The two, climate and profit, are very much related. The gains from doing this are “odious profits” that exist only because of massive costs externalized onto third parties (I’m riffing off the term “odious debt” — that incurred by dictators, usually for military hardware, for which the people are forced to pay even after the dictator has been deposed). Anyone who advocates well-functioning markets, as opposed to unbridled capitalism, should see the logic of ensuring that all costs of production are captured in the market price. The huge negative externality associated with fossil fuels is what prompted Nicholas Stern to call climate change the biggest market failure in history.

How much are we talking here? The pipeline itself is a $5 billion investment so it will have to make back a decent annual return. Enbridge’s estimates for toll structure and throughput imply revenues of just under $900 million per year. Based on financial statements in Enbridge’s 2010 Annual Report, profits from pipeline operations (after-tax earnings plus dividends) averaged 34% of revenues over the past three years. At this rate, profits from NGP would be over $300 million per year. These are not trivial amounts, and they do not include “costs” such as lucrative executive compensation – for example, Patrick Daniel, the CEO of Enbridge, made more than $6 million in 2009, and several other executives had more than $1 million in compensation.

Beyond the pipeline itself, we can also include the gain in profits to oil sands producers from higher market prices in Asia, estimated to average $3.6 billion per year by Wright Mansell, a consulting firm whose report is included in the application. So call it $4 billion in annual profits and you can see why a government with no morals would want to cozy up to the pipeline and start calling it ethical oil.

But at what environmental cost? There is a certainty of oil spills from the pipeline itself and tankers on the BC coast. Enbridge pipelines had 800+ oil spills on its pipelines over the past decade and a bit, and the record of other pipeline companies is no better with 5,600 incidencts in the US alone gong back to 1990.

But I’m more interested in the climate impacts. The Northern Gateway Pipeline would transport 525,000 barrels of diluted bitumen per day. The carbon content of this fuel is translates into annual global emissions of approximately 70 Mt CO2e. In addition, there are emissions associated with extraction of the resource (6.5 Mt CO2e, according to Pembina) and emissions associated with the energy needed to run the pipeline and ship bitumen to Asia. Finally, there are emissions from upgrading and refining bitumen into oil and other petroleum products (8-9 Mt CO2e per year, although this emissions-intensive process would happen in the importing country). All in, annual emissions associated with the pipeline could be in the range of 90-100 Mt CO2 per year, and this is not counting emissions associated with construction (manufacturing and transport of steel pipe, and machinery and equipment on-site).

So what is the damage — the negative externality — from all of that carbon? The most credible recent study estimating a range of values for the “social cost of carbon”, with most estimates in the range of $150-500 per tonne of CO2, but possibly as much as $893 per tonne. To put this in more recognizable terms, BC’s $25 per tonne carbon tax translates into less that six cents per litre. Internalizing the external costs of the pipeline into market prices would require a mix of regulation, carbon pricing and removal of any caps on liability in relation to spills. Indeed, the corporate form in practice limits liability to the initial investments made by owners of stock, which could be exceeded in the form of massive clean-up costs for a catastrophic spill.

Based on the numbers above, a low estimate of 80 Mt of CO2 into the atmosphere per year with external costs of $50 per tonne would imply $4 billion per year in externalized costs. Using a higher estimate of 100 Mt at $200 per tonne, external costs reach $20 billion per year. These numbers assume that bitumen would stay in the ground in the absence of the NGP, which may not be realistic given other options, but the point is that the NGP would facilitate the combustion of large volumes of fossil fuel, and doing so imposes very large costs on third parties from future climate impacts.

Bottom line: the Enbridge pipeline makes odious profits and they must be weighed against the costs of GHG emissions and oil spills. Privatize gains, socialize losses. Which is why the industry and their government make no reference to either the profits to be gained or climate change. While there will be some jobs created along the way, they are very small in number. Governments get a cut, too, through royalties and taxes (though the latter are being phased out for people fortunate enough to be corporations), but these are like the royalties on export of blood diamonds.

