And with good reason.

Earlier today, I outlined why in a new report for the CCPA which looks at the rapidly expanding usage of fracking in two regions of the province where the gas industry is steadily increasing its efforts to extract natural gas from deeply buried shale rock formations.

The report – Fracking Up Our Water, Hydro Power and Climate: BC’s Reckless Pursuit of Shale Gas – concludes that when all is said and done the gas produced from such operations is the natural gas equivalent of the oil produced from Alberta’s tar sands. The parallels between the two are downright spooky, and even spookier when you consider that a goodly amount of natural gas currently produced in BC is headed to Alberta to . . . facilitate the extraction of raw bitumen from the tar sands.

Both the shale gas fracking indusry and the tar sands oil industry are big consumers of water, big consumers of energy and big emitters of greenhouse gases. And they will be even more so in the years ahead. I was lucky to gain an inkling for what that may mean during a field-trip last year, which took me into the heart of one of the emerging fracking zones in BC’s south Peace region. Fortunately, I had award-winning photographer, Garth Lenz along for the ride. He captured some amazing images of all the ways our public water and hydro resources are being placed at risk as the fracking industry expands. Later, the CCPA’s Terra Poirier worked with the images to create a nifty slideshow which you can access on-line here. You can also check out more of Garth’s images on his website – which also includes portfolios of his photographs in Alberta’s tar sands and over the Athabasca river delta.

Like I said earlier, and as Garth’s work vividly portrays, the parallels between BC’s shale gas industry and Alberta’s tar sands oil industry are many. But the big three of water use, energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions clearly stick out. When you look at those three, the need to enact tough new policies and regulations to deal with BC’s natural gas sector is obvious.

In fracking, immense amounts of water – up to 600 Olympic swimming pools’ worth at some BC fracking operations – are pumped underground along with unknown chemicals and sand to break open cracks or fractures in the shale rock, fractures which allow the trapped gas to be released. That water use is very loosely regulated in BC, leading to all kinds of potential environmental abuses.

The power that the rapidly expanding shale gas industry in BC is projected to need, could, according to BC Hydro, amount to the equivalent of 2 and possibly 3 times the power that would be produced at the proposed Site C dam, on the Peace River, not far from where the pictures in the above-mentioned slideshow were taken.

Lastly, there’s all the additional greenhouse gases associated with shale gas production in BC – emission increases that will undercut any ability for BC to meet its legislatively mandated greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.

That’s why I argue in today’s Province newspaper that it’s time to put a cap on annual gas production in the province before our shared water and hydro resources and our climate are totally fracked.

For all those who saw the segment on the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations – either when it aired on October 6 or, more likely, after the fact as the segment was posted and viewed on various websites – the verbal utterances of the show’s co-host, businessman and entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary, were jaw dropping in their insensitivity.

Not the least being the following, directed at Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges, in response to his characterization of the objectives of the thousands of people who had, by then, taken to the streets in protests in New York City and Washington DC, where Hedges was among those to speak to the throngs:

“Listen, don’t take this the wrong way,” O’Leary said to Hedges, “but you sound like a left-wing nutbar. If you want to shut down every corporation, every bank, where are you going to get a job? Where are you going to work? Where’s the economy going to go?”

Later when Hedges likened O’Leary’s offensive prattle to that more becoming of a Fox News host and said he usually avoided shows where “character assassination” was the order of the day, O’Leary suggested they then turn to the issues. At which point Hedges said words to the effect that it was O’Leary who had got things off to a bad start by calling him a “nutcase” and O’Leary took it upon himself to hurl yet more verbal abuse.

“I didn’t call you a nutcase, I called you a nutbar.”

LaPointe’s dissection of the episode and his conclusion that it breached the CBC’s journalistic standards is well worth reading, and highlights for those who may have had the pleasure of seeing him on the occasional guest spot on the At Issue panel on CBC’s The National, just what a bright light he is. In part, here’s what he said:

There is room at the inn for a range of views, but there is no room for name-calling a guest. At the very least, suggesting Hedges was a “nutbar” undermined what was likely a more interesting discussion. At worst, it permitted The Lang & O’Leary Exchange to be criticized as no different than the all-heat, no-light discussion shows that diminish discourse, far from the ambitions of a flagship business program on a public broadcaster. O’Leary might have been genuinely curious about Hedges’ views, but his opening salvo only fed contempt, which breached policy. When O’Leary asked Hedges “don’t take this the wrong way,” it came across as disingenuous and begged the question: Is there a “right way” to take being called a nutbar?

Correctly and quickly, CBC News concluded it was unacceptable for O’Leary to do what he did. Its private apology to Hedges was a responsible gesture, as was its discussion with O’Leary about the inappropriateness of the name-calling. What was unclear was why the program would stop there and not acknowledge this also to the audience. Only the guest received the benefit of the private apology, from the programmer and not the principal himself. When CBC News acknowledges error, I believe that closure is better achieved and accountability better demonstrated by communicating that to the audience and not simply to the correspondents. In this instance it would help fulfill the spirit of CBC Journalistic Standards and Practices, a substantial policy which in principle embraces the public element of its implementation.

The CBC, the Lang & O’Leary Exchange, and LaPointe’s offices received hundreds of letters of complaint, including this one from me.

October 11, 2011.

Dear Mr. LaPointe,

As a former journalist and a long-time CBC TV viewer, I am troubled at the manner in which Chris Hedges, a guest on the Lang & O’Leary Exchange, was treated when he appeared on the show on October 6.

While being entertaining and provocative helps the CBC and other broadcasters to build and maintain their audience share, a line is crossed when it comes at the expense of being accurate, respectful and fair. This is especially true when the show in question is a news-oriented public affairs show and is aired by a public broadcaster.

The manner in which Kevin O’Leary treated Hedges was disgraceful from the get-go. At one point in just four short sentences Mr. O’Leary managed to not only inaccurately characterize Mr. Hedges’ position but also to be patently unfair and disrespectful while doing so.

“Listen,” O’Leary began, “don’t take this the wrong way but you sound like a left-wing nut bar. If you want to shut down every corporation, every bank, where are you going to get a job? Where are you going to work? Where’s the economy going to go?”

There is a huge gulf between advocating for the “shut down” of everything – as Mr. O’Leary unfairly and inaccurately suggested Mr. Hedges did – and what Mr. Hedges actually supported, which was increased regulation of the runaway US banking industry. Mr. O’Leary knows this, or ought to. Yet he chose to engage in trash talk, more befitting of Fox News than a public broadcaster. As a taxpayer who wants Canada’s public broadcaster to grow and thrive, this troubles me.

Mr. O’Leary is also bright enough to know that there is no gulf whatsoever between the derogatory words nutcase and nutbar; that choosing to use one or the other in characterizing a guest on a show that he co-hosts is disrespectful; and that deliberately and immediately hurling the verbal abuse back in a matter of seconds (“I did not call you a nutcase. I called you a nutbar.”) is a further and completely gratuitous provocation.

Despite Mr. O’Leary’s invective, Mr. Hedges maintained his composure and actually spoke to relevant issues – for example, banking industry regulation, which Mr. O’Leary chose to go nowhere near, personal attacks being his preferred mode of action, much like that regular guest on CBC’s hockey telecasts, Don Cherry.

What I’m trying to understand and hope you can help me with is this: CBC obviously knows the modus operandi of Mr. O’Leary. It knows or ought to know that his unprofessional antics result in violations of its own standards. So if the standards are breached – and I believe they are in this case – are CBC viewers to expect that edginess trumps accuracy, fairness and respect?

I sincerely hope that this is not the case.

Respectfully,

Ben Parfitt.

PS: I wrote this letter to you a couple of days ago, but had yet to send it. In the interim, I have read your fine distillation (October 13) of the show itself and your response to concerns received by many CBC viewers about Mr. O’Leary’s conduct. It is my hope that a public apology is issued to not only Mr. Hedges but to CBC viewers who deserve to hear that Mr. O’Leary’s behavior on October 6 was a clear breach of CBC’s standards.

The northern coastal Nation has been active in logging for some time, and with its opening of its own trade office in Beijing two years ago has stepped up its direct efforts to boost trade with one of the world’s most rapidly industrializing economies.

Two years after opening that office, as noted in a recent story in the Globe and Mail, one of the largest province-wide aboriginal organizations in the province – the First Nations Summit – along with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada has unveiled an initiative aimed at emulating the Lax Kw’alaams example.

“The First Nations-China Desk is a portal to help native communities gain access to markets for their forestry and fishery products – at a time when China is emerging as a key customer. In May, for the first time, China surpassed the United States in the value of shipments for B.C. lumber exports,” the Globe’s Justine Hunter reported.

