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By Many Calculations, LNG Is a Fail for BC: Report
By Many Calculations, LNG Is a Fail for BC: Report
The math for liquefied natural gas is bad on emissions, revenues, jobs, even offsetting coal in China, finds a new study.
David Hughes, one of the nation’s foremost energy analysts, has a simple message for the governments of British Columbia and Canada when it comes to advocating for LNG projects.
“Do the math.”
Hughes has parsed the numbers and they don’t add up on methane emissions, climate change targets, resource royalties, job benefits or even basic economics.
“The math is clear,” says Hughes, whose latest 57-page report on LNG exports highlights a long pipeline of damning figures.
Emissions targets: Won’t LNG help hit them? The numbers say noThe Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
The province’s CleanBC plan, for example, demands an 80-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 from 2007 levels.
But Hughes, who was a scientific researcher for 32 years at the Geological Survey of Canada, checked the math on emissions based on energy production forecasts made by the Canada Energy Regulator.
His math is conservative. It excluded any LNG exports. It assumes current major reductions in methane leaks from gas extraction might be plugged. And it further assumes the electrification of some upstream projects. Still, Hughes found that “emissions from oil and gas production would exceed B.C.’s 2050 target by 54 per cent.”
(A group of scientists writing in Nature found the same thing on a global scale last year: just using existing fossil fuel infrastructure takes the world into climate change hell.)
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‘Normal Is the Problem’
‘Normal Is the Problem’
So is normal’s idiot child, ‘the new normal.’ What we’ve made normal never was natural.
Sharon Wilson is a fifth-generation Texan who drives around rural communities and takes pictures of oil and gas facilities with an infrared camera. The pictures make visible all the methane pollution that industry and governments pretend is not happening in rural communities.
Wilson recently tweeted these two sentences: “We can and must do better than going back to normal. Normal is the problem.”
And she is right as rain about that. Normal has become a pathological state.
After the random normlessness of this pandemic, I don’t want to go back to normal either. Or its idiotic child, “the new normal.”
Let’s face facts: our hi-tech, globalized-trade-anything-for-peanuts world run mostly by tyrants isn’t natural.
Since 1970, an outpouring of normality has just about destroyed the Earth: It has created an abnormal economic machine, blind to energy spending, that doubled the global population and boosted per capita consumption by 45 per cent.
At the same time the so-called value of global economic activity grew by 300 per cent. Meanwhile global trade has exploded like a coronavirus by 900 per cent. To support all this consumption and trade, the extraction of “living materials” from nature has jumped by 200 per cent.
Now here’s just a partial list of the cost of all this exponential normality: Humans have appropriated or altered 70 per cent of the world’s lands with mines, roads, industrial farms, cities and airports. We have engineered more than 75 per cent of the world’s longest rivers. We have filled the ocean with plastics and slaughtered coral reefs. Anyone who calls that kind of behaviour normal is crackers. It’s ecological imperialism, and nothing more than a full-scale assault on the dignity of local life.
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Don’t Bet on a Vaccine
Don’t Bet on a Vaccine
If we get one, great. But here’s why we can’t count on it and what that means.
Every day politicians promise eventual relief from the threat of COVID-19 with a vaccine. An unprecedented scientific race to develop more than 100 of them is now underway. But don’t roll up your sleeve yet. Any promise of a technical solution for a global pandemic remains a great gamble for a variety of reasons.
So we had better develop a robust Plan B: Get very good at living with the coronavirus in our midst, keeping large outbreaks to a minimum. The key to this, lacking a super effective vaccine, is: test, trace and isolate. Repeat. Repeat. And repeat again. We have the means to do this now, and it should become our way of life for many months, and likely years, to come.
Why should we be wary of the promise a vaccine will deliver us any time soon from the coronavirus?
Some viruses are more ‘wily’ than others. Vaccines are artificial tools to confer immunity to diseases. Instead of waiting for natural immunity and disease cycles to do the often deadly and random job, our civilization now depends on the efficiency of vaccines. Immunization is as much a part of modern civilization as the highway.
Vaccines, however, have their limits and can also suffer from diminishing returns. The evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has noted that humans have used vaccines for the last 200 years to conquer the easiest adversaries: measles, diptheria, rabies, polio and smallpox. “We are now left with the more wily ones which will probably evade our vaccination efforts by changing their coats.” Malaria and viruses like HIV are masters at evading the immune system.
