the policy of banning oil
tankers from B.C.’s inside straits and channels around Haida Gwaii. The
Harper Conservative government wants to change that.
Oil supertankers today are far bigger than in the ’70s, while weather events are becoming more extreme and unpredictable.
The
Exxon Valdez and Gulf of Mexico oil spill disasters prove there is no
guarantee against human error or equipment failure. We invite an
eventual disaster if we allow hundreds of oil tankers a year to ply
those dangerous northern waters. Should a major oil spill happen, and
inevitably it would, there would be no going back. B.C.’s coastal
environment, lives, and jobs would be changed forever — for the worse.
Oilsands giant Suncor has been fined $200,000 for dumping material harmful to fish into a northern Alberta river.
Suncor Energy Inc. was fined Tuesday after pleading guilty to charges under the federal Fisheries Act.
Environment Canada says the fine was for the release of effluent in
2008 from sediment ponds built as part of Suncor operations near the
Steepbank River north of Fort McMurray.
The material in the water was clay and other natural materials and
did not include oilsands or tailings pond effluent, Environment Canada
spokesman Mike Bell said Wednesday.
“It was total suspended solids — matter suspended in water,” Bell
said. “It is deleterious to fish because it interrupts their respiration
and can impact habitat as well.”
To many British Columbians, “Super, Natural British Columbia” was a reassuring slogan. At least it tacitly recognized the incredible beauty and the astounding ecological diversity of BC – one of the most biologically diverse regions on the planet. Implicit in this marketing slogan was the promise that BC’s remarkable scenery and richness would be acknowledged as an invaluable and irreplaceable public asset.
So the shift in marketing to “The Best Place On Earth” should have been noted with foreboding, primarily because the expression is too vague to mean anything in particular. Is it “The Best Place On Earth” to gamble? To ship illegal immigrants? To get rich by unregulated speculation? To export raw logs? To operate polluting mines? To drill for methane and gas? To build pipelines? To open new tanker routes for shipping oil to Asia?
The emphasis during the last decade in British Columbia has shifted away from “Super, Natural” toward industrialization. The change has never been official, never publicly declared or explicitly decided by plebiscite or election. But governance of the province has abetted this shift with the relaxation of regulations, with the weakening of oversight, and with environmental assessments becoming little more than ritualistic exercises invariably favouring industrial development over conservation and precautionary measures. The shift has been gradual and pervasive. But not so subtle for the few British Columbians who have noted the signs. Many more, however, are now aware of the loosened rules, the auctioned resources, the changed landscapes, and the exploited places in which everything natural seems to be for sale.
Hundreds of deformed fish found in rivers running through the Alberta
oil sands have been collected and documented by an industry-led
monitoring body, The Globe and Mail has learned, but the findings were
not shared with the public or key decision makers in government.
That body, the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP), has been
criticized in scientific quarters as secretive and is under the scrutiny
of three reviews. Former environment minister Jim Prentice ordered one
of those reviews after being shown photos this fall of a few malformed
fish, and it was delivered Thursday to Environment Canada.
It is thus a testament to our 24-hour news cycle, tabloid-saturated, overworked, short attention spanned society that we have largely already forgotten the sense of sheer powerlessness and intense fear that gripped the world in the months of the Gulf crisis. It is with good cause that Gore Vidal uses the term “the United States of Amnesia.”
All the while, a slew of breathtaking images poured forth –
The Gulf itself played host to a 
And those are just the big ones. A cursory study of the business of oil, gas, and coal exploitation and use reveals a litany of small-scale – bu nevertheless environmentally significant – pipeline leaks, tailing pond malfunctions, and myriad problems with the extraction, refining transportation, and burning of fossil fuels. They’re all just standar externalities – part of the cost of doing business, born by the planet, whil corporations reap record profits.
One of the highlights of my 2010 was spending several weeks amid BC’ Great Bear Rainforest, traveling the very coastline Enbridge wishes to se plied by the world’s largest oil tankers. Having witnessed and