Home » Posts tagged 'thetyee'
Tag Archives: thetyee
Higher-risk ‘Shallow Fracking’ More Common than Suspected: Study
Higher-risk ‘Shallow Fracking’ More Common than Suspected: Study
Lessons for BC, Alberta in new Stanford report.
The study examined the frequency of so-called shallow fracking, described by the researchers as occurring less than a mile underground. Shallow fracking poses a greater risk to drinking water than fracking that occurs much deeper under the Earth’s surface.
Out of 44,000 wells fracked between 2010 and 2013 in the United States, researchers found that 6,900 (16 per cent) were fractured less than a mile from the surface and another 2,600 wells (six per cent) were fractured above 3,000 feet, or 900 metres.
“What surprised me is how often shallow fracturing occurs with large volumes of chemicals and water,” said lead researcher and environmental scientist Robert Jackson in an interview with The Tyee.
The majority of shallow fracking now takes place in Texas, California, Arkansas and Wyoming. Although the study largely excludes Canada, shallow fracking also takes place in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, and sometimes at depths less than 500 metres.
Due to poor data reporting by industry and its regulators, “the occurrence of shallow hydraulic fracturing across the U.S. is underestimated in our analysis,” added the study.
During shallow fractures, the industry injects fluids into vertical or horizontal wells to crack rock directly below or into groundwater. In many reported cases, the resulting fractures can travel up to 556 metres into other hydrocarbon zones, water formations or other energy well sites.
As a result, shallow fractures can connect to aquifers used for drinking water.
“Even fractures that do not extend all the way to an overlying aquifer can link formations by connecting them to natural faults, fissures or other pathways,” explained the study.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Senators Walloped with ‘Intense’ Amount of Anti-C-51 Email
Senators Walloped with ‘Intense’ Amount of Anti-C-51 Email
Words like ‘horrified’ and ‘terrified’ came up frequently, they report.
Many senators say they’ve been stunned by the overwhelming flood of email they’ve received over C-51, the highly controversial Harper government security bill that passed a Senate vote earlier in the month.
The vast majority of the messages expressed firm opposition to the legislation; words like “horrified” and “terrified” came up frequently.
Senator Percy Downe of P.E.I. reports having received 6,000 email messages on the bill, 150 from his home province.
“Normally on an issue of importance I might get 20 or 30 at the most from PEI, so this was a lot more,” he said.
Senator Joan Fraser received approximately 3,100 messages about C-51, while former RCMP officer Senator Larry Campbell only reported receiving a few hundred.
Senator Mobina Jaffer, an international activist for human and women’s rights, has received a whopping 10,000 email messages since May and they continue to trickle in, even though the bill is out of the Senate now.
“But not one letter I got was in favour of C-51 though, and that’s not normal,” she said.
Senator Grant Mitchell, deputy chair of the Senate committee on National Defence and Security, was the lead critic for the Liberal Senate caucus. He also was involved in the Senate’s pre-study of the bill at committee.
He compares his C-51 feedback to the response he got to the Kyoto bill and C-279, NDP MP Randall Garrison’s transgender bill of rights, which Mitchell is co-sponsoring through the Senate.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him
As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him
Students, provinces, investors and unions are taking action. How long can he ignore it?
One of the first things Stephen Harper did after winning a majority in 2011 was to build a system of levees around the Prime Minister’s Office. They weren’t physical levees, of course, like the type designed to keep water from flooding New Orleans. Rather, they were ideological ones, erected on the belief that climate action is at odds with a healthy economy. Surrounded by those levees, Harper did whatever he wanted on climate change, which for the most part meant ignoring it completely.
His Conservative government passed laws to accelerate the growth of Canada’s oil and gas industry, while pledging carbon regulations that never came. He pulled Canada from the Kyoto Protocol, muzzled federal scientists and cut funding to their research, strong-armed the U.S. on bitumen pipelines and set climate targets he had no clear intention of meeting. But something unexpected happened. A frustrated cohort of students, provinces, investors and unions decided to take decisive climate action on its own.
