Reflections on the Past Year
(between the Oil Sands trips of 2013 and 2014, and beyond)
On August 6th, two and a half days after the breach, the BC government ordered mine owner Imperial Metals Corp. to immediately stop the release of toxic material into surrounding waterways. Unfortunately, by this time, the tailings pond was empty of its 24 million cubic meters of water and tailings. The president of the company apologized to Likely residents but could not refrain from telling them that the water that had destroyed Hazeltine Creek and contaminated Quesnel Lake was of drinkable quality; he did not mention whether the accompanying tailings, containing an estimated 326 tonnes of nickel, over 400 tonnes of arsenic, and 177 tonnes of lead, were also of drinkable quality.
The BC government initially claimed that it was not an environmental disaster. This was not surprising as the largest shareholder of the mine, Alberta billionaire Murray Edwards, has raised over a million dollars for the BC Liberals, and donated another half million over the last 10 years. Also, developing 8 new mines in BC by 2015 was an important part of the BC Liberals’ 2013 campaign platform.
It is worthy of note that the BC Liberal government had cut back their environmental monitoring of mines. The average number of inspections conducted each year is now less than half of what it was in the 1990s when the NDP was in power. From 1993 to 2000, an average of 48 inspections were conducted each year. Between 2001-2013 that number dropped to 21.
...
In
July 2013, I went up to the Oil Sands area for the first time. I was there for the 5th
annual Healing Walk. A month earlier there was a substantial pipeline spill
south of Ft Mac. While we were there, three hundred people, mostly from the
Fort McMurray FN, were involved in the on-going clean-up efforts, we were told
by a FMFN band member.
Views from the walk 2013
The Walk 2013
Traffic on Hwy 63 during the Walk
…
The day of that Healing Walk (with 500
participants), we received news of the explosion at Lac Mégantic overnight,
another sign of the dangers of oil and reckless corporate-government collusion.
I say that because all kinds of evidence have since come to light. Transport
Canada gave MMA (Montreal, Maine and Atlantic, the rail company that owned the train that exploded)
permission to reduce their train crew to ONE person over the strenuous
objections of the Montreal office, the union, and a variety of transportation
experts. MMA has a long history of safety violations. The MMA tracks were in
extremely poor condition and yet were not designated as an ‘excepted track’,
which would have prohibited the transport of dangerous goods. MMA`s safety
management system, which all railways are required to have in place was not
approved until 2010, 7 years after its submission to Transport Canada. MMA was
supposed to provide a risk assessment after the major increase in crude oil
transport. It appears that it never did. And so on: there is a lot more.
…
The
day before we left on the canoe trip last year (2013), the Alberta Energy
Regulator approved a lease for a new SAGD (Steam assisted gravity drainage) tar
sands project (the Dover Commercial Project).
It is adjacent to Ft McKay FN lands referred to as the Moose Lake
Reserve, 50 km northwest of Ft McKay. The reserve contains Moose Lake where
many FMFN members have built cabins and there are also band-owned cabins.
According to the Ft McKay FN website:
“This particular area in our
traditional territory is sacred to the community of Fort McKay and is the
resting place of many of our ancestors.”
“Moose Lake is one of the only
areas far enough away from oil sands development where the people of Fort McKay
can hunt, trap, fish, and pick berries safely and in peace. Fort McKay First
Nation is committed to the protection and preservation of Moose Lake in order
to ensure our children and grandchildren have a clean, peaceful place to keep
our traditions and culture alive.”
The
Ft McKay Band had asked for a 20 km buffer zone around the lake for the above
reasons. They were granted 1.2 km. The lease holder is Brion Energy Corporation,
a joint venture between Athabasca Oil Corp. and PetroChina Co. (now Phoenix
Energy Holdings), promises to exploit
the resource “in an environmentally acceptable manner” according to the Brion
website. The Dover project is expected to produce approximately 4.1 billion
barrels of bitumen. At $50 per barrel of bitumen, that amounts to $200 billion.
One quarter of that amount would have been lost if the Alberta Energy Regulator
or Brion Energy could have dialed back their greed and given in to Ft McKay’s
request. Ft McKay FN appealed but has since settled out of court.
...
As
if to highlight the risks involved in SAGD projects, we also learned last
summer (2013) that there was a major
underground and surface spill of bitumen from a SAGD operation in the Cold Lake
area to the south. It started 2 weeks before our arrival, and approximately 1
million liters of bitumen had already leaked out. There is no known method to
stop the flow. In a SAGD operation, tar sands deep underground are heated with
hot water pipes and another series of deeper pipes, in theory, collects the
melted tar. This spill continued for almost a year, until the spring of 2014,
and it highlights the fact that SAGD operations are an unproven and unsafe
technology. That and one other method of ‘in situ’ oil sands extraction are to
be the main methods of getting most of the oil (tar) out of the oil sands.
...
Will
the companies responsible pay for a spill cleanup (to the limited extent even
possible) when there is one? Let’s look back 25 years. When the Exxon-Valdez
spilled a portion of its cargo into Prince William Sound in 1989, Exxon was fined by a US court $5.3 billion. But did
they pay? For fourteen years, Exxon’s lawyers appealed the decision no less
than 4 times and were able to reduce the judgement on three of the decisions.
Final result? Exxon paid less than 10% of the original judgement: $0.5 billion.