For members of an isolated First Nation operating in a region of the province that has witnessed a sharp drop in sawmill and pulp mill jobs in the past decade, an economic development strategy that puts band members to work logging trees and exporting raw logs has some immediate economic benefits that for obvious reasons are attractive.

But more broadly, is aggressive marketing of the lowest value of all forest products – raw logs – along with growing shipments of low-value commodity lumber products to China a wise move for BC’s forest industry and one that provincial government policies ought to promote?

While it is true that the shocking contraction in the US housing market, now entering its fifth year, has been a harsh and stubbornly persistent reality for the province’s forest industry, forest-dependent communities and the provincial government alike, is simply attempting to replace one market with another a wise move? Or is it possibly setting us up for even deeper economic pain down the road?

I believe the answer to the first question is no and the answer to the second question is yes, and I outline why in a new report released today by the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives – Making the Case for a Carbon Focus and Green Jobs in BC’s Forest Industry. You can check it out here. Or, if you want to, you can read a stripped down version of some of what is in the report in an op-ed of mine published in today’s Vancouver Sun.

What we desperately need and so richly deserve in this province is a new forest policy roadmap. With tens of thousands of forest industry jobs lost over the past decade; with a forest resource showing signs of great stress due to the effects of stupendous insect attacks, increasingly frequent and severe forest fires, unsustainable logging rates and ill-considered reforestation choices; and now, with the with great uncertainties of climate change staring us in the face, we need policies that restore health to our forests and that reinvigorate our decimated forest sector.

The way to do that lies in seriously ratcheting up carefully targeted, publicly funded reforestation efforts and in accepting that now and for the foreseeable future we must extract greater social and economic value from a smaller pool of natural resources. In other words, for each tree we cut we need to produce more jobs and, more to the point, more sustainable jobs. Our government’s and forest industry’s overemphasis on diversifying markets for BC’s forest products outside of the United States and their preoccupation with penetrating the Chinese market in particular is not the way to go if most of what we end up shipping are low-value products that lack distinction on the global stage.

Now, more than ever, we need to embrace product diversification, not market diversification. Happily, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that BC has considerable room to improve in that regard.

Right now, the province manages to generate one full-time forest industry job for very 1,189 telephone pole’s worth of trees logged. Ontario manages to generate one full-time forest industry job with close to one sixth the wood, while Quebec manages the same feat with about one quarter of the wood volume used in BC.

The irony is that despite having what is still one of the richest forest resources in North America BC is embarrassingly low down the value chain. It’s time to move up several rungs on that chain – before it’s too late.

Yet in the intervening months – months in which local residents watched as an unprecedented rush on water resources got underway – there was virtually no word from the provincial government about what its intentions were with regards to Talisman or a number of other energy companies with similar plans to divert large quantities of water from the region’s rivers, lakes and streams.

Late last week Hudson’s Hope’s residents got their answer. The provincial government had granted Talisman the rights to pull up to 10,000 cubic metres of water per day from the reservoir, each and every day for the next 20 years. It is widely expected that in days or weeks the province will issue a similar approval to a second Calgary-based company, Canbriam Energy Inc., effectively doubling the water to be piped below farmer’s fields at a rate of eight Olympic swimming pools per day.

All of which was approved in the absence of any meaningful public consultation – something that local residents and the general public alike were promised two months ago when Energy and Mines Minister, Rich Coleman, rose during Question Period to say that there would be “an extensive process of public consultation, discussion and negotiations with First Nations before anything would go ahead.”

This does not bode well as far as responsible management of public water resources in the public’s interest is concerned. Especially when the government knows just how great and growing the demand for water is in the province’s booming unconventional gas industry. Currently, half or more of all gas wells drilled in British Columbia are hydraulically fractured or fracked, a process in which water is pressure-pumped deep underground (along with undisclosed chemicals and copious quantities of sand) to crack tightly-bound shale rock, which allows the gas trapped in the rock to be released.

At some well pads in northern BC, as much as 600 Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water is used in fracking operations. As of now, there are 17 long-term water licence applications submitted by natural gas companies to the provincial government in just the Horn River Basin alone, the northernmost of BC’s two shale gas zones currently in development. The applications, within the traditional territory of the Fort Nelson First Nation, would result in gas companies gaining access to nearly 20 million cubic metres of freshwater per year in a region of the province where knowledge of water resources is limited and where industry and government are scrambling to get baseline information in place.

Coleman’s promise, in response to a question from Independent MLA Bob Simpson, seemed to indicate that the government understood that how water licences were reviewed and issued was an important public policy issue. But the government’s subsequent actions suggest otherwise.

Simpson, representing Cariboo North, and fellow Independent Vicki Huntington representing Delta South, had days earlier called on the government to appoint a special committee of the legislature to examine all aspects of BC’s emerging unconventional gas industry, in large measure because of the industry’s escalating water demands.

During the same Question Period in which Coleman promised fulsome consultation, Simpson called Talisman’s and Canbriam’s proposed water withdrawals at Williston Reservoir “the worst-kept secret” in BC’s South Peace region. “The question from that region is: what is the public consultation process for a water withdrawal of that magnitude? Both First Nations and the general public would like to know, from whatever minister that’s appropriate for this: what is the process that the public can be engaged in, in the diversion and pipeline withdrawal of 7.3 billion litres per annum from the Williston reservoir behind the W.A.C. Bennett dam?”

Despite Coleman’s subsequent promise that the public would be provided ample opportunity to scrutinize and comment on the proposed water withdrawals, nothing in the intervening eight weeks suggests anything close to that happened; in fact, quite the opposite. The government kept a tight lid on its review of the Talisman application and did its best to avoid exposing public servants involved in the licensing decision itself or the politicians to whom they reported to media scrutiny.

In response to questions about Talisman’s application, communications staff with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO), told CBC Radio reporter Betsy Trumpener two weeks ago that a decision on the licence would be made by the end of July.

A few days later, on Monday July 25, the decision to grant the licence was apparently made by Robert Piccini, section head of water authorizations for FLNRO in Prince George. However, subsequent calls to Piccini’s office indicate that he was out of the office that week. No statement announcing the licensing decision was released.

On Wednesday The Province newspaper published an op-ed I wrote noting that the decision was imminent and questioning what had become of Coleman’s promise for a robust consultative process. Later that day, I checked a “water licence query” database maintained by FLNRO that indicated that Talisman’s licence had indeed been granted two days earlier. (The database lists only rudimentary information such as licence numbers, licence holders and issuance dates, but no concrete details on the licences themselves.) Subsequent calls to water stewardship officials in the Prince George office were not returned.

The following day a water stewardship official at Victoria headquarters provided me an electronic copy of the full, conditional Talisman water licence. the ministry has yet to post the document on line at a registry where members of the public can view the actual licence documents.

Meanwhile, throughout the last week of July Trumpener and the CBC tried repeatedly to reach Coleman or Steve Thomson, Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. Emails sent simultaneously to both Trumpener and Coleman’s office by communications staff with FLNRO indicated that Thomson’s office would be the one to respond to media questions. In other words, the minister who had promised public consultation would not be available, but the minister in charge of water licensing decisions apparently would be.

Except even that proved not to be the case. Late on the afternoon of July 28, Trumpener received an email from Lisa Barrett, communications officer in Thomson’s ministry. The email’s first sentence was not encouraging. “Minister Thomson is unavailable for comment.”

The email – also sent to The Tyee, but not issued as a news release – went on to say that in Thomson’s absence the following could be “attributed” to Thomson’s ministry. The email noted that Talisman had been granted a licence allowing it to draw “a maximum of 10,000 cubic metres of water per day, to a maximum of 3,650,000 cubic metres of water per year until December 31, 2031.”

Because Talisman’s application fell below 10 million cubic metres per year, its application had not been subject to a formal environmental assessment, the statement further said. One reading of this particular detail was that in the view of Thomson’s ministry public consultation is really only required for those projects reviewed under a formal environmental assessment process, which of course is not true, the government’s extensive public meetings to assess public input on the proposed modernization of BC’s Water Act being being but one example.

Another point raised in Barrett’s email was that prior to Talisman’s licence being approved “a technical assessment of water availability was done, as well as several meetings with First Nations in March and April and correspondence with stakeholders and local and federal governments.”

In the absence of any mention in the email of Coleman’s promise, the inference is that in the opinion of Thomson’s ministry “correspondence with stakeholders” – whatever form such correspondence took – is adequate to fulfill the government’s commitment to extensive public consultation.

All of which does not sit well with Simpson, who remains concerned that nobody is taking responsibility for the bigger picture issues. By any measure the water coming into play in BC’s unconventional gas industry is considerable and will only climb as natural gas prices recover. Prices are currently low due to a glut of available gas in North America and no outlet, at present, for domestic producers to ship to overseas markets where prices are higher (ergo the push by BC natural gas producers to build a liquid natural gas processing facility and terminal near Kitimat, which would allow them to ship gas which has been super-cooled to liquid form on tankers bound for China and elsewhere).