Harper’s done his best to withstand this rising tide. He’s argued that climate is low on the list of “significant challenges,” for instance, after 400,000 people marched for action in New York; that regulating the emissions of polluters is “crazy,” as Ontario readied a system of cap-and-trade; that Canada is a fossil fuel “superpower,” as billions of investment dollars flowed into clean energy; and that taxing carbon is “job-killing,” as Canada’s largest private sector union argued the exact opposite.
Levees don’t break bit by bit. They collapse all at once — and with a destructive fury. The storm surge that breached New Orleans’ defences in 2005 killed 1,800 people. The surge of anti-Tory opinion in Alberta’s recent election swept away a 44-year-old political dynasty. For four years Harper has been governing on climate change, as well as many other issues, from behind a system of ideological levees. As the federal election this fall nears, how long will Harper ignore the forces rising against him?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
More Industry Linked Earthquakes Recorded in Alberta
More Industry Linked Earthquakes Recorded in Alberta
New seismic reporting system ‘a good start’ but ‘not foolproof,’ says hazard expert.
More industry-linked earthquakes have shaken up Alberta’s oil and gas fields in recent weeks from Fox Creek to Peace River, say experts and regulators.
In Fox Creek, Alberta, where industry triggered a 4.4 magnitude earthquake, a company fracking in the Duvernay Formation has reported more tremors.
“On May 28, an operator in the Fox Creek area reported two seismic events, of a magnitude 2.2 and 2.1 respectively,” confirmed Ryan Bartlett, a spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator.
“The events were associated with hydraulic fracturing operations,” said Bartlett, “and were reported to the [regulator] as required by Subsurface Order #2,” a new set of regulations to monitor seismicity set up last February.
In addition, a shallow 3.5 magnitude earthquake occurred near Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta where a history of quick and high-volume gas extraction from the Strachan gas pool has triggered swarms of tremors since 1976.
Gail Atkinson, one of Canada’s foremost experts on earthquake hazards, said the June 2 event near Rocky Mountain House “appears likely to have been triggered by hydraulic fracture operations nearby, though the details of those operations are not yet available.”
The fracking of tight oil formations along the Rocky Mountains, says a recent industry case study, can divert fracking fluids into faults with the risk of “generating induced seismicity of large enough magnitude to be felt at the surface.”
Just northeast of the town of Peace River, residents recently heard a loud boom as two earthquakes shook an area where industry extracts bitumen by injecting steam into the ground. The regulator’s Alberta Geological Survey branch is investigating the events.
“We can’t take things out of the earth and expect things not to move,” said nearby resident and rancher Carmen Langer.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US Federal Report Confirms Water Pollution by Fracking
US Federal Report Confirms Water Pollution by Fracking
Based on limited data, EPA study finds no ‘widespread’ impacts.
Despite being limited by data gaps, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that hydraulic fracturing technology has polluted ground and surface water in cases ranging from Alberta to Pennsylvania.
The 500-page draft report reverses the findings of a 2004 EPA study that concluded that the technology, which involves the high-pressure injection of fluids, gases, chemicals, water and sand into rock formations that hold oil and gas, posed no risk to groundwater.
While the report found that fracking has not led to “widespread” water pollution across the U.S., it does debunk claims that the technology has never contaminated groundwater or that industry never fracks directly into drinking water aquifers.
EPA ON FRACKING: THE 2004 REPORT
The EPA’s first study on the technology, “Evaluation of Impacts to Underground Sources of Drinking Water by Hydraulic Fracturing of Coalbed Methane Reservoirs,” found that fracking was safe and largely reflected the views of the George W. Bush administration.
The report was a government response to complaints and legal challenges related to the impacts of shallow fracking of coal formations across the U.S. — the precursor to the shale gas revolution.
Despite extensive evidence of methane migration into groundwater in Colorado, West Virginia and Alabama, the agency concluded in its 2004 report that “the injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into coalbed methane wells poses little or no threat” to drinking water and “does not justify additional study at this time.”
At the same time the report noted that the coalbed methane industry had not only, in 10 out of 11 coal basins, fracked coal seams containing drinking water, but had done so with toxic fracking fluids, such as diesel fuel.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Libertarian? You Belong on the Left
Libertarian? You Belong on the Left
Watch out, freedom lovers! Conservatives will build the biggest police state they can.