And this was a company with annual revenues of $420 billion, based in the US,
and the judgements were in a US court. What do you think would happen if the
Canadian government takes a Chinese company to court?
...
Alberta
has a carbon tax of $15/tonne, half of BC`s. However, it is only for industry
and Alberta exempts 96% of its industrial climate
pollution from paying the carbon tax. Some tax.
...
The 2014 Report of the Canadian Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development (Julie Gelfand) was tabled in January 2015. Among other things, she noted that after 6 years of “planning”, the Harper government still has no plan for reducing GHGs in the Oil and Gas industry. Canada is not on track to meet even the watered-down (from Kyoto) targets agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009. In December 2014, Harper declared that it would now be ‘crazy’ to start putting GHG regulations in place when oil prices are low.
Gelfland also noted that the Joint Oil Sands Monitoring
program (JOSM) began two years ago, is still not doing a good job of monitoring
and the federal contribution is neither transparent nor is its future assured.
JOSM was announced by the Federal and Alberta governments as a “World Class”
oil sands environmental monitoring program in 2012 after the Royal Society of
Canada report that year determined that the previous monitoring program (also
trumpeted as being “world class”) was
inadequate, unscientific, and uncoordinated.
...
Questions worthy of asking.
1. Why does Canada
want to ship raw bitumen out of the country? In Norway, they insist on
maximizing the jobs from oil. They have no pipelines to the coast because they
do all the refining in the country. If we legislated it, the oil companies
would build the refineries here.
2. Why do we have cutbacks to the CBC, Canada Post,
Education, Scientific endeavours, Fisheries and Forestry officials, and Health
Care? Because we keep cutting taxes to the wealthy and corporations. Norway
takes in 5 times what Canada/Alberta does from each barrel of oil.
3. Why are we trying to liquidate a non-renewable resource
like oil when future generations will need it? If we developed it much more
slowly, it would be possible to reclaim the land and avoid polluting and drying
out the entire watershed.
...
More
evidence of the Canadian government priorities. The Natural Resources Canada
spending report submitted to Parliament in the fall of 2014 indicated that
it failed to spend $298.6-million on programs for "green"
programs such as renewable energy development and technology innovation.
The lapses
in spending on green programs or technologies that would help cut greenhouse
gas emissions included a further $1 million the department left unspent from
$10.9-million that had been allocated for a Climate Change Adaptation Program.
It also left untouched almost the entirety of $22 million that had been
dedicated to a satellite
earth observation program, which was supposed to provide data on vegetation, land and water
conditions in the "oil sands region" as well as other oil and
gas-producing region. The observation was supposed to help with developing
an ecological baseline to measure environmental damage caused by oil and gas
extraction.
Meanwhile,
Natural Resources Canada spent $438.3 million on programs to support the
oil and gas industry -- it spent $41.6 million more, or nearly 10 per cent
extra, than the amount it was allotted for the 2013-2014 fiscal year. The
federal government spent $24 million in an ad
blitz promoting Canadian oil and Keystone XL in key cities like Washington
in the U.S., but according to a survey, the ad campaign has had
little impact across the border.
...
There is an
ongoing lawsuit by Jessica Ernst, a former consultant to the oil and gas
industry in Alberta, which alleges that industry activity including the
hydraulic fracturing of shallow coal seams between 2001 and 2004 in central
Alberta contaminated local aquifers with methane, making Ernst's water
flammable.
In
particular, the lawsuit alleges that the ERCB (now called the Alberta Energy
Regulator) violated Ernst's right to free expression under the Charter by
banishing her from contact with the board while she was dealing with the
pollution issues on her property. Last year, Chief Justice Neil Wittmann ruled
that the case against Encana and Alberta Environment could proceed to trial,
but he dismissed the claim against the Alberta Energy Regulator on the grounds
that a statutory immunity clause excepted it from civil action and Charter
claims.
Jessica Ernst
Ernst's
lawyer Murray Klippenstein has appealed that ruling, saying that no government
or province can legislate themselves out of the fundamental rights guaranteed
by the Charter of Rights, on which Ernst's claim is based. The astounding thing
about this is that the Alberta government is claiming that the Alberta Energy
Regulator, the body that decides what Oil and Gas projects (including all of
those in the Oils Sands) are approved, has NO duty to protect Alberta citizens.
If not, what exactly does it have a duty to protect??
…
Of
the fourteen defining characteristics of fascism (cited by Dr Lawrence Britt
after studying regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and several Latin
American countries), the Harper government along with its corporate
friends, is now clearly displaying seven
of these, including Mass Media Control, Obsession with National Security,
Corporate Power Protection, Suppression of Labour Rights, Disdain for Intellectuals
and the Arts, Obsession with Crime and Punishment, and Fraudulent Elections.
Personally,
I cannot wait for an election. Not that that will solve all our problems, but
it will be a good start if we can elect a government which does not have its
mind made up before it has the facts.
…
I can`t end my reflections without some good news on energy.
1. Germany generated over HALF of its electricity demand
from Solar Energy for the first time on June 9, 2014!!
2. In France, some 20 companies and institutions employing
10 000 people have signed up to pay their staff
CDN $0.36/km to bike to work in a 6-month long experiment. Other
countries with bike-to-work schemes include: Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Belgium
and Germany.
3. One fifth of the world’s power production now comes from
renewable sources. In 2014, 95 developing countries have policies to support
renewable energy (compared to only 15 countries in 2005).
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