“This water is a public resource that has economic, social and ecological values beyond using it for the controversial ‘fracking’ process,” Simpson said in a statement late last week after word of the government’s approval of Talisman’s water licence application came to light. “The government had an obligation to fulfill the Minister’s promise to conduct “extensive” consultation before allowing this significant amount of water to be mixed with unknown toxins and then permanently removed from the Earth’s water cycle.”

Simpson went on to say that the Minister of Environment should halt the issuance of new water permits and licenses in much of northeastern BC where fracking operations are concentrated until baseline data is collected and the public and First Nations are extensively consulted.  Simpson also suggested it is time for BC to consider putting a price on water for use in fracking operations in order to motivate the industry to reduce its demand on BC’s fresh water ecosystems.

But Simpson and Huntington, who have both elicited strong support for their calls for reforms from numerous enironmental organizations, First Nations and landowner groups, appear to be facing an uphill battle. When it comes to managing public water resources in the public interest, the government’s actions to date deal the public out, not in.

But scratch the surface just a little and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake’s recent claim that “from this point forward, every government building in our province will be carbon neutral.”

Since it is almost impossible for government buildings – cash-strapped schools and hospitals among them – to not be net consumers of energy and therefore net greenhouse gas emitters, purchasing carbon credits to allegedly counteract those emissions is essential to the province’s claim to carbon neutrality and its self-anointed status as continental environmental leader.

By law, the provincial government requires institutions to buy those credits from just one entity – the Pacific Carbon Trust or PCT, a Crown corporation set up for specifically that purpose. This gives the PCT a monopoly position for a segment of the carbon market, which at present is largely a voluntary market dominated by private sector carbon sellers and buyers.

Bob Simpson, Independent MLA for Cariboo North, says not only is the PCT’s monopoly position hurting cash-strapped school districts and health authorities that are forced to pay the PCT as much as four times more money than they would otherwise pay for the same credits from a private credit marketer, but the legitimacy of a good number of the credits that the PCT has bought and sold may be of questionable merit as well.

An examination of the PCT’s “2010 Carbon Neutral Government Portfolio” published in June of this year reveals that fully 55% of the 729,782 tonnes worth of carbon offsets that it has purchased and marketed to meet the provincial government’s “carbon neutral” goal for 2010, came from just one project known as Darkwoods, a chunk of privately owned forestland purchased three years ago by the Nature Conservancy of Canada when, Simpson says, the PCT “was nothing more than a just fledgling organization.”

Simpson also says that the project does not appear to meet the PCT’s own standards for qualifying carbon offset projects. That standard is known as additionality. Part of the additionality test is that any project supported by the PCT must face “economic, investment or technological barriers to implementation that are overcome or partially overcome by the money from the sale of offsets.”

“The Trust must prove that without its money this purchase would not have happened and therefore the credits would not have been generated. I don’t buy that in this case,” Simpson says. “And we’re talking money from kids and patients to make this happen?”

As a matter of policy, PCT does not disclose what it pays for its carbon credit purchases, says its managing director of business development, David Moffat. However, enough facts are known about the Darkwoods project to give a good idea. The sale of the credits was announced June 8 in a jointly issued press release that included the NCC and PCT.

The press release notes that the NCC as “Canada’s leading private land conservation organization”, had just completed the largest ever forest carbon project to date in North America, with the successful marketing of 700,000 tonnes of carbon credits. The sale of the credits not only raised the bar for conservation in Canada, the press release claims, but it “contributes in excess of $4 million for NCC’s conservation work.”

Based on the number of credits sold and the selling price, the sale worked out to roughly $5.70 a tonne. While PCT will not disclose what it paid for the 403,112 tonnes of credits it purchased from the NCC, the price that PCT’s captive public sector “clients” are required to pay is known. That price is $25 a tonne, or more than four times the average price generated from the Darkwoods carbon credit sale, meaning that public sector entities including school districts and health authorities will fork out $10.07 million to help meet the government’s carbon neutrality goals.

And that’s just the beginning of where things get murky from a public policy perspective. Just how much additional carbon has actually been stored at Darkwoods since the NCC stepped in to purchase them in 2008?

Well, it turns out the answer to that question is, at best, hypothetical. Here’s why.

Darkwoods encompasses 55,000 hectares of land between the communities of Creston, Salmo and Nelson in B.C.’s Kootenay region. The lands also border a lengthy strip of Kootenay Lake’s shoreline, and cut deep into mountainous terrain. For decades prior to the NCC purchase, the lands were logged under the ownership of a German aristocrat, Duke Carl Herzog von Wurtemberg.

In July 2008, the NCC announced that it had purchased the extensive parcel of private forestland – a rarity in B.C. where 94 per cent of land is publicly owned – for $125 million (a price that included projected future management and carrying costs of $385,000 per year, of which $150,000 was property taxes.)

On its website, the NCC hailed the purchase as “the largest single private land” conservation acquisition in Canadian history. The group benefited enormously from a $25 million contribution toward the purchase from the federal government.

In announcing the purchase, the NCC highlighted the climatic benefits of a conserved Darkwoods estate saying its forests represented “an immense carbon sink” of some two million tonnes – an amount “equal to the annual carbon footprint of nearly half a million Canadians.” It also clearly stated that its vision for the property was one that could fairly be characterized as “business as usual” for an organization dedicated to protecting biological diversity. (This is important because according to PCT standards a successful offset project must demonstrate an “incremental benefit” in terms of carbon storage and cannot be “the outcome of business as usual”.)

“Darkwoods,” NCC president and CEO John Louds said at the time, is “part of a greater vision that will set new standards for conservation success.”

What the NCC didn’t say then was that it wished to turn that green asset into greenbacks, and plenty of them. By monetizing the carbon storage capacity of Darkwoods the NCC could in effect have its very own green ATM generating cash to help it pay for Darkwoods and other conservation acquisitions.

And here’s where things get murkier, because while Darkwoods’ trees had pulled a great deal of carbon out of the atmosphere and stored it in their trunks, branches and needles, the incremental or additional carbon stored would be relatively small based on a “business as usual” conservation approach.

“Harnessing the power of the carbon market,” became NCC’s goal and that of its advisors Ecosystem Restoration Associates or ERA, a Vancouver-based company described as a “pioneer” in the development of forest-based carbon offsets, and 3GreenTree Ecosystem Services, a Vancouver company billed as a “full service forest ecosystem asset development, acquisition and management company.”

To boost the future market worth of Darkwoods, a strategy was hatched that cast into the future and honed in on a hypothetical situation in which an entity other than NCC succeeded in buying Darkwoods. This hypothetical buyer then embarked on a massive, unsustainable logging operation as well as subdividing tracts of land for resale to wealthy individuals wanting their own little slice of lakeside paradise; in general a company intent on making off like bandits to the delight of its short-sighted, profit-driven shareholders. The scenario is outlined in a voluminous “project description” posted on the Verified Carbon Standard website. VCS self describes itself as founded in 2005 “by business and environmental leaders”. Its stated mission is to “ensure that carbon credits bought by businesses and consumers can be trusted and have real environmental benefits.”

This hypothetical situation then became the “baseline” against which NCC’s light-handed approach would be judged. A hypothetical logging rate was assigned the phantom company and set at 300,000 cubic metres per year – a cubic metre equalling one telephone pole’s worth of wood. By comparison, the NCC said it would engage in only low levels of logging to a maximum of 10,000 cubic metres per year for “conservation and management” purposes. The difference between the hypothetical baseline rate and the NCC’s proposed rate then served as the basis for calculating additional carbon storage. This scenario was ultimately given a green thumbs up by, among others, Scientific Certification Systems, a third-party “validator” of the Darkwoods carbon project.

The company’s senior vice-president, Robert Hrubes, hailed the “unique methodology” developed by the carbon project team and said he believed it “will benefit the entire carbon industry.”

The hypothetical rate, however, represented an astonishing increase over what had actually occurred on the same lands over decades. Searches of a provincial government database on logging rates reveal that the company managing Darkwoods – Pluto Darkwoods Corp. – logged nearly 396,500 cubic metres of timber between 2001 and 2007, the last full year of operations before NCC took over. That worked out to an average of just 56,631 cubic metres per year, less than one fifth of the hypothetical rate used to generate those $4 million worth of carbon credits.

Tom Swann, the NCC’s associate regional vice president for British Columbia, maintains that Pluto’s logging record was not indicative of most private forestland owners and that the company’s logging rates were “well below what they could have been doing if they were a commercial logging company.” That was because the aristocratic German owner placed a higher premium on conserving forests and therefore chose to log less than others might.

Be that as it may, Simpson remains concerned that a conservation organization buying lands with the express purpose of conserving them should on the basis of a hypothetical scenario involving liquidation logging by someone else then be able to lay claim to millions of dollars worth of credits, many of which are paid for by tax dollars directed to public institutions, which are then clawed back.