A few dozen freedom-loving libertarians expressed their ”principled” opposition to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Anti-Terrorism Act this week. As the Senate’s final vote on Bill C-51 is delayed to Tuesday, many are sounding off on Harper’s fractured right-wing base.
Historically, libertarians have found themselves lumped in with the far right, presumably because the far right says it doesn’t like big government and neither do libertarians. Hey, libertarians just want to do their own thing and be left alone. Isn’t that what the right wing wants too?
Not exactly. The basic premise of libertarianism is that adults should be free to act as they choose, as long as they harm no one else: believe what they please; say what they think; work where they like; live where they can afford to; sleep with any consenting adults they choose; eat, drink, inhale, and inject themselves with any substance they enjoy. A society so organized, libertarians argue, needs low taxes and a minimal state — just as the Conservatives argue.
But if they question a single tenet of Conservative ideology, libertarians find themselves suddenly dealing with authoritarians who class them with child pornographers and terrorists. Low taxes? They cut your taxes and run up your debt. Small government? Conservatives will build the biggest police state they can get away with — the better to kettle any taxpayers who have second thoughts about Conservative policies.
And those taxpayers have more than cops to fear. Expect the Conservative advocates of lower taxes to launch endless tax audits against you.
Libertarians will grant government at least the power to enforce contracts and defend its citizens with force if need be. Even Ayn Rand, who took the Russian Revolution much too personally and hated violence, admitted as much.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
If Food Is a Right, Who Should Provide It?
If Food Is a Right, Who Should Provide It?
Nearly 850,000 Canadians visited food banks in one month last year.
At a recent public forum in Victoria, B.C. about the right to food, the first audience question was about federal politics and the October election, which put the panelists in an awkward position.
“We all work for charities that are very non-partisan and would never suggest that you vote in any particular way,” said Laura Track, counsel for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, alluding to federal laws that restrict what organizations with charitable status can say.
The June 2 panel included Peggy Wilmot from the advocacy group Faith in Action, Roberta Bell from the Victoria Native Friendship Centre, Rudi Wallace from the Mustard Seed food bank, and Stephen Portman from the Together Against Poverty Society. A similar event with different panelists is planned for Vancouver on June 24.
Track did allow, “I agree that it’s a political issue for sure, and should be an issue in the next election.”
As the author of a soon-to-be-released report, Hungry for Justice: Advancing a Right to Food for Children in BC, she clearly sees ending hunger as a top priority. The report details rising food insecurity in Canada, critiques the treatment of hunger as a matter for charities to deal with, and considers what it would mean to recognize the right to food as a human right.
“The right to food is clearly protected in international human rights agreements that Canada has signed and agreed to uphold,” wrote Track. “But what does it mean to have a ‘right’ to something when that right so often goes unfulfilled?”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Canada Is Endangering Its Natural Wealth
How Canada Is Endangering Its Natural Wealth
Impaired ecosystems leave Canada at an economic disadvantage. A Tyee Solutions excerpt.
It’s an old economic truism that scarcity creates value. In an era when natural capital is disappearing around the globe, it’s also increasingly highly valued. Beyond degrading biological, intrinsic and cultural values, Canada’s ineffective stewardshipof our ecosystems puts at risk billions, potentially trillions of dollars worth of wealth.
As long ago as 1996, Simon Fraser University economist Nancy Olewiler estimated that British Columbia received $2.75 billiona year (adjusted for inflation to 2014) in non-lumber value from its pre-pine-beetled forests, mainly from outdoor recreation, but also from wildlife viewing and recreational fishing and hunting.
More recently, economists have estimated that the ecological services provided by the Mackenzie River watershed in northern Canada are worth some $571 billion a year —thirteen and a half times the region’s official GDP of $42 billion. In 2014 an unknown portion of that wealth went up in smoke when fires consumed vast swaths of boreal forest in the Northwest Territories.
