Three Fibs Premier Clark Uses to Sell LNG Dream
Sorry, it’s not clean. It won’t pay off. It’s not popular. Here’s why.
Why does Premier Clark keep saying LNG will bring a bonanza of jobs and revenues? Photo: Province of BC Flickr.
Fib #1: LNG is ‘clean’
While making our documentary Fractured Land about fracking in B.C., co-director Fiona Rayher and I journeyed to Cornell University to interview Dr. Robert Howarth. He is a global expert on the climate impacts of fracking.
CLARK’S SITE C INCONSISTENCIES
On the massive, taxpayer-funded Site C dam project, our premier remains where she’s always been: all over the map.
First, she told us the power was needed for the enormously energy-intensive LNG industry.
Then she creatively interpretedthe Clean Energy Act to mean that LNG plants could power themselves by burning some of their own gas, saving them money. That would produce three times the greenhouse gas emissions as would electric power. It also means her previous justification for Site C is gone.
Even BC Hydro recently admittedto the BC Utilities Commission that without powering LNG, we wouldn’t need the electricity from Site C until at least 2029.
This dam is therefore an unnecessary taxpayer-funded boondoggle of at least $9 billion that would flood or disrupt30,000 acres of some of the best farmland left in Canada, while violating First Nations’ treaty rights. — D.G.
We told him our premier has affixed the label “Cleanest Fossil Fuel on the Planet” to B.C. LNG (derived almost entirely from a massive increase in fracking in the province’s northeast).
