The Narwhal | News on Climate Change, Environmental Issues in Canada

Has Stephen Harper Helped or Hindered The Oil Industry?

James Wilt — Mon, 04 May 2015 21:27:41 +0000

At an estimated 2,700 litres, the bunker fuel spill in English Bay was relatively small — yet the stakes of that spill couldn’t be much higher.

With Enbridge and Kinder Morgan both hoping to build oil pipelines to B.C., which would significantly increase oil tanker traffic in the province’s inside coastal waters, a dramatically mishandled marine oil spill raises all sorts of questions — questions the federal government does not appear well-positioned to answer, despite its aggressive push for West Coast oil exports.

“Obviously, from the oil industry’s perspective, you couldn’t have picked a worse place to have an oil spill,” Jim Stanford, economist at Unifor and founder of the Progressive Economics Forum, told DeSmog Canada.

While the federal government insisted its response was “world-class,” a former commander of the shuttered Kits Coast Guard station blamed the six-hour delay in even deploying a boom to contain the oil on the closure of that station in 2013 — a move that is reported to have saved the federal government at estimated $700,000 a year.

The English Bay spill, beyond being a systemic failure, has been a total PR disaster.

“It’s a very dramatic indication of the failure of our environmental safeguards around transportation and energy,” Stanford said.

Will The Real Energy Superpower Please Stand Up

Canada’s aggressive “energy superpower” push — a Harper government priority that has been accompanied by the elimination of environmental laws— has drawn criticism from all corners, and not just domestically.

The Obama administration indicated the fate of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, which has been caught in a protracted review process for six years, was intrinsically tied up with the oilsands’ growing greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union came close to labelling oilsand’s crude as high-carbon due to its energy-intensive extraction and refining process (that move was thwarted by intensive lobbying by the Canadian and Albertan governments).

Back at home, the undercutting of environmental reviews and elimination of environmental laws has resulting in growing citizen concern about Canada’s oilsands development and record on climate change, as demonstrated by recent climate and pipeline protests.

Martha Hall Findlay, former Liberal MP and executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, says the federal government has blown the environmental file.

“You don’t poke people in the eye when the rest of the world is saying there are significant environmental concerns,” she said.

“I think it’s smart to acknowledge that and address it. Our current federal government has done the opposite in many ways. And, importantly, have been seen to be doing the opposite. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a factor in Obama’s decision on Keystone.”

With Friends Like These Who Needs Protesters?

What’s become clearer is that such a myopic approach to policymaking has created difficult conditions for the extractive industries.

“The Harper government’s bloody-mindedness on environmental issues has actually done more to bog down large resource projects than anything the environmental movement could have done,” Rick Smith, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, said.

“What it’s done is make First Nations, local communities and environmentalists feel marginalized and angry.”

Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada echoed the sentiment, saying complaints are now likely to emerge from beyond the protest crowd: “If the government won’t listen to Canadians about it, they’re soon going to have to listen to our would-be customers.”

While there’s some significant progress occurring on the provincial front on the climate change file, that can’t make up for the lack of federal leadership.

“People outside Canada don’t necessarily understand the nuances of the different levels of governance within the country,” notes Anthony Heyes, University of Ottawa economics professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Economics. “Outsiders see it as a country that has a relatively disappointing record in not just greenhouse gas emissions in an absolute way, but also against international commitments..”

Hall Findlay added that if the federal government had followed the lead of the provinces, Keystone XL might have been approved. But at this point, piecemeal climate commitments from the provinces might not be enough.

An associated problem is the fact that Harper bet the economy on the success of the oil and gas sector (Thomas Walkom put it nicely in a piece for the Toronto Star: “Harper has his own unspoken industrial policy. It can be summed up in a word: pipelines.”)

Stanford suggests that such infatuation has come at the cost of other industries — manufacturing, tourism, transportation — due to the high dollar being pegged to an extremely volatile resource.

“You would have needed a government with the foresight and courage to actively push against that in order to protect our environment, obviously, but also our economic diversity and long-run prosperity instead of riding the bandwagon as they did,” he said.