Canadians feared for their natural security, as long ago as 1989 when eight in ten of us agreed at least somewhat in surveys that pollution “threatens the survival of the human race.” The extent of that threat is now much clearer. So is how much we stand to lose.
Wherever economists look, they find that nature’s contribution to Canada’s wealth exceeds what appears in conventional accounts. The value of climate-threatening carbon stored in Manitoba’s 50 million hectares of boreal forest, for example, was assessed last year at $117 billion — 10 times the province’s full budget — not counting recreation, hunting, and other economic contributions.
Toronto’s trees were revealed in a different study to be worth more than $80 million annually, in services that run from energy-saving shade to scrubbing pollutants from the air; that amount was more than the city spent in 2014 on economic development and recreation. The asset value of the urban forest was assessed at $7 billion.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Missing from Canada’s Political Debate: Natural Security
Missing from Canada’s Political Debate: Natural Security
25-year review of Canada’s eco-stewardship reveals neglect across party stripes.
Canada’s prime minister is pre-campaigning with a strong-on-security message. His government is taking measures designed, among other goals, to protect energy infrastructure from what the RCMP has called “violent environmental extremists.”
As I write, enormous forest fires burning out of control across northern Alberta have done what no activist has accomplished: forced the suspension of oilsands operations.
These events capture a dimension missing from Canada’s security debate: our natural security.
Our natural security is physical. It provides the stable, productive environment that has allowed Canada to prosper. In the form of fields and lakes and forests, and in global exchanges of water and energy, natural security underwrites our economy, our health and our ability to maintain the institutions that serve and protect us.
Every one of Canada’s governments since 1989, including the present one, has expressed strong environmental principles and enacted impressive legislation to protect vulnerable species, defend Canadians against pollution and prevent development from devastating critical ecosystems.
Despite those laws, audits and independent assessments persistently warn us that our natural security is degraded, failing and increasingly undefended. And that should concern Canadians of all political stripes.
The wide gap between our aspirations and actions confronted me again and again as I sought an answer to an apparently straightforward question: “How well has Canada cared for our environment — really?”
The year-long search was commissioned by Tyee Solutions Society, an independent journalism production centre started by the founders of this publication and donor-supported. It collated events, laws, international developments and a wide range of public audits and independent assessments over a period in which five prime ministers from three parties occupied 24 Sussex Drive. All of that information is now available and searchable online.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
BC Natural Gas Reserves Inflated, Revenues Overstated, Report Finds
BC Natural Gas Reserves Inflated, Revenues Overstated, Report Finds
Analyst David Hughes offers another challenge to the province’s nascent industry.
A new report on liquefied natural gas prospects for British Columbia challenges government claims that gas exports will lower greenhouse gas emissions, or generate $100 billion in profits for the province.
The report published today by David Hughes, one of Canada’s foremost energy analysts and a former federal government geoscientist, also contends that the provincial government has vastly overestimated the amount of gas available for export.
The National Energy Board has approved 12 export licences to Asia or the United States with another seven under review along the B.C. coast.* The provincial government, which has lowered taxes and royalties to promote the new industry, expects only three to five terminals may be eventually built.
Due to depressed oil prices, global competition and cost over-runs in the capital intensive industry, not one project has yet announced a final investment decision.
Government fact sheets claim, for example, that “British Columbia’s natural gas supply is estimated at over 2,933 trillion cubic feet,” or enough gas to last 150 years.
But Hughes notes the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission estimates raw gas reserves (gas that can be drilled and recovered based on existing economics and well data) for the province at 42.3 trillion cubic feet.
The commission calculates “marketable resources,” or what industry might be able to find, drill and frack — a highly uncertain figure, due to high decline rates and the spotty nature of unconventional shale resources — at 442 trillion cubic feet.
As a result, Hughes calls the government’s inflated figure of 2,933 trillion cubic feet, or 70 times more than proven reserves listed by the commission, “a false and irresponsible statement.”
Windfall profits questioned
Government claims about earning windfall profits from gas exports also have no basis in real economics, Hughes argues in his report.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance
Third chapter in OpenMedia’s crowd-sourced privacy plan.