And he is not alone in worrying about the precedents this sets. NDP environment critic Rob Fleming, says the government’s carbon neutral claim has achieved very little in terms of actual greenhouse gas emissions reductions, which are “a tiny part of the overall total.” Furthermore, Fleming says, the requirement to buy credits from the PCT applies only to government buildings, which represent less than one per cent of the total greenhouse gas emissions sources in the province, leaving unaddressed the emissions from big industrial emitters.

Meanwhile, the same document outlining the hypothetical industrial logging rate that generated all of the carbon credits generated at Darkwoods and subsequently purchased by the PCT notes that for decades running the NCC hopes to market large numbers of additional credits – 400,704 credits, on average, per year over just the next 10 years alone, which based on the NCC’s most recent carbon credit sale would be worth another $2.28 million per year.

Whether the PCT will buy more such credits in future years to meet the government’s future “carbon neutral” goals remains to be seen.

My special thanks to Tyee editor David Beers or whoever it was who chose to run the image of Yosemite Sam to accompany the piece (Yosemite is one of my favourite Bugs Bunny Show characters).

Anyway, I reprint here an exchange of comments in response to the article. They offer some insights into how at least one (and possibly two) anonymous industry insiders viewed my commentary, which focused on Independent MLA Bob Simpson’s recent Private Members’ statement in the provincial legislature and Liberal MLA Pat Pimm’s embarrassing response to it. (Simpson’s statement outlined why he and fellow Independent MLA, Vicki Huntington, had called on Premier Christy Clark to appoint a special legislative committee to study BC’s rapidly expanding unconventional gas industry and provincial policies relating to it.)

The exchange is as follows.

Posted by “Cool Hand”

The Emotional Factor

Quote:

Parfitt: policies in jurisdictions such as Quebec and New York State are being driven by mounting public fears

Some differences:

1. Unlike BC, AB, Texas, and Oklahoma, fer instance, which have been actively engaged in oil/gas drilling/production for over 60 years and have a Ministry/Department bureacracy dealing with these matters, QC and NY haven’t and don’t;

2. The shale gas/tight gas plays in QC and NY are relatively shallow compared to the much deeper plays in BC/AB and the southern U.S.;

3. The ng [natural gas] shale plays in QC and NY are in close proximity to a relatively large population base;

Ergo, some folk become emotionally (versus rationally) driven.

In that same vein, SK has a well-developed uranium mining industry and ON has a well-developed nuclear power industry. Imagine if uranium mining or nuclear power was proposed for BC?

The same emotional reaction exhibited in QC and NY would also occur out here with no provincial experience in those fields.

Posted by Ben Parfitt

Re: The emotional factor

“Cool Hand”, you’re obviously well informed on natural gas and energy industry issues. Do you work in the industry? I ask because you, too, hide behind a pseudonym.

To respond briefly to each of your three points:

1) BC, Alberta, Texas and Oklahoma do indeed have established gas industries, while Quebec and New York State may not. (Although it was actually in up-State New York in 1821 that the very first commercialized natural gas was first developed from a very shallow shale formation.) Readers of your comments may, however, draw the incorrect impression that BC and others have “60 years” experience with hydraulically fracturing or fracking unconventional gas-bearing formations in the manner presently employed. They do not. Combining numerous wells on a single well pad, drilling each well deep into the earth and then out in long horizontal reaches, and then pumping massive amounts of water down each well in “slickwater” fracking operations where chemical friction reducers are introduced to ease the water’s passage, was only perfected in the past decade and has only been in play in BC for a few years. At today’s biggest multi-well pads in BC, 600 Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water is pressure-pumped underground. No government agency that I am aware of has so much as a plan to quantify what the cumulative impacts on human health and safety and the environment are of such operations.

2) You suggest that the deeper depths at which shale formations are found in BC make our unconventional gas resources safer to develop. To date, according to the BC Oil and Gas Commission, there have been 18 reported “communications” between fracked wells in the province, meaning that unforeseen contamination corridors between wells spaced up to 750 metres apart have occurred. This is one reason why noted experts on fracking, such as Cornell University’s Anthony Ingraffea, refer to the below ground events induced by fracking as “non-linear chaos”.

3) Natural gas-bearing shale formations in Quebec and New York State are indeed much closer to large human populations than are BC’s. That will be of little comfort, however, to the residents of Pouce Coupe who had to flee their homes in 2009 following a well failure at an Encana well that was traced to a build-up of frack sand in the well piping and that resulted in highly toxic sour gas flowing into the night air. Should human health and safety and the environment count for less when there are fewer people around?

I agree that the fracking debate is an emotional one. It seems sensible then to have a hard look at it in a non-partisan way by our elected leaders or by an independent commission in a forum in which witnesses are called, a wide-range of professional opinion is sought, minutes are kept, the public has access and a report laying out policy recommendations is produced. You share this view, correct?

Posted by “reallife”

The emotional factor

Not sure about Cool Hands’ expertise but I have been involved with resource development as a service provider and a regulator for many years and continue to make my living in the industry.

1. Yes, the frac jobs have increased greatly in size and use much more fluid, propant and force than early jobs but it is still the same technology.

2. Communication between wells at depth is not a concern for safety of people or the environment. However, it could present commercial issues that may need addressing by the industry.

3. The release of gas at Pouce Coupe is only partially attributal to fraccing. Yes, apparently sand cut out a nipple and shame on Encana for not being on top of this – they should not have left a well untended while it is flowing back treatment fluids. A worse incident occurred many years ago near the Blueberry Indian Reserve where an oil well was being tested after fraccing. Sand cut out a section of pipe and very sour gas was released leading to evacuation of the reserve. This is not a condemnation of fraccing but does point to a need for industry to better staff its field operations.

4. Fraccing is not an issue that calls for a special investigation. However, the business of regulating the entire industry could benefit from a new look. It seems to me that best practices are only employed after an incident happens or an initial application is refused. I believe it would be better if the industry employed best practices at all times. Too many decisions are left to people in the field who are working for a firm that has submitted the lowest bid to the oil company. This too frequently leads to problems caused by cost cutting and lax efforts by the unmotivated field workers. Oil company executives should be held personally responsible for problems in the field. It has long been held that the safety levels in oil operations are inversely proportional to the distance from Calgary (executives do not like to travel a long ways to operations.)



For seven minutes Simpson, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Cariboo North and one of two Independent MLAs, spoke about why he and fellow Independent Vicki Huntington (Delta South), had called on Premier Christy Clark to appoint a special committee of the legislature to investigate B.C.’s ballooning unconventional gas production and its public policy implications.

It was an impressive performance, given the slightly more than 7 minutes that Simpson had to marshal his arguments.  You can watch it all here on a video clip. Look in particular for Simpson’s characterization of B.C.’s rapidly expanding unconventional gas production as the Wild West of resource extraction, and how that comment may have unhinged his Liberal colleague from across the carpeted divide. But I digress.

Private Members’ statements, are an opportunity made available to all MLAs and take place on Monday mornings when the legislature is in session (a rare event the past few years). Statements fall outside of normal government business and are meant to be non-partisan in nature. But just as there’s the Wild West of resource extraction there’s the Wild West of B.C. politics.

During his statement, Simpson touched on a wide array of controversies swirling around B.C.’s accelerating unconventional gas drilling as reasons why he and Huntington (along with a number of environmental organizations, First Nations, local citizens’ groups in the energy-rich northeast corner of the province and others including the B.C. office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) believed that convening a special legislative committee made good public policy sense:

• Issues of public health and safety, in particular the health and safety risks associated with uncontrolled sour gas releases.
• The escalating volumes of water, sand and toxins being pressure-pumped underground during hydraulic fracturing or fracking operations, a stimulation technique now used to encourage maximum gas flows at about half of all natural gas wells drilled in British Columbia.
• Government subsidization of natural gas industry activities at a time of low gas prices.
• Who, if anyone, is tracking the cumulative impacts on land and water resources as B.C.’s unconventional gas resources are developed.
• Reports from government funded bodies showing that gas produced from unconventional shale formations will result in so many greenhouse gas emissions that the province will be incapable of meeting its legislatively mandated GHG emissions reduction targets and, in fact, court increases in said emissions of 10% or more.

“British Columbia has a long history of natural resource exploitation. The original founding of this province was fur, forests and fish. The neck of the woods I come from, was the gold rush. And if history dictates anything to us it states that we need to be much more careful in how we use our natural resources,” Simpson said.

It was then that he suggested that the escalating development of B.C.’s unconventional gas resources might properly be called the new Wild West of resource exploitation, a phrase, he was at pains to point out that he had not coined, but that he and other fellow MLAs on the legislative finance committee had heard applied to the Peace region’s natural gas plays on two separate occasions when the committee traveled there.