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Global Boom, Pandemic, Crash: Is History Just Repeating Itself?
Global Boom, Pandemic, Crash: Is History Just Repeating Itself?
If Peter Turchin is right, we face the end of a 300-year cycle, as did previous far-flung empires.
The coronavirus pandemic is, among other things, a tribute to human ingenuity and our relentless pursuit of globalization, an impulse thousands of years old. Previous civilizations, from the Romans to the Mongols, traded aggressively and invaded new ecosystems. They, too, connected far-flung geographies in innovative ways. None of it, however, ended particularly well.
By trading in all manner of peoples, plants, germs and animals, these empires diligently tested the limits of globalization and its growing complexity by seeding their own disintegration.
The corona pandemic, a pretty mild affair in the scheme of things, is telling us that we are now in the middle of a historic cycle where hyper-connectivity combined with hyper-complexity could rapidly lead to decline, if not collapse.
In fact, pandemics are not black swans, but predictable and natural events that often appear like clockwork in the evolution of human empires. They trigger other crises or partner up with them.
These mass reversals often appear after periods of intense population growth and changes in population density just as an imperial adventure unknowingly begins its descent.
In the process of pruning human numbers, pandemics invariably play a significant role in the disintegration of civilizations. They reveal wealth inequalities and technical fragilities. In this regard pandemics announce both the ending and beginning of things. They can have both negative and positive effects.
Peter Turchin, a Russian historian, has long argued that civilizations expand and contract in distinct waves or what he calls “secular cycles” that last about 300 years.
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Alberta’s Meat Plant Workers Share Their Fears and Anger
Alberta’s Meat Plant Workers Share Their Fears and Anger
As Cargill prepares to reopen, voices from the frontlines of Canada’s largest COVID-19 outbreak.
They fear the virus. They are concerned about the futures. They worry for their communities.
And they say neither the government nor two foreign-owned companies, which account for 70 per cent of the nation’s beef slaughtering capacity, are doing enough to ensure their safety.
They say the companies didn’t provide adequate protective gear for the people who butcher Canada’s beef until it was too late.
The Tyee interviewed five Alberta employees of two meat plants, parts of different international conglomerates. The people interviewed are members of a largely immigrant work force that speaks dozens of languages and now finds itself at the centre of the largest COVID-19 outbreak in Canada.
Those who work at the JBS meat-processing plant in Brooks wondered why it has never shut down in order to do a thorough disinfection and increase its safety measures.
Those who work at the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River said the company has lied about the protections provided, as well as compensation paid.
As one shared, “Why did this virus spread? It came from the fabrication floor where there is no airflow, and we are working elbow to elbow and there is no distancing. Where are the safety precautions? They said they did the safety precautions. No they didn’t.”
Now that worker and others fear returning to work when the Cargill plant reopens Monday. Among that plant’s employees, 921 out of 2,000 are now infected. At least seven workers are in hospital and five are in intensive care. One Cargill worker and a close contact have died.
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Ignoring US Alarms, Alberta Meat Packers Spawned Canada’s Biggest Outbreak
Ignoring US Alarms, Alberta Meat Packers Spawned Canada’s Biggest Outbreak
As the virus gripped US plants, the union pleaded for a shutdown. They were rebuffed.
Canada’s largest outbreak of COVID-19 swept through two meat-packing plants in southern Alberta two weeks after the provincial government ignored union requests to temporarily close both of the plants.
And it mirrored a series of recent, well-documented hot-zone eruptions in meat plants in the United States.
More than 600 immigrant workers and community members have been infected while the disease has killed at least three people at Cargill’s High River plant and the JBS food plant in Brooks, Alta.
“The real issue here is a moral issue,” charged Thomas Hesse, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, which represents workers at the plants. “How do we as a society want to bring food to our tables?”
Rachel Notley, the former premier of Alberta, has called for a full public inquiry.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
“It is unconscionable that we now have a situation where hundreds of people have contracted a deadly virus,” said Notley, who leads the NDP Official Opposition. “What kind of concerns put the lives of workers so low?” she asked on CBC Radio yesterday.