Some may remember East Germany’s Stasi spy agency, or reference China’s extensive Internet censorship. But few would express fear that western democratic governments like the U.S., Britain, and Canada were engaged in the mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens.
That all changed in June 2013 when Edward Snowden, a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the spying activities of the NSA and its Five Eyes partners in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. Since then, we’ve seen a long stream of revelations about how Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is engaged in extensive spying on private online activities.
To give just a few examples, we learned that CSE spied on law-abiding Canadians using the free Wi-Fi at Pearson airport, and monitored their movements for weeks afterward. We learned that CSE is monitoring an astonishing 15 million file downloads a day, with Canadian Internet addresses among the targets.
Even emails Canadians send to the government or their local MP are monitored — up to 400,000 a day according to CBC News. Just last week we discovered CSE targets widely-used mobile web browsers and app stores. Many of these activities are not authorized by a judge, but by secret ministerial directives like the ones MP Peter MacKay signed in 2011.
CSE is not the only part of the government engaged in mass surveillance. Late last year, the feds sought contractors to build a new monitoring system that will collect and analyze what Canadians say on Facebook and other social media sites. As a result, the fear of getting caught in the government’s dragnet surveillance is one more and more Canadians may soon face.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Latest Privacy Revelations Show It’s Up to Canadians to Protect Themselves
Latest Privacy Revelations Show It’s Up to Canadians to Protect Themselves
The most important self-help step? Get into encryption
Another week, another revelation originating from the seemingly unlimited trove of Edward Snowden documents. Last week, the CBC reported that Canada was among several countries whose surveillance agencies actively exploited security vulnerabilities in a popular mobile web browser used by hundreds of millions of people. Rather than alerting the company and the public that the software was leaking personal information, they viewed the security gaps as a surveillance opportunity.
In the days before Snowden, these reports would have sparked a huge uproar. More than half a billion people around the world use UC Browser, the mobile browser in question, suggesting that this represents a massive security leak. At stake was information related to users’ identity, communication activities, and location data — all accessible to telecom companies, network providers, and surveillance agencies.
Yet coming on the heels of global revelations of surveillance of network exchange points and internet giants along with Canadian disclosures of daily mass surveillance of millions of internet downloads and airport wireless networks, nothing surprises anymore. Instead, there is a resigned belief that privacy on the network has been lost to surveillance agencies who use every measure at their disposal to monitor or gather virtually all communications.
While the surveillance stories become blurred over time, there is an important distinction with the latest reports. The public has long been told that sacrificing some privacy may be part of a necessary trade-off to provide effective security. However, by failing to safeguard the security of more than 500 million mobile users, the Five Eyes surveillance agencies — Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand — have sent the message that the public must perversely sacrifice their personal security as well.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Who Is BC’s Big LNG Partner? A Petronas Primer
Who Is BC’s Big LNG Partner? A Petronas Primer
Group led by Malaysia’s national oil company aims to build terminal near Prince Rupert.
Just one week after the Lax Kw’alaams band rejected a $1-billion offer by Petronas to build a liquefied natural gas terminal at the mouth of the Skeena River in British Columbia, Premier Christy Clark has signed an agreement with Malaysia’s national oil company to “establish the path to a final investment decision on the project.”
Part of that path includes a long-term commitment by the provincial government not to raise natural gas royalties, regardless of changes in global prices for the commodity.
Natural gas, like oil, is one of the world’s most volatile commodities in price.
“With this certainty, industry can plan their operations over a longer period of time and commit capital to jobs and production needs, while the Province has a guaranteed royalty revenue each year,” said a government news release.
Pacific NorthWest LNG, which is largely owned by Petronas, has yet to make a final investment decision, and the proposed multibillion-dollar project near Prince Rupert must still pass an environmental review.
Just what kind of company is Petronas, and what’s its relationship to the Malaysian government? The Tyee looked at the public record.
1. The government of Malaysia set upthe national oil company in 1974 when oil prices jumped from $1.50 to $12. The government did so with the goal of safeguarding “the sovereign rights of Malaysia and the legitimate rights and interests of Malaysians in the ownership and development of petroleum resources.” The company’s success has helped the government to reach out to the Muslim world.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