And then it was time for the Wild West’s Liberal MLA, Pat Pimm,  to present his, er, reasoned response. Here’s some of what the MLA  for Peace River North had to say. Believe me when I say it was not the first or last of his embarrassing utterances.

“Why has the member opposite all of a sudden decided to take an interest in worrying about the great folks of northeastern B.C.? I mean, I’m happy you are, but, uh, I think that’s why we have 85 MLAs. And I think I can look after my needs in that neighbourhood quite well. I’d also like to ask the member opposite if he’s going to be seeking election in northeastern B.C. next time around, or if he would be content to try and represent his own constituents in the Cariboo South, or Cariboo North, rather. And, ah, last time I checked they certainly could use a little help in that area. And I think he should be dedicating his time to their concerns instead of grandstanding in this House about the northeastern B.C.”

It was then that Deputy Speaker Dawn Black reminded Pimm that his get out of Dodge rhetoric was inappropriate for the moment at hand and directed the MLA to address his comments to her, something that Pimm, flashing a saccharine smile, undertook to do but evidently had occasional trouble pulling off.

All and all, it was a shocking performance by one of Sheriff Clark’s junior deputies. All the more so because as anyone familiar with unconventional gas developments knows, policies in  jurisdictions such as Quebec and New York State are being driven by mounting public fears over the environmental, health and safety and economic damage caused by fracking operations in other Canadian provinces and U.S. states. In both Quebec and New York, temporary moratoriums on unconventional gas developments were imposed, allowing time for provincial and state officials to investigate the links between fracking operations and potentially deadly gas leaks, explosions, contaminated drinking water wells and groundwater sources, and polluted streams and rivers.

As Simpson said, we can either develop natural resource policies here in B.C. in response to rising protests or our elected leaders can actually be proactive, examine the issues and shape or reshape provincial policies accordingly.

If Sheriff Clark has any sense, she’ll lasso Simpson and Huntington and deputize them to be on a special task force to launch a preliminary investigation into the issues raised by the two Independent MLAs. In the meantime, she might want to send her junior deputy, Mr. Pimm, on a long horse ride out to the outer extremities of the range in his beloved northeast B.C.

Along the way, Pimm could  water his steed at any one of the numerous pits dug into the earth and each filled with 10 or more Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water. The pits were excavated by natural gas companies and then filled with water withdrawn from rivers, lakes and streams; water now destined for pressure-pumping deep underground at fracking operations. A word of warning, though. Avoid the nearby wastewater pits.  Too much salt, sand and chemicals there for a horse’s liking.

For the last few years, a coalition of environmental  organizations, First Nations and others have stepped up efforts to publicize their opposition to the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, which if built would carry oil processed from Alberta’s tar sands to Kitimat for subsequent shipment to China and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim .

But comparatively little has been said about the actual and steadily increasing oil shipments out of the Port of Vancouver, which could further increase sixfold should Kinder Morgan’s plans for a dramatic expansion in tanker traffic get the green light from the National Energy Board among others.

You’d like to think, as Anderson notes, that the prospect of such a surge in oil shipments combined with other related issues such as the dredging of parts of the Burrard Inlet seabed to make way for tankers that could carry four times more oil than was on-board the ill-fated Exxon Valdez, would have environmental leaders tripping all over each other in a rush to get standing before the NEB, which will chair hearings into Kinder Morgan’s proposals.

But nary a one has applied to the NEB for intervenor status. Nor, as Anderson notes, has our provincial government. In fact, our government actually made a point of sending a letter to the NEB saying that it would not be a player in the proceedings.

I wonder why? Is it possible that the province wishes to avoid being seen as supporting such an obviously contentious proposal? Or is it that it wishes to avoid having the spotlight potentially shone on some of the more obviously embarrassing deficiencies in its alleged “environmental protection” plans?

Before considering the adequacy or lack thereof of B.C.’s capacity to respond to oil spills and, more importantly, to work proactively to reduce the prospects of such, consider this:

B.C.’s coastline, with its numerous inlets and islands, is 27,000 kilometres long, more than half the Earth’s equatorial circumference. Over this sprawling area, as well as the entire interior of the province, the provincial government deployed the equivalent of just over 13 full-time staff in 2010 to respond to oil and “dangerous goods” spills. In 2008-2009, we had nearly 4,000 such reported spills in the province, but likely many more that went unreported and undetected given the lack of environmental enforcement and protection staff.

Just across the border, Washington’s spill prevention and preparedness program had 77.7 full-time-equivalent staff in 2010 and its departmental budget allocation for the year was  $29.1 million, compared to B.C.’s paltry allocation of $2.5 million. With a hiring freeze in B.C.’s emaciated environmental departments and plans to reduce already gutted staff further through attrition, our government is flirting with an environmental disaster for which it may one sorry day have to claim some responsibility.

An oil spill in the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca would do incredible damage to the environment in the Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island, just as an oil spill on the mid coast from a proposed export facility there would wreak ecological havoc in that place that environmentalists have done so much to cement in people’s minds as our very own ecotopia – the Great Bear Rainforest.

But the damage to the provincial economy caused by a massive oil release in B.C.’s southern waters would be an order of magnitude greater than on the mid coast, for the simple reason that the southern corner of the province is where most British Columbians live, work and play and where countless business are located, many of them tied to the marine economy.

For that reason, we must insist that our elected leaders are held accountable for ensuring that the highest level of environmental safeguards are in place before any substantial increases in oil shipments out of the Port of Vancouver occur, as well as ensuring the safety and integrity of the inland pipeline route that soon may bring a whole bunch more of Alberta’s tar sands oil our way – an issue that the BC Tapwater Alliance correctly foresaw five years ago might soon become an environmental issue of note.

How right they were.

Meaning that Independent MLAs Bob Simpson and Vicki Huntington will have their work cut out for them trying to maintain media focus and public attention on their welcome non-partisan call for the appointment of a special legislative committee to thoroughly investigate unconventional natural gas developments in the province.

It’s a call that 21 organizations and prominent British Columbians – including First Nations, leading environmental organizations, local citizens groups in the natural gas-rich northeast corner of the province, and individual town councilors – all support, and one that we at the BC Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have also endorsed.

For years, the policies of provincial NDP and Liberal administrations alike have been squarely focused on increased exploitation of BC’s natural gas resources, which are primarily situated in the Peace River and Northern Rockies regions of the province – an extensive, but remote part of BC that is larger than the state of Nebraska. This fact may help to explain why it has fallen to Simpson and Huntington to propose that the time has arrived for a sober assessment of the industry’s activities and the role that provincial policies play in shaping them.

It was under the NDP that the one-stop-shop for regulatory energy industry approvals – the Oil and Gas Commission – was created in an effort to eliminate the alleged red tape of multiple agencies reviewing applications by natural gas companies to drill gas wells, build roads and and situate pipelines. Dan Miller, under whose tenure as Energy and Mines Minister the OGC was created, would go on to do lobbying work for mining and energy company clients, including Enbridge Inc., the company hoping to build an oil pipeline from Edmonton to Kitimat.

It was largely under the Liberals, but also under the NDP, that various breaks on energy industry royalty payments and other credits were offered as inducements to industry expansion. With billions of dollars having flowed into provincial coffers over the past decade – much of it in the form of one-time sales of subsurface rights or royalty payments – and billions more potentially at play, neither Liberal or NDP MLAs have been particularly vocal about questioning a) whether or not the public should subsidize industry activities, or b) what the cumulative effects of rapidly accelerating industry developments mean for BC meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets or the environment more generally.

This reluctance takes on added significance in light of the rapidly accelerating use of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” operations to boost natural gas production – operations that only a few short years ago Liberal and NDP MLAs alike could have been excused for not knowing a thing about. Now fracking is assisting in the production of nearly half of all the natural gas produced in the province, led by companies such as EnCana Corporation, whose former  president and CEO Gwyn Morgan went on to become a special advisor to Christy Clark. It is the rapidly emerging usage of this “stimulation” method – which involves pumping copious amounts of water under extremely high pressure deep underground to crack or fracture “unconventional” formations such as tightly bound shale rock, thereby releasing their gas – that lies at the heart of Simpson’s and Huntington’s initiative.

The rapid deployment of hydraulic fracturing at gas pads where numerous wells are located close together – and where each well is drilled deep into the earth and then drilled out horizontally for 2 kilometres or more – is a relatively new phenomenon dating back about a decade and with its origins in the state of Texas. As I wrote last year in a report released by the Program on Water Issues at the Munk School of Global Affairs, natural gas companies in northeast BC – including EnCana, Apache Canada and Talisman Energy – all increasingly employ fracking technology to boost gas production, in some cases setting industry records for water usage in the process with hundreds of Olympic swimming pools worth of water pressure-pumped underground at some sites.