Alberta’s growing outbreaks follow in the wake of deadly events in the U.S. where meat-packing plants have become COVID-19 incubators.
The U.S. recorded its largest single cluster of cases at a pork-processing facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in early April. By the time the Chinese-owned facility closed for two weeks there were nearly 900 cases.
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For Oil and Its Dependents, It’s Code Blue
For Oil and Its Dependents, It’s Code Blue
The great price collapse of 2020 will topple companies and transform states.
If oil has been laid low by the coronavirus, then the nations whose economies most depend on it might soon be on ventilators. By any prognosis the great oil price collapse of 2020 has pushed the world’s most volatile commodity into Code Blue.
No one expects oil, its peddlers or consumers to emerge wealthier or wiser from this crisis. Oil company bankruptcies, already happening before the pandemic, will escalate. And more petro states will begin to stumble, like Venezuela, down the rabbit hole of collapse.
The pandemic, combined with suicidal overproduction and a brief price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, has reduced oil consumption and revenues on a scale that is mindboggling.
Prior to the pandemic, the world gulped about 100 million barrels a day, filling the atmosphere with destabilizing carbon. Today it sips somewhere between 65 million and 80 million barrels.
At least 20 to 30 per cent of global demand has vanished and nearly two dozen petro-producing countries including Canada have agreed to withhold nearly 10 million barrels from the market. Few expect this agreement will stop the price bleeding.
In fact, the price of Western Canadian Select or diluted bitumen remains below five dollars a barrel — cheaper than hand sanitizer. That’s a drop of more than 80 per cent compared to the month before.
Because the spending of oil fertilizes economic growth and expands national GDPs, most of the world’s economists now predict a long depression after the pandemic.
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COVID-19, Brought to You by Globalization
COVID-19, Brought to You by Globalization
How the virus exploits traits of our economy extolled as modern triumphs.
This pandemic, with an estimated mortality rate of one to two per cent, is not a world ender or something to be truly feared.
But it deserves our respect and it certainly has our attention.
Pandemics, which go off like improvised bombs, don’t have to be formidable killers to be bad. Even modest biological detonations can upend your day and alter your world.
As SARS-CoV-2 — the respiratory virus that causes the disease COVID-19 — begins its explosive global journey, it has proven its ability to clog hospitals and freeze economies.
It is worth remembering that SARS-CoV-2, unlike influenza, is a novel cold-like virus that Homo sapiens have never experienced before. We have no immunity and must acquire it either through exposure to the virus or a vaccine that most likely won’t be ready till the pandemic is over.
SARS-CoV-2 will play with different populations differently, making use of the demographic material at hand along with human follies such as the criminal dearth of testing in the United States for the last month.
And it won’t be the last. This particular biological invader springs from an ancient, large and diverse family of viruses hosted by a variety of wild animals including bats and birds.
These species are particularly hard pressed by global economic forces now ruinously reducing biological diversity everywhere. As biological biodiversity declines, viruses will seek reliable hosts and jump from animals into people at any given opportunity. Peter Daszak, a pioneering disease ecologist, says we now live in Age of Pandemics.
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Diana Beresford-Kroeger on the Flawed Thinking that Got Us to Climate Crisis
Diana Beresford-Kroeger on the Flawed Thinking that Got Us to Climate Crisis
Our conversation with the renowned botanist turns to fire, money and manual work.
In early November, a California radio station in Marin County invited the world-renowned botanist to participate in a podcast about her new book To Speak for the Trees.
The book, already in its fourth printing, has much to say about climate change and the healing role of forests.
But the climate crisis rudely intervened as wildfires once again scorched their way across the populous state.
Just before the scheduled interview, she got an emergency call from the station, recalls Beresford-Kroeger.
“They said, ‘Sorry we can’t do the interview today because the studio is on fire. We’re getting out of here fast.’”
At first she thought it was a joke. “They were telling me as matter of fact as though their studio goes on fire everyday. But this is the new reality.”
So she wished them well. “You know that that the crisis is happening to them and you realize yours might be the next shot.”
And there’s the problem. Climate change has now appeared at everyone’s doorstop in different guises; rising seas, longer king tides, melting ice caps, brutal fires, dying trees, failed crops, migrating peoples, rising food prices, monstrous storms, drying aquifers and absent politicians.