So thanks to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, who unintentionally shone a massive spotlight on this project. The Conservatives would have been better off had he just shut up (though I’m figuring his letter came from central command and he was forced to sign his name to it). Let’s follow the money and have a real debate about the impacts of this pipeline from Alberta to China.

• Who are the real ‘radicals’ – those working for a sustainable climate and environment – or those who promote carbon-bombing the atmosphere, making us all guinea pigs in one of history’s most reckless experiments?
• Who are the real hypocrites – those who drive to public meetings because we have not sufficiently invested in realistic lower carbon alternatives, or fossil fuel industry executives who enjoy mild summer days, fresh drinking water, vacations on low-lying ocean islands, or food grown next to expanding deserts – all things that will become scarcer if they continue having their way?
• Who is undermining Canada’s national interests – advocates of responsible inter-generational stewardship and careful development of our resources, or a government turning Canada into an international environmental pariah?
• What’s the more short-sighted job creation strategy – investment in labour-intensive lower-carbon infrastructure, or short-term construction projects to export unprocessed raw materials to foreign economies?

Like the Orwellian oxymoron “ethical oil,” the double standards in political and media discourse constitute a temporary triumph of greed over reason, of vested interest over collective well-being.  A decently human future requires a reversal.

Presumably they would like to return to a more “normal” debate.  You know, one disproportionately influenced by well-heeled corporate-funded market fundamentalist think tanks and pseudo-grassroots “astroturf” industry front groups (see Donald Gutstein’s book, Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy); by tax-deductible corporate lobbying, subsidized to the tune of $100 million a year, according to Democracy Watch; by a public relations industry that now outnumbers under-resourced professional journalists by three or four to one; and by a “majority” Conservative government that was opposed by over 60% of Canadian voters but that avoids democratic accountability and steamrolls its agenda through Parliament as much as it can get away with.

One commentator suggested that Canada may be descending towards becoming an authoritarian petroleum state.  Now is the time for anybody who cares about a democratic and sustainable future to make sure that doesn’t happen.

I’ve been trying to make sense of Canada’s utter intransigence on climate. After all, our Prime Minister has children, too, so what could possibly be going through his head when the science is so clear about our need to act. Perhaps Stephen Harper and the Conservative party are simply climate deniers, who frown on any evidence, no matter what the scientific consensus, that contradicts their worldview of small government and unbridled capitalism. One can also point to the 2011 Crime Bill as another case in point of ideology trumping evidence.

Another factor is that the politics of opposing climate action is just too compelling for a conservative to resist: the oil and gas industry is a fundamental part of Harper’s base, and therefore a key source of political power; plus it is easy to demonize people who want to challenge the status quo in tough economic times, no matter how unsustainable the present course may be.

It is not just about the tar sands of Alberta, either. In BC, the provincial government is narrowly focused on new coal mines and shale gas fracking as the centrepiece of a provincial economic strategy. Since coming to power earlier this year, Premier Christy Clark, also a mother, has shown little interest in pursuing further climate action, leaving BC set to follow in the unfortunate Canadian tradition of reneging on climate commitments. BC cannot meet its legislated targets for GHG reductions by 2020 while pursuing a fossil fuel export strategy.

Coming back to the kids, I think Harper and Clark know very well that climate change is upon us. Reports from the federal government itself, via Environment Canada, pin the blame for freak weather on climate change. The mountain pine beetle infestation has devastated BC’s interior forests, and extreme weather incidents have been widespread. We know climate impacts will continue to get worse, leaving a terrible legacy for our children.

But rather than act, perhaps the Conservatives are making a leap of faith that wealth and technology will spare Canada from the ravages of extreme weather and altered climate patterns. Or at more personal level, wealth and technology will enable their children to maintain a high standard of living.

This is, of course, nonsense. It is like being unconcerned about a plane crash because you are sitting at the back of the plane. And this callous disregard guarantees a massive injustice perpetrated across generations. Failure to act is already condemning millions of people around the world to suffering and death.