The Oil and Gas Commission has approved hundreds of temporary water use permits allowing energy companies to divert hundreds of millions of gallons of water from streams, rivers and lakes in the Peace and Northern Rockies regions. Massive water diversion proposals involving longer-term water tenures known as water licences have also been submitted by energy companies to water stewardship officials with the new Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. Some of those proposals include diversions out of Williston Reservoir and have resulted in behind-door negotiations between gas companies and BC Hydro over what price the companies should pay for water from the province’s largest reservoir, which is the source of much of BC’s  hydroelectric power.

To date, both the Oil and Gas Commission and the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations have failed to consult in any kind of meaningful way with members of the public generally or First Nations specifically about the hundreds of short-term water use permits granted to natural gas companies or the dozens of long-term water licences sought by the industry.

“Public policies are driving the rapid expansion of BC’s unconventional gas sector, particularly in shale formations in the Peace Region,” Huntington, Independent MLA for Delta South, said in endorsing the call for the appointment of the special legislative committee to review the development of the province’s unconventional gas reserves. “It is incumbent on the government to ensure it fully understands the cumulative impacts associated with developing this resource.”

Both Huntington and Simpson expressed concerns that with prices for natural gas currently low that the provincial government may offer even more inducements to the gas industry in order to artificially prop up developments. This year alone, the province expects to hand $172-million to the gas sector in royalty rebates and infrastructure credits. In return, it expects to collect the equivalent of about $1 million per day – or $365 million – this year in net royalty payments from the industry. It’s not clear how much of the subsidies or the royalties will be attributed to natural gas produced from wells that were hydraulically fractured, although about one half of the gas currently produced involves use of the controversial stimulation technique that has been linked to methane contamination of household tap water, dangerous and potentially lethal leaks of gas laced with hydrogen sulphide and known as sour gas, and badly polluted waterways.

“The rapid expansion of this industry, and the potential for it to continue to expand with the aid of incremental government assistance, has led to serious public policy questions being raised by more and more individuals and organizations,” Simpson, Independent MLA for Cariboo North, said.

Huntington and Simpson cite a range of public concerns as influencing their decision to call for the appointment of a special committee of the legislature including:

• Economists asking if we are developing gas resources at the wrong time in the market cycle.
• Peace River residents in the Northern Health Authority calling for a public inquiry into the health and safety implications of oil and gas development.
• The amount of fresh water used in hydraulic fracturing operations and the disposal of the large amounts of toxic wastewater subsequently produced.
• The significant additional carbon emissions associated with the industry.
• Failure to address First Nations rights and title issues.
• Other jurisdictions such as Quebec and New York State taking a more precautionary approach to unconventional gas developments (both effectively have moratoriums in place pending further study).

In years past the BC Government has appointed special committees of the legislature to address high-profile issues. Notably in 2005, the government appointed committees to examine both the province’s aquaculture industry and prospects for electoral reform. Such committees are bi-partisan in make-up, have powers to call witnesses, can request or commission reports, and can travel to different regions of the province to hold meetings and assess public opinion. Their proceedings are also recorded and become part of the public record.

With a growing number of people – particularly those residents living in the heart of the province’s gas-development zone – saying its time to take a sober look at what escalated unconventional gas developments may mean for public health and safety, the environment and economy alike, appointing such a committee makes imminent sense.

But for many people in the province, prolonged periods of hotter and drier weather are often far from welcome.

That’s because when things get hot and dry they burn. And in many regions of British Columbia that may mean potentially deadly outcomes for residents in numerous communities as wildlfires sweep through forests on their borders.

With that in mind, fire ecologist Robert Gray has stepped forward with a timely critique of the provincial government’s wholly inadequate approach to reducing the significant risks that forest fires pose to numerous communities in BC – a critique that ought to be required reading for all provincial MLAs.

In 2003, one such fire destroyed 334 homes and numerous businesses near Kelowna and forced the evacuation of 45,000 people. In 2009, in events eerily similar to those in 2003, tens of thousands of British Columbians near Lillooet and Kelowna were forced to flee their homes as out-of-control wildfires moved with frightening speed toward their communities. All told, the efforts made to fight the hundreds of blazes to burn in each of those two fire seasons would cost taxpayers nearly $800 million.

What concerns Gray is that in the years since 2003 – and with a brutal reminder yet again in 2009 of the havoc that wildfires can cause – the BC government has seemingly yet to grasp the significance of making the substantive changes to forest policy and forest management in the province that would reduce the likelihood of catastrophic, community-threatening wildfires in future years.

Gray has spent a lot of time thinking about such things. In 2003, he was one of the co-authors of Firestorm 2003, a report by a panel of fire experts working under the direction of former Manitoba premier, Gary Filmon, who had been called upon by then BC premier Gordon Campbell to assess what happened in that year’s fire season and to make recommendations on a new way forward.

In a nutshell, what Gray and others recommended was the need to be proactive in managing perimeter forests. In such forests, there should be one key objective: to reduce forest fire risk through the systematic clearing or thinning of trees and brush. Doing so, the Filmon committee concluded, would reduce fuel loads, meaning that when – not if – future fires burned, they burned far less intensely and with far less risks to people and properties than would otherwise be the case.

Doing such work is not cheap, costing between $1,000 and $20,000 a hectare, although most areas can be treated in the $6,000-per-hectare range.

In response to the work of Gray and others, the province began putting money into treatment efforts, with an initial grant to the Union of BC Municipalities of $50 million, and more recently a further grant of $25 million. But as the province’s independent Forest Practices Board noted last year, provincial funding had by the beginning of 2010 resulted in the treatment of just 35,000 hectares of perimeter forestland, while the total area of such land in need of fuel reduction treatments was 1.7 million hectares, of which 685,000 hectares was considered “high risk” and in most immediate need of treatment.

At such rates of treatment, it will take well over a century to complete initial fuel-reduction efforts in forests where high fuel loads are a clear and present danger to communities, to say nothing of the fact that treatment efforts must be ongoing to be effective.

Making matters of even greater concern is that there is a real risk that we will see more forest fires in BC in future years, not less.

Higher average temperatures and site-specific periods of prolonged drier weather are widely predicted outcomes of climate change. In 1993, meteorologists and climatologists with the Canadian Forest Service warned that this could result in much longer forest fire seasons. Should atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations double by the year 2040, the average Canadian “fire season” would increase by 30 days – a prediction subsequently revised upward to 40 days and 50 days in the case of BC.

Another fact not well appreciated by British Columbians is that while the costs of fighting wildfires is formidable – averaging $150 million per year over the past 10 years for a total expenditure of $1.5 billion – the true costs of future fires could be far, far higher. It all depends where the fires burn and the damage that they cause. A good case in point is in California, a jurisdiction that like BC appears to be more and more susceptible to catastrophic wildfires due to the effects of climate change.

In 2003, three forest fires in California known as the Old, Grand Prix and Padua wildfire complex forced the evacuation of 100,000 residents and completely destroyed 787 properties. The total estimated costs to date in dealing with those fires, is $1.2 billion. Only 5 per cent of that price tag actually applied to fire suppression. Much of it went, instead, to addressing damaged community water supplies and to flood control efforts.

When the true costs of fires are considered spending money up-front to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes makes sound public policy sense. The question is, where does the money come from to do the job?

To start, the province might finally get serious about increasing the amount of money it charges forest companies logging trees on publicly owned lands. Right now, logging companies gain access to droves of publicly owned timber for a pittance – the equivalent of 25 cents for each telephone pole’s worth of wood.

But beyond that, more substantive policy changes are needed. Somehow we must find a sustainable means of getting those communities that are most at risk of wildfires to play a more central role in reducing fuel loads in the forests surrounding them, forests that they understand better than most.

Gray believes that the central policy change required is to shift our thinking about how certain public forests are managed and to whose benefit. Right now, just about every hectare of public forestland in the province outside of parks is deemed to be there for one purpose: to grow trees for the forest industry. Yet in the forests surrounding communities, optimum tree growth may run counter to the interests of protecting the public from the very real dangers of wildfires.

“If the provincial government placed all Crown land surrounding communities under local government jurisdiction and enacted laws and policies that de-emphasized timber production and prioritized fuel hazard reduction, then local government could both protect local homes and businesses and cover most of the costs of doing so by using the wood fibre to kick-start local bio-energy industries including district and home heating systems, as well as the manufacture of exportable bio-energy products such as pellets, biochar and biodiesel” Gray said in an opinion piece published in The Vancouver Sun. “This, in turn, would make local communities less reliant on provincial subsidies.”

Quite clearly, given changing conditions on the broader forest landscape, we’ll probably also have to get a lot more serious about other things too, such as prescribed or deliberately set fires to reduce the prospect of more catastrophic and uncontrollable wildfires.