Beresford-Kroeger has been thinking about climate change for a long time.
She first thought about the issue in the 1960s while chatting with her bookish Uncle Pat about her fear of going hungry.
The two didn’t have much money, and Beresford-Kroeger already knew what it meant to go to bed with an empty stomach.
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New Study Finds Far Greater Methane Threat from Fossil Fuel Industry
New Study Finds Far Greater Methane Threat from Fossil Fuel Industry
The gas plays a powerful role in driving up global temperatures.
A new study published in Nature may have ended a long scientific debate about the key source of rising methane levels in the atmosphere.
It found that methane emissions from human activities — mainly fossil fuels — are probably 25 to 40 per cent higher than previously estimated, while natural sources of methane emissions are up to 90 per cent lower than previously estimated.
In plain English, that means the fossil fuel industry is having a much greater impact on climate destabilization than previously thought.
Methane, the main chemical constituent of natural gas, is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide in the short term. Although methane dissipates faster than carbon dioxide, it has 80 times the climate warming impact over a 20-year timespan.
Every day, the oil and gas industry burns or releases methane by design, often as an unwanted byproduct of oil production, or leaks it accidently through faulty or aging equipment — a form of chronic spillage known as “fugitive emissions.” The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
Methane also escapes while industry strips a number of impurities and contaminants from natural gas gathered in gas fields, including hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide.
For years the fossil fuel industry has claimed that natural gas is a clean fuel that will serve as bridge to a renewable future, but recent studiesshow leakage rates are highly underestimated, thereby challenging that claim.
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What the Teck Mine Will Destroy
What the Teck Mine Will Destroy
Old growth, wetlands, wildlife. All the review panel added up and wrote off.
Any day now, the Trudeau government is expected to render its verdict on the $20-billion Teck Resources Frontier mine proposed to push Alberta’s industrialized oilsands landscape farther north.
There’s been a lot of published debate about whether the economics of the big dig make any sense. Less covered has been the environmental toll the project will exact should it proceed.
Last July, the Joint Review Panel assessing the impacts of the project released a 1,335-page report after holding public hearings.
Despite finding “significant adverse effects,” the panel declared that the mammoth project was in the public interest.
It added that the mine “would maximize the value of a product which is essential to everyday life” and provide income for Indigenous peoples of Alberta and Canada. Assuming, that is, oil prices reach $95 a barrel.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
Oil prices currently now sit at $50 a barrel, so that public interest to be traded against natural destruction is far from materializing.
In the meantime, here’s what the panel said the mine will destroy or imperil:
The project will destroy 292 square kilometres of the boreal forest, most of which is prime waterfowl habitat. For reference, that’s nearly three times the size of the city of Vancouver.
The report adds, “The project is likely to result in a significant adverse effect to biodiversity, primarily as a result of the loss of wetlands and old-growth forests.”
There will be a high to moderate loss of habitat for migratory birds whose populations are already dwindling.
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Green Myths Canada’s LNG Sales Force Tells the World
Green Myths Canada’s LNG Sales Force Tells the World
No, methane’s no fix for global coal-fired energy. Here’s why.
Representatives of the British Columbia, Alberta and federal governments are making the global rounds these days to sell the notion that liquefied natural gas exports can help the climate crisis.
Dave Nikolejsin, deputy minister of the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, for example, flew to Japan last September along with members of the Canadian Society for Unconventional Resources.
There they tried to impress upon the Japanese attendees “the role of Canadian LNG in meeting global climate policy objectives and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide.”
The pitch goes like this: According to LNG Canada, the big Shell project now under construction in northern B.C., could replace 20 to 40 coal-fired plants in countries like China and India with Canadian methane, and reduce their emissions by 60 to 90 million tonnes.
That’s impressive, says LNG Canada, because 90 million tons equals about 80 per cent of Canada’s car pollution. Or all of B.C.’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
In fact, Darren Gee, president and CEO of Peyto Exploration, which fracks for gas in B.C., believes Canada has a “moral obligation to provide the rest of the world with the country’s clean, responsibly-developed energy to improve lives and preserve the environment.”