But we are rich, so why should we care? Such is the fundamental injustice of climate change: those who have done the most to cause the problem – rich people in rich countries – are not the ones to pay the price. Executives in the oil industry who have gotten rich by externalizing their costs of production are thus in terrific position to seek shelter in fortified compounds, while the poor and innocent, who have not benefitted from fossil fuels, who must live with the consequences.

Climate change embodies injustice: the rich screwing the poor; the old dumping on the young; humans robbing other species. To make it right we need climate justice, and our work at the CCPA has been to develop a vision of what a post-carbon society could look like, and how we get there. But we have to collectively choose that future.

Two other big stories of 2011 may show a glimmer of hope that we have hit bottom, and change is coming. The Occupy movement came out of nowhere to oppose the inequality of savage capitalism. And Big Oil’s push for pipelines to get tar sands crude to market has run into massive opposition in the US, led by red meat states like Nebraska, and in BC, led by a unified wall of First Nations.

We will need new governments, federally and provincially, to spearhead the collective action required for a climate just world, and that will address our ecological deficits with the zeal we have for budget deficits. The wall of denial will come tumbling down in short order, and our Climate Justice Project is preparing us for a rapid transition that is smooth and fair. In the meantime, as our governments have been occupied by fossil fuel industries, take heart in the fact that people can still say no, leaving the carbon bombs held by Alberta and BC trapped underground.

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.

The following are just a few of the issues that hit the convention floor.

The RCMP and public private partnerships

There was a lot of coverage in the media about the breakdown in negotiations over a new RCMP contract between British Columbia and the federal government. A side bar issue that got no coverage dealt with the new RCMP Division Headquarters in Surrey.

Solicitor General Shirley Bond complained to a UBCM panel about the province’s inability to control rising RCMP costs. The example she gave was the RCMP’s new Division E headquarters that saw costs balloon from $300 million to $1 billion.

However, it turns out that the new headquarters is a federal public private partnerships and that so far the province’s privatization agency, Partnerships BC, has billed $2.5 million in consulting fees on the project. Remember when the government argued that P3s offered fixed costs and price stability?

The Municipal Auditor General

Mayors and councilors were not happy about the province’s decision to impose a Municipal Auditor General on them. Councilors argued from the convention floor that they were already forbidden by law to run a deficit and had many of their major projects subject to referendum.

However, the province backed down on most of the issues promising to pay for the new office (but not for the cost of audits) as well as swearing that new MAG would not have the power to second guess local policies, including tax policy.

The big issue that still remains is governance. The UBCM wants the same model the province enjoys in its relationship with its own AGM. That would mean an MAG would report to an accounting board made up of local government representatives. No dice Communities Minister Ida Chong told the convention. Apparently local governments will make up only a minority of the board. The business community has been promised its own chair at the table.

The business community (primarily the Canadian Federation of Independent Business) is on a full-court press to see business property taxes cut with the cost being shifted to homeowners. Of course business, unlike homeowners, can write off their property taxes against federal and provincial taxes.

Government downloading and rural areas

Every UBCM convention holds individual forums for different sized communities. My favorite is always the Electoral Area Directors’ forum made up of mainly people representing spread out rural areas. While diplomacy is the order of the day when big communities talk to the provincial government, with Area Directors you get a lot more down-to-earth candor.

Over the years Area directors have had a continuing complaint about downloading of costs. This year the complaint was over diking policy. As a Central Kootenay Director told the provincial officials at the forum, “One of the reasons you are downloading is that you lack resources. If you can’t handle it, we sure can’t.” The chair of the presentation on diking sent the provincial officials away with this message:

We don’t have the expertise, equipment or money. Flood mitigation needs more funding. Send the message back.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)

Over the years residents, particularly in urban areas, have become used to a growing level of recycling. Blue boxes take away our newspapers, cans and plastics. For many of us there will soon be recycling of kitchen scraps.