Eight years after the devastating Kelowna fires, with another forest fire season upon us and a provincial government mired in debt and clearly adrift in forest policy, Gray’s ideas are worth considering.

Inventories – the counting and assessment of plant life in our forests – is essential if we are to have any chance of managing the full range of values in our forests. If we don’t have sufficient information on what we have, we can’t hope to manage it in the public interest.

British Columbia’s publicly owned forests are an incredible asset, worthy of increased inventory efforts.

As Anthony and I note our Province op-ed:

If you had a stock inventory narrowly valued at $250 billion, would you want to know how quickly it is depleted and replenished?

That, by the way, is the estimated value of the available, commercially desirable trees in B.C.’s publicly owned forests. If you consider the additional values our forests have as carbon storehouses, the protector of water resources, the life-support system for numerous plants and animals and the source of tens of thousands of jobs, you could perhaps quadruple that value.

Evidently not, as outlined by two scientists in a sobering critique of provincial government forest policy (or the lack thereof) published in today’s Vancouver Sun.

Penned by Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest science at the University of British Columbia, and Kathy Lewis, a professor of ecosystem science and management at the University of Northern British Columbia, the critique notes that with the scrapping of the Forest Practices Code and its replacement with the Forest and Range Practices Act in 2002, British Columbia moved into a “results-based” world where “professional reliance” was supposed to safeguard the public interest.

The top-down, highly prescriptive Code, was replaced with an open-ended, virtually impossible to enforce set of objectives with the responsibility for meeting such objectives transferred from industry and government to individual forest professionals “purportedly with tough penalties for non-compliance.”

Nine years later, however, Simard and Lewis note that the about-face in government forest policy has failed to deliver innovative and effective forest stewardship on public or Crown lands in the province, which constitute 94 per cent of B.C.’s entire land base – a land base shared with numerous small, geographically dispersed First Nations’ communities that bear an even greater burden than most as a result of the deepening forest health crisis.

A “vast sea of clear-cuts” has spread across much of the landscape, making our forests far less able to store and moderate water flows or store carbon.

“Salvage” logging of dead pine trees attacked by mountain pine beetles has wiped out droves of younger, living trees with dire ecological and economic consequences, particularly forests that were subject to “small scale salvage” operations. Under such operations, the provincial government induced companies to do additional logging by waiving their reforestation obligations. It is now estimated that well in excess of 200,000 hectares and probably in excess of 300,000 hectares of small scale salvage lands are inadequately reforested following logging, with the number likely growing.

An over-reliance on planting single-species of trees – particularly lodgepole pine – on logged sites appears to have set the stage for a future forest health crisis as disturbingly large numbers of the planted trees die as a result of insect attacks and disease outbreaks.

And, last but not least, the area of insufficiently reforested land in the province continues to expand thanks to sharp declines in tree-planting budgets, forest fires and insect attacks.

“Results-based management and professional reliance,” Simard and Lewis note, “are only effective when backed up by strong and efficient forest laws, policies and operating rules. In British Columbia, forest laws and practices are deregulated and weak. Therefore, we are failing to meet our own stewardship goals.”

Not surprising given their commitment to sound science underpinning how we manage public forests on the public’s behalf, Simard and Lewis lament the pronounced budgetary and staff cuts in the provincial Forest Service. The cuts have resulted in a precipitous drop-off in funding for critically important forest research and inventory efforts both inside and outside government – cuts that have seriously compromised efforts to restore our future forests to a state of health, especially in light of climate change.

They end their critique by urging readers to demand that the provincial government enact new forest policies and laws “that will ultimately increase the resilience of B.C.’s environment and economy.”

It’s a call to action we’d be wise to heed.

Last week, the Alaska Highway News reported that during her first installment of promised town hall meetings Premier Christy Clark pledged to a gathering in Fort St. John that her government would investigate the threats to public health and safety associated with sour gas developments.

Calls for an investigation have been growing, spearheaded by a local citizens group – the Peace Environment Safety Trustees Society – who are alarmed at the growing number of sour gas leaks, related deaths and injuries of gas industry workers, and a range of health care complaints by area residents.

If Clark’s commitment to the society (PESTS) is acted on, it promises to highlight a contradiction inherent in her stated policy objectives. On the one hand, Clark has staked out ground as a staunch defender of children and families, which presumably includes their general health and well-being. On the other, she has made it abundantly clear that she sees increased revenues from an expanded oil and gas industry as a cornerstone of her government’s fiscal plans.

In many areas that oil and gas companies currently operate in in B.C.’s Peace River region, sour gas is a frightening fact of life. As Vancouver Sun columnist Stephen Hume noted recently, hydrogen sulphide, the toxin in sour gas, is absolutely deadly. People exposed to gas leaks where the toxin is present at levels of just 250 parts per million have been known to die in minutes. In some northeast B.C. gas wells, hydrogen sulphide concentrations reach as high as 160,000 parts per million.

In a detailed brief submitted to the provincial government on behalf of PESTS and written by environmental lawyers Calvin Sandborn and Tim Thielmann, it is noted that over the past three decades, at least 34 workers in B.C. and Alberta have been killed in sour-gas related incidents and hundreds more disabled. Massive, uncontrolled releases of sour gas have occurred in B.C., but to date have not been near communities with large numbers of residents. The same could not be said for residents living near Gao Qiao, in Chonquing, China where, in 2003, a massive sour gas leak there forced the evacuation of 64,000 residents and killed 243 people in what became a 25-square-kilometre death zone.

In 2009, an uncontrolled release of sour gas near the Peace River community of Pouce Coupe spewed 30,000 cubic metres of toxic gas into the night air. The estimated eight-hour gas leak forced the evacuation of 18 residents, killed a horse and resulted in at least one emergency hospitalization. The leak occurred at an EnCana Corporation well site. Former EnCana chairman, Gwyn Morgan, is a senior advisor to Clark.

Clark did not mention such events during her town hall meeting in Fort St. John. Instead, she spent much of her time extolling the virtues of expanded oil and gas developments in northeastern B.C., noting at one point that revenues generated by the region’s energy industry provided roughly $1.3 billion of wealth to provincial coffers each year. An amount, she said, that allowed health care professionals primarily in the south of the province to perform 96,000 knee replacement surgeries.

“One of the things that happens when you’re down South is you find a lot of people who are against everything. They’re against hunting, forestry, mining, oil and gas, you name it,” Clark said. “People need to remember that if you’re against everything, eventually you don’t have the money left to be able to pay for the things that are important to us.

“I want to make sure that everybody in British Columbia understands what an important role the North plays in making sure that we’re able to have all the things we want as a province.”

Clark was later reminded, however, that there is a dark side to gas developments in the region and that it is people living in the region that are most directly affected.

“We appreciate the economic activity the [oil and gas] industry has brought to the area, but there has never been an assessment of the cumulative health impacts it’s having on people and the environment,” PESTS member, Lois Hill, said.

Letters of support for the PESTS-led initiative have flowed in from numerous quarters, including from local health officials, elected members of the regional district government, First Nations and even from Blair Lekstrom, local  MLA and Minister for Transportation and Infrastructure.

In response to Hill’s comments, provincial Health Minister Mike de Jong, who attended the town hall meeting, replied that a panel of experts drawn from the University of Northern B.C. and elsewhere should be called upon to study the impacts of sour gas developments on air, water and soil in the Peace River region. De Jong used words like legitimate, fair and reasonable to characterize the broadening call for an examination into the human health threats posed by sour gas.

What remains to be answered is just what form the Clark government’s commitment will take, and whether or not the natural gas industry’s controversial and rapidly expanding use of hydraulic fracturing or fracking operations will form part of any future inquiry.

Fracking involves the pressure-pumping of immense amounts of water, fine-grained sand and chemicals below the earth’s surface to stimulate gas production. The controversial technique was found to be a contributing factor to the Pouce Coupe gas leak and has been linked to at least 18 incidents involving unwanted “communications” between gas wells – meaning that fracking activities at one gas well have caused contamination corridors to open to another well that may be 700 metres or more away. Such unwanted events have resulted in corrosive frack sand from one well being blown hundreds of metres into another, sand that in high enough concentrations can lead to well failures and uncontrolled gas leaks.

PESTS and legal experts acting on its behalf want a formal inquiry called under the provincial Health Act – a process that would result in pubic meetings and the calling of witnesses. It remains to be seen, however, whether Clark’s commitment to the health and well-being of children and families will result in such a process or something less formal and less likely to shine as bright a spotlight on a dark side of the gas industry.

“While minister Lekstrom has assured us that money has been set aside for a permanent air-monitoring program, that program is going to be led by the energy industry regulator, the Oil and Gas Commission,” Hill says. “We have not been informed officially of any plans for a broader inquiry. Air monitoring is just one component of what we’re looking for. What we want is an empowered Ministry of Health, to set standards, monitor compliance and investigate health impacts associated with this industry. And before that happens, we think we need a full, public inquiry.”