And so, while the blockaders of northern B.C.’s LNG Canada pipeline await police eviction while claiming to stand up for Indigenous sovereignty and climate protection, backers of the project lay claim to their own moral high ground.
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The Quake Threat to Dams Posed by Fracking Was Long Warned
The Quake Threat to Dams Posed by Fracking Was Long Warned
A new trove of internal exchanges shaken loose by Ben Parfitt amplifies decades of safety urgings.
“Why is this so difficult?” a BC Hydro dam safety engineer plaintively asked his superiors seven years ago.
He’d been stymied again in proposing that because the risks of earthquakes caused by fracking were clear, preventing disaster required creating “no frack” zones around dams.
His sense of urgency runs through a long thread of discussions within BC Hydro and the Oil and Gas Commission surfaced by investigative researcher Ben Parfitt.
For years now the two crown agencies have been reluctant to publicly talk about the risks earthquakes triggered by the oil and gas industry pose to critical dam infrastructure throughout northeastern B.C.
But a freedom of information request by Parfitt at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has shed new light on what has been a long and often acrimonious internal debate.
Hundreds of emails, letters, memos and meeting notes released by the utility in response to Parfitt’s request and his just published investigationmake the following important revelations:
Officials at BC Hydro have been concerned about the shale gas industry since 2007 when coal bed methane extraction resulted in seismic activity at the Peace Canyon Dam near Hudson Hope.
The Peace Canyon Dam, which provides six per cent of the province’s electricity, is built on fragile shale rock and wasn’t built to withstand even modest earthquakes.
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Crazy Days in Alberta: The Poison Wells File
Crazy Days in Alberta: The Poison Wells File
The province let oil and gas firms create a $100-billion disaster. They expect you to foot the bill.
Every day something crazy happens in Alberta to illustrate how thoroughly oil politics have eroded the province’s grip on reality.
Judy Aldous, who hosts a province-wide CBC Radio noon show, recently devoted an hour to one particularly crazy item — orphaned and unreclaimed wells in Alberta.
Guest Gary Mar, CEO of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, argued that federal taxpayers fund tax credits for the oilpatch worth $700 million over three years to help pay for the cleanup.
“All Canadians benefited from this industry and all Canadians should be part of the solution,” he said.
An average listener unaware of the history of the province’s derelict well, pipeline and gas plant liability problem might have concluded Mar was being reasonable.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
But Mar, a former provincial Conservative cabinet minister, was really asking for taxpayer’s money to make up for 43 years of misrule by Tory governments. They created the current crisis by failing to require oil and gas companies to provide security deposits to cover their cleanup responsibilities, and by allowing them to put off remediation of inactive wells indefinitely.
That’s how crazy the situation has become in Alberta. Taxpayers are being asked to pay for the failures of government and oil and gas companies by a former politician whose party was responsible for the problem.
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It Bears Repeating: Renewables Alone Won’t End the Climate Crisis
It Bears Repeating: Renewables Alone Won’t End the Climate Crisis
‘We have to look at downsizing, degrowth, using less.’
Although the media still portrays climate change as some vague threat to “the environment,” it is really a self-made blitzkrieg that is already destabilizing a highly energy-intensive and complex human civilization.
Greta Thunberg has spoken prophetically: our civilized house is on fire.
But our collective politicians, blinded by ideology and technological illusions, refuse to panic, let alone call the community fire department.
They behave as though they can just build another house somewhere else on Mars, and then watch the conflagration on Netflix
In that previous analysis, I quoted a Colorado professor, Roger Pielke Jr., who recently noted in Forbes that if we really wanted to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, and we solely choose wind power as the solution, we’d need to build and deploy 1,500 wind turbines on about 300 square miles every day for the next 30 years.
We can’t do that, of course, because of physics and economics. Pielke was simply illustrating the scale of the challenge if we thought that renewables could do all the work for us.
But a great many readers questioned Pielke’s math; others questioned his motivation. Others questioned my sanity in quoting such a fellow.
Having written about energy for 30 years (and my best scribbling on the matter remains The Energy of Slaves), I thought Pielke’s numbers, which can vary with wind power due to location and size of blades, were largely accurate and conveyed the enormity of the task at hand, especially if we think our energy crisis is just a substitution problem.
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