It turns out there is some risk of things going the other direction. The Area Directors heard a presentation on Extended Producer Responsibility. Under this program producers and consumers or products will have responsibility for them. It sounds attractive but what will it actually mean?

A Director from the Sunshine Coast told the panel they were planning to extend their blue box program and asked for advice considering the EPR policy. An industry spokesman advised the Director that they couldn’t give practical advice but that it would be “prudent to wait.”  An industry spokesman reported that some governments were putting a pause on such projects. “Remain nimble” she advised.

It turns out we may all have to be more nimble if we have to start taking our newspapers to depots rather than having them picked up in blue boxes.

Wages for public employees

It appears Christy Clark’s government is determined to make public employees pay for the government’s ineptitude on the HST. In a panel on the economy Finance Minister Kevin Falcon told the audience:

With respect to the wage mandate for the whole public service at net zero for two years – that tough mandate is likely to continue.

Public sector wages have already fallen due to inflation and the two year wage freeze. The Finance Minister appears determined to push them down further. Meanwhile, at least for now, wages in the private sector are going up.

Ferries

At the forum on the economy an Island Trust Trustee told the panel of Ministers:

Ferry fares are killing our communities. We are losing jobs because of the ferry fares.  If government isn’t willing to put money into ferry infrastructure we are going to continue to lose jobs.

Transportation Minister Blair Lekstrum said they were cutting 400 sailings but that it would not likely affect fares. Finance Minister Falcon suggested fares really didn’t make much difference because when they cut fares temporarily during the recession, ridership didn’t go up. The Island Trustee disagreed.

Open government

I went to one of the 7:30 am “clinics” on Thursday morning on “open government.” I had hoped it might deal with the government’s poor record on access to information but instead it dealt with the governments new web sites.

It wasn’t a total loss though. The government’s data website that now contains more than 2,400 data sets looks pretty interesting. And the open information site that publishes the government’s FOI releases is certainly worth reading on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Too bad their policy of releasing the information only 72 hours after it goes to the FOI requestor will probably discourage media from using FOI.

Workshop on market housing

Thursday afternoon there was a workshop on market housing that was much more interesting than last year’s all day workshop. Last year was mainly taken up by how little the province could or would do. This year instead focused on how much was actually being done in communities like Vernon, Langford and Surrey.

 There were dozens of other policy issues addressed in the week long convention. Paul Willcocks has an interesting column on the debate about smart meters here. It is remarkable just how much information flows in a meeting like this.

The purported policy change seemed scary — the government might roll back the requirement for BC Hydro to be able to meet domestic electricity requirements in drought conditions. And the scientist’s description of the consequences is also quite a fright– BC Hydro will be forced to rely on coal-fired electricity if the policy change goes through.

It is quite a story and would be of concern if true. But there is no basis for the story that was told and little need to be concerned. There was no science in the scientist’s reported remarks. It was sadly just another effort, sponsored by the IPP lobby, to  encourage the government to retain the now widely discredited ‘self-sufficiency’ policy that is forcing BC Hydro to buy more power than it needs to ensure reliable supply.

The policy issue is not, as characterized by Justine Hunter in the Globe, whether BC Hydro should be able to meet its requirements in drought conditions. Of course it must be able to do that. BC Hydro must ensure reliable supply under all water conditions. The issue is how that can best be done.

The government’s self-sufficiency policy requires BC Hydro to guard against the risk of drought by entering into long term firm power purchase contracts with British Columbia IPPs — power that in many years it will not need and be forced to sell at a loss. It precludes BC Hydro from even considering more cost-effective and in many ways less environmentally damaging options — in particular relying on the spot market for electricity in those years that its own hydro production is limited by drought.

Would relying on the spot market in low water years increase GHG emissions in British Columbia? No . There would only be an increase in provincial emissions to the extent BC Hydro were to use the Burrard natural gas thermal plant more than otherwise, and BC Hydro simulations and spot market price forecasts suggest that would not occur to any great extent. There almost certainly would be no significant impact on B.C.’s ability to meet its GHG reduction goals.