Stanford notes that the employment rate is currently as low as it was in the summer of 2009, the worst moment of the global recession. That’s got to sting for a party that advertises its leader as a trained economist — not an elitist lawyer or under-qualified teacher.

Ultimately, Harper’s mismanagement of the energy and environment file — and most importantly the nexus of those two things — might be more of a gift than a burden for those who want to see progress on climate change.

“In a way, the fact that Stephen Harper has burned any semblance of federal environmental regulation to the ground is an opportunity for Canadians to rebuild something at the federal level that’s new, truly modern and forward thinking,” Smith says.

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Blame Canada Part 2: Canada’s Plan to Get Rich by Trashing the Climate

Stephen Leahy — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:30:18 +0000

Blame Canada is a four part series revealing how Canada has become a wealthy, fossil-fuelled energy superpower and an international climate pariah. Part 1 reveals Canada's emergence as a Petrostate, part 3 shows how energy 'wealth' contributes to the nation's poverty and part 4 asks What is Happening to Canada?

Like every other country in the world, Canada has promised to help keep global warming to less than 2 degrees C. However Canada's political and corporate leadership are committed to turning the country into a fossil-fuelled “energy superpower.” With a drug lord's just-providing-a-service hypocrisy Canada has openly declared it's future is tied to the profits from dumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of climate-heating carbon into the atmosphere every year.

And the world's new energy superpower plans to grow those annual emissions to 1.5 billion tonnes by 2020 giving one of the least populated countries a gigantic carbon bootprint.

Most of this climate-wrecking carbon energy will come from Canada's tar sands located just underneath the pristine boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta. The oil industry likes to call them “oil sands,” although there is no liquid oil only a tarry bitumen mixed deep in the sandy soil.

With an estimated 170 billion barrels, the tar sands are the third largest crude oil reserves. Extraordinary efforts involving colossal amounts of water, heat, chemicals and machinery are needed to get the bitumen out of the ground and into pipelines. This the world's largest industrial project with more than $300 billion invested since 2001 by the oil industry.

Nowhere has fossil energy expansion or investment been faster or larger. Environmental activists call it "Canada's Mordor."

While the tar sands may be located in Canada, more than two-thirds of all oil production is owned by foreign entities. China alone has put $36 billion into tar sands development. Now another $15.1 billion can be added with the Chinese state-owned firm CNOOC Ltd takeover of Calgary, Alberta oil and gas producer Nexen Inc in February.

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Even “Canadian” oil companies like Suncor are predominately owned by non-Canadians, which means that a majority of the industry's profits are sent out of the country, according to a recent analysis of stockholdings by a Canadian conservation group.

In 1999 the tar sands produced 300,000 barrels of heavy crude oil a day. Now it’s up to 1.6 million barrels a day, and expected to increase to 2.4 million by 2017 and 4 to 5 million a day by 2020. And there's much more to come. An incredible $2.077 trillion is expected to be invested expanding and maintaining the tar sands over the next 25 years, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute.

Virtually all of the current tar sands crude flows south to the US via existing pipelines. Increasing production requires new pipelines such as the controversial Keystone XL and Northern Gateway.

Keystone XL is TransCanada Pipelines $7 billion project is designed to carry 800,000 barrels of tarry, unrefined oil every day 2,400 kilometres south through the US heartland to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Most of the refined oil is expected to go to non-US markets. Since it crosses national borders only President Obama can approve it by declaring that the pipeline serves US "national interest."

Obama's decision is expected this summer.

There are other pipelines proposals to move bitumen out of Alberta. The $5.4 billion TransMountain to bring up to 900,000 barrels to Burnaby, British Columbia. There are two proposals to go east all the way to Montreal and New England. One of these, Enbridge's “Line 9” proposal involves reversing the flow of a 37-year old pipeline. Public hearings are underway and it may be approved as soon as 2014.

These pipelines are needed in order for tar sands to reach its expansion goals of 4 to 5 million barrels a day by 2020.