Even those of us who know comparatively little about our forests understand that some astonishing things have occurred in recent years that raise questions about the health of one of our most important publicly owned resources.

Two of the more evident of those things are the epic mountain pine beetle attack that has left in its wake one billion or so dead older pine trees, and a spate of terrifically intense fires that have burned forests across huge swaths of land.

But as it turns out, these are far from the only events that are giving rise to a burgeoning reforestation crisis in the province. While the beetle attack and fires have predictably captured  media attention, another event with significant implications for the health of future forests has quietly unfolded.

That event is the widespread die-off of large numbers of planted trees in allegedly healthy tree plantations – our so-called future forests.

How significant a problem this is and what it means for the province’s already considerable reforestation challenge is not yet fully understood. But as the results of early field studies come in, it appears that the province has a lot more forestland in need of rehabilitating than previously thought.

Last year, Forests Minister Pat Bell claimed that the amount of forestland that was “not sufficiently restocked” and in need of replanting was in the vicinity of 240,000 hectares or 600 Stanley Parks in size. But this week Anthony Britneff, a former public servant who was in his 40th year of service in Bell’s ministry when he retired last year, will vigorously challenge his former boss’s number at the Kelowna conference, suggesting it may be off by a factor of 10 or more.

Part of the reason why, has to do with the growing number of once healthy tree plantations that now show significant signs of stress.

In the tree-panting world, areas of logged land that have been replanted are only considered to be successfully rehabilitated when their trees are deemed “free-to-grow”.

Free-to-grow means that the planted trees have reached a height where they can no longer be outcompeted by undesired plants. At this point, it is assumed that the unimpeded trees will simply continue growing until a point decades down the road when they are logged.

A few years ago, however, some forest scientists began to question whether this assumption was correct. They worried that if the provincial ministry of forests relied on such an assumption to guide it in setting logging rates, and the assumption later proved incorrect, sustainable management of publicly owned forests was in doubt.

It turned out they were right to raise the question and that a lot of free-to-grow tree plantations were in trouble. Among those to initially focus on the health of such plantations was Alex Woods, a forest pathologist formerly with Bell’s ministry and now with the new Ministry of Natural Resource Operations.

Woods’ preliminary results, presented to an international gathering of forest disease experts in Valemount last October, indicated that fully one third of free-to-grow plantations in the Okanagan region had fewer than the minimum number of trees needed to meet provincial reforestation requirements. Other areas of the province are being similarly surveyed.

The bad news with such findings is that future forests may deliver far less by way of important natural services (cycling water) and economic benefits (wood for forest industry jobs). The good news is that with proper resources our public servants can continue the critically important fieldwork that may lead to productive changes in how we reforest public lands for maximum public benefit. Whether those resources will continue to be there, however, is a big question. The provincial forest service has lost 1,006 positions – one quarter of its workforce – in less than a decade, and its budget fell by 23% between the 2008/09 and 2010/11 fiscal years.

Woods’ findings come as no surprise to others who have conducted surveys in once seemingly healthy tree plantations. They believe that an underlying problem with the plantations is rooted in the free-to-grow requirement itself. Forest companies are legally required to establish a new crop of trees on lands that they log. That requirement is only met when the trees that are planted reach free-to-grow status. Since the quickest and easiest way to do that is to plant trees that favor open, light environments – which is precisely what recently logged lands are – one tree species has been overwhelmingly favored over all others. That tree is lodgepole pine.

Scientists such as University of British Columbia forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, are among those to suggest that the free-to-grow requirement itself has spurred the over-planting of lodgepole pine (fully 55% of all trees planted in B.C.) and that such over-planting has resulted in pines being placed in large numbers where they shouldn’t be, for example on wetter sites. The homogeneous plantations then see their trees die in large numbers when things like the mountain pine beetle come around.

Add climate change to the mix, and we have a major reforestation challenge on our hands. Not only has climate change contributed to the severity of the mountain pine beetle outbreak, but it has fueled other problems, including blights such as Dothistroma that have wiped out planted pines by the drove over large areas – a phenomenon described by Alex Woods and other public servants.

Dealing with this triple whammy will not be easy. We must build on our proven success in planting trees, but in new and creative ways. Public funds will need to be invested in the hundreds of millions of dollars to plant new generations of trees (a significant increase over current funding levels). But before such trees are planted, far more care will be needed to determine which trees are planted where. Then, once the trees are planted, we’ll need public servants out there on our public lands, systematically tracking what is happening so that our planting plans can be changed as circumstances require.

If we want forests for tomorrow, we’ll have to put forest scientists where they’re needed most — in our forests.

Under the pretext of kicking off “national forestry week”, Bell waxes enthusiastically about how B.C.’s forest industry “is a really exciting place to be right now.” Yes, the minister and MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie says, we’re “maximizing” the value from our forests like never before, “using more and more of each tree.” And we’re renewing our forests, by planting plenty of new trees for future generations.

So let’s get this straight. Ten years ago, B.C.’s forest industry employed 99,000  men and women, nearly half of whom worked in mills making solid wood products, which is where we get the biggest bang for the buck not only from an employment perspective but a climate perspective as well (remember, all solid wood products continue to store carbon for decades and potentially generations to come). A decade later, and we’re down to 52,000 industry jobs – a whopping 47% percent decline. If this is exciting, I’d hate to see what depressing looks like.

Bell, of course, doesn’t stray anywhere near such uncomfortable truths. Instead, he stays focused on his short, scripted video message which, among other things, touts the great job potential associated with churning out more wood pellets in B.C. – pellets that are shipped half way around the world to heat homes and businesses in Europe, and which European countries subsequently claim carbon credit for on the shaky ground that the pellets are “carbon neutral” and displace the burning of dirty coal or other non-renewable fossil fuels. Or Bell alludes to burning more of our forest resources to fire new electrical plants as part of BC Hydro’s “Phase 2″ call for new electricity from so-called “bioenergy” sources.

If the Forests Minister seriously thinks that this represents a potentially significant source of new jobs in the province he ought to give his head a shake. While a new wood pellet plant slated for Burns Lake will create 20 new badly needed full-time jobs, the jobs created will require staggering amounts of wood to be sustained. For each job in the pellet plant approximately 13,250 standard telephone pole’s worth of wood will have to be found. This compares to one job for every 1,000 cubic metres of wood, which more or less has been B.C.’s average over the past couple of decades. An average, by the way, that is far from the envy of the world, with many other countries having consistently outperformed B.C. by generating far more jobs with far less wood.

From a sustainable management perspective, accelerating wood pellet production is not the answer to our problems. It creates relatively few jobs while producing a product that is immediately burned, releasing greenhouse gases into the Earth’s overheating atmosphere. This should not preclude using wood as an energy or heat source. But surely, we ought to embrace job growth strategies centered on making durable, high-value, solid wood products first, with only the fallout or waste from those processes being potentially available for use as heat and power sources. And only then, in a context of a healthy carbon balance in our forests and forest products over time – as both forest industry unions and environmental organizations in the province have advocated. As will come as little surprise, Bell goes nowhere near this, perhaps because to do so would be to confront those ugly job loss figures earlier noted.

And then there’s the small matter of renewing British Columbia’s publicly owned forests.

Here, it’s hard to gauge whether the informed viewer will laugh or cry at Bell’s YouTube performance. “We planted an additional 20 million trees this year through our Forests for Tomorrow program,” Bell enthuses. “We’re looking at new and innovative ways of growing trees faster and making sure that we have a sustainable timber supply for our children and our grandchildren.”

Sinking 20 million new trees into the ground may sound impressive. But as Rob Scagel, a consultant to tree-planting companies and commercial nursery operators puts it, “that’s not even a necktie for a corpse.”

There are many individual nurseries in the province, Scagel says, that could sow 20 million seedlings and have space to spare. Go back in time, Scagell adds, and you will find a wealth of statistical data to show that in the late 1980s and 1990s publicly funded reforestation programs sank five times as many trees into the ground, helping not only to renew public resources but provide much sought after seasonal employment to corps of workers, many of them university students wrestling with escalating tuition fees. And that wasn’t the half of it. Funds were also available in the tens of millions of dollars to brush, thin and prune forests, funds which are nowhere to be seen today.

All of that past investment came well before the most recent and epic pine beetle attack; the massive amount of logging that has occurred in response to that attack; and a rash of severe forest fire seasons that burned across hundreds of thousands of hectares of public forestland.

When all of those things and more are considered, Anthony Britneff a former Ministry of Forests employee with nearly four decades of public service behind him, says the province faces a reforestation challenge of unprecedented proportions.

Instead of sowing seeds for more trees, Bell chooses to sow seeds of misinformation. Our forests and forest industry are both the poorer for it.