Would BC Hydro’s relying on the spot market in drought years mean more coal-fired power generation in Alberta or the U.S.? There is no evidence or reason to think so.  The coal plants in those jurisdictions do not ramp up and down to supply spot market demands by BC Hydro or anyone else. They will continue to produce as much power as they can as long as the governments in those jurisdictions allow it.

In any event, a large proportion of the spot market power that BC Hydro could buy would be as green and clean as any B.C. supply. There generally are opportunities to buy very low cost surplus hydro power during the spring freshet period, even in low water years. Increasingly, there is low cost surplus wind  production  that BC Hydro could purchase when high wind conditions occur during light load hour periods. And at least until 2024, there is the Columbia River Treaty power that BC Hydro could use if no less costly sources of electricity were available. That power is owned by the province and managed by BC Hydro’s own power trading subsidiary Powerex.

Too much of the debate (and headlines) about the government’s self-sufficiency policy has been cast in slogans and fears. The good scientist speaking at the IPP press conference would do a service by presenting some analysis of impacts, benefits and costs — not just spectres of self-serving concerns.

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.

In the Lower Mainland, the delivered cost of natural gas is approximately 3.28 cents per kWh, plus 0.45 cents per kWh in carbon tax.  This compares to BC Hydro residential rates of 6.67 cents (tier one) and 9.62 (tier two) per kWh for electricity.  Thus, gas prices are 56% the cost of the tier one electricity rate and 39% of the tier two rate, creating a perverse incentive to use gas as a fuel source instead of electricity.

Unfortunately, prices do not tell the truth. In terms of climate action and economics, there is an externality, or a cost borne by third parties to the market transaction, associated with burning fossil fuels. A recent study put the value of these external costs at up to $900 per tonne of CO2.  While this is the top of the range, it would translate into about 16 cents per kWh, and implies that the price of natural gas is as much as five times lower than it would be if all costs were included in the market price.

Decarbonizing homes requires, minimally, that the gap between current natural gas and electricity prices be eliminated over time through effective carbon pricing. And this must also take into consideration looming increases in electricity prices. The cost of natural gas may rise on its own account, but additional carbon pricing measures may be required to avert a widening gap. Longer-term, making prices tell the truth is needed if BC is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuels like natural gas over the course of the next few decades.

A deeper problem is that the BC government puzzlingly considers natural gas to be a source of clean energy, and often talks about GHG reductions and increased gas production in the same breath. At best, it is merely the cleanest of fossil fuels. In regions where electricity is produced by coal, a switch to natural gas can lower GHG emissions per unit of energy, although in the case of shale gas fracking, natural gas emissions may actually be on par with coal.

From a consumption perspective, space and water heating are the two sources of GHG emissions in homes: space and water heating together comprise 99% of residential emissions (the remaining 1% is from appliances).  Electricity and natural gas are  competing energy technologies for providing these services. Existing homes using natural gas heating/cooling and hot water systems (typically hydronic systems) could be converted to renewable fuel sources such as waste heat, biomass, geo-exchange, and solar thermal. Heap pumps of various types (including ductless models that can replace electric baseboard heaters) are also a very efficient way of providing space heating. Neighbourhood-level or district energy systems (including waste heat recapture) could also play a major role in the transition away from fossil fuels.

BC’s population is expected to increase from about 4.6 million residents to over 6 million by 2036.  New housing and redevelopments should not be adding to BC’s appetite for natural gas, nor should energy efficiency programs subsidize conversion to natural gas. Instead, a slow-and-steady transition off of natural gas toward clean electricity from the grid and other on-site and neighbourhood-scale alternatives is needed, synchronized with energy efficiency gains to avert a major increase in electricity demand that could drive up prices.

The biggest overarching concern is that any such moves would massively increase poverty, or specifically energy poverty, where households spend a disproportionate share of their income on energy. A major plan for retrofit programs aimed at low-income households, and the older housing stock, multi-unit buildings and rental stock where low-income households are more likely to live is needed. Current energy efficiency grant programs are aimed at owners of typical single-family homes, which pretty much makes the irrelevant for low-income households. In addition to this, some form of income transfer (ideally, funded out of growing carbon tax revenues) would likely be needed.

These contracts don’t go on the books as debt, but just like debt we will be responsible for it for the next 30 or 40 years.

The lions share of these payments will go to independent power producers.  Last year the future cost of these payments jumped from $23.8 billion to $45.3 billion. This is the cost of privatizing BC’s power system. Marvin Shaffer writes about this process here and here.

Future costs for hopsital public private partnerships jumped more than $2 billion to $9.1 billion.

The government reports on these “Contingencies and Contractual Obligations” in the Public Accounts in limited detail. Fortunately, they now also make more detailed information available on a website here.

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.

Can we pin this all on climate change? Some say yes, others are more cautious about how much we can cite human greenhouse gas emissions. But all agree that what we are seeing is consistent with what climate scientists have been predicting for decades. Would those tornadoes have been averted in the absence of too much carbon in the air, or would they have happened anyway but packing an extra punch due to a warmer planet? We can only speak in probabilities not black and white, but there is a high probability that the extremes we have been seeing are part of our new 21st century climate.

Lots of people are connecting these dots. Canada’s mainstream media is an exception that continue to report extreme weather events on one page and oil and gas developments in the business section, as if there is no connection whatsoever. Worse, during the second (or was it the third?) round of tornadoes, the Vancouver Province ran a story, “No Link Between Tornadoes and Climate Change” (which I think ran through the CanWest media empire). It was a puff article quoting one person who made such a comment with no counter-point, but what is interesting is that some editor felt it necessary to make that a banner headline.

I think this wall of denial is about to fall in the next few years, and with it we need to usher in a new era of climate action. Serious climate action, not the slow and gentle first steps we’ve witnessed to date in places like BC and California (whereas other juridictions have done nothing at all). That means shifting to zero fossil fuels in the energy system as soon as possible, aggressively making our society more energy efficient, and redeveloping our urban spaces into complete communities that are substantially more pedestrian and bike-friendly, and with major investments in public transit.

But I think we need to up the ante for those pursuing business as usual, the relentless expansion of oil and gas infrastructure that is causing these problems and guaranteeing that they will be worse in the future. Actions that lead to mass deaths and displacements, either directly due to a weather event or indirectly from impacts on land and livelihoods, beg for some accountability. I’m no international law-talking guy, but I believe that these things can only be called crimes against humanity.

Let’s say that again. Efforts to expand the oil and gas industry, like the Keystone XL and Enbridge pipelines, are crimes against humanity. Expanding the coal industry, like the proposal to export megatonnes of Washington state coal, is not just bad environmental policy, but a crime against humanity.

The Economics of Climate Adaptation Working Group, including Swiss Re and other prominent grey-suited observers, calculate that weather disasters over the past 50 years have led to $1 trillion in losses and 800,000 fatalities. Those human and financial losses are only going to get worse. It is not polar bears and “future generations” we are talking about. It is the current impacts on people around the world who had nothing to do with the problem. It is about Canada’s First Nations, whose constitutional rights have literally been run over by those massive mining trucks that ply the Alberta tar sands.

I may be willing to give a grace period for actions take before 2000 or so, on the grounds that we did not know better (though we actually did). Nor would I punish regular folks (including me) who burn fossil fuels because of the structure of the world we live in and the lack of alternatives. This is about the dealers not the addicts; about the need for urgent change in response to the unfolding crisis.

It matters not whether such actions today are “legal” (almost all genocides were legal at the time) but they are deeply immoral and wrong. Major shareholders and senior executives in big fossil fuel industries – and the politicians that dote on them – need to understand that their profiteering off of destabilizing the climate will pay a price. That’s a little thing we call justice.

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.