Fracking Up Canada's Wilderness

Although the tar sands gets most of the media attention, Alberta is also one the world's largest suppliers of natural gas from conventional and unconventional gas reserves. In 2000 there were less than 100 gas wells that tapped "unconventional" natural gas. Today Alberta Environment, a provincial agency, counts 176,000 multistage hydraulic fracturing sites. US EPA estimates 35,000 wells are fracked in the US each year.

For two decades Alberta ranchers and farmers have been dealing with water and air contamination from oil and gas drilling. “What used to be a pleasant farming landscape just five years ago has morphed into a semi-industrial area. There are now more than twelve oil and gas sites within a four mile radius of the farm,” writes Paul Slomp about his family's farm.

Farmers and other landowners will no longer be able to refuse oil and gas activity on their land under Alberta's Bill 2, the “Responsible Energy Development Act.” Under this law landowners will no longer have their concerns heard at public hearings nor can they appeal to an independent review panel. Bill 2 and other laws are forcing Alberta's agriculture communities to shift from food production to resource extraction says Slomp.

British Columbia The New LNG Empire

Next door to Alberta is the province of British Columbia (BC), world famous for its pristine and rugged wilderness. BC's northeast is where some of the biggest shale gas operations in North America are getting started. Shale rock formations there contain hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that can only be tapped by fracking.

BC's Horn River basin may hold 165 trillion cubic feet of gas while another region called Montney is estimated to have 49 trillion cubic feet, according to an April 2011 report by the US Energy Information Administration.

"Northeastern British Columbia is a key habitat for grizzly bears, caribou and others. Fracking operations are moving into untouched areas, building roads, drill pads and wastewater ponds," says Tria Donaldson of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, an environmental NGO based in Vancouver.

About 90 percent of the gas currently produced in British Columbia is exported to US or sent to Alberta, where it is used to boil the tarry bitumen out of the millions of tons tar sands. A massive expansion of shale gas operations is underway due to the recent approvals to build a liquefied natural gas plants (LNG) on BC's coast, at Kitimat. Korea Gas, Shell, Mitsubishi Corp and Petro-China are involved in a $12 billion project to liquefy 1.2 billion cubic feet per day and load it on LNG tankers for lucrative Asian markets.

At least nine other multi-billion dollar LNG export terminals have been proposed. The BC government is banking on having five export terminals operational by 2020 and collect a yearly royalty and tax bonanza estimated at $6 to $7 billion, or about 15% of the government's current budget.

As with Alberta's tar sands, the scale of BC's proposed gas development is staggering. Roads, well pads, disposal pits, pipelines, worker's housing would affect and fragment 7,500 sq km of land — an area nearly three times the size of Metro Vancouver.

The massive increase in fracking will put new burdens on the region’s fresh water resources. "Fracking is using huge amounts of fresh water in a region that suffers water shortages," Donaldson says.

Millions of liters of water are needed for each well. The gas industry has obtained rights to take 275 million liters every day from local rivers, lakes and streams. In 2011 sixteen companies were fined in for failing to account for how much water they were taking. According to media reports, the fines were less than $1,000.

Water holding facilities in BC. Images from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report, Fracking Up BC.

“Green ” Vancouver North America's biggest exporter of coal

Canada is also tapping into its coal deposits, the fifth largest in the world. Close to 30 million tons of coal exported each year mostly from from BC and Alberta.

BC is also Canada's main coal export hub, with three coal export terminals including Westshore, the busiest coal export terminal in North America. However the Port of Vancouver plans to double its coal exports and build another coal terminal on the Fraser river, turning the “green city” of Vancouver into North America's biggest exporter of coal.

Despite pledges to act on global warming, Canada intends to add billions of tonnes of CO2 to the overheating atmosphere. Four million barrels per day of tar sands oil by 2020 translates into one billion tons of CO2 over a year from tar sands extraction and burning the resulting fuels. Add in Canada's natural gas production – estimated at half billion tons of CO2 annually by 2020 for production and burning. Top it off with 80 to 100 million tonnes of CO2 from coal and 'normal' domestic emissions of half a billion tonnes and viola: Canada the 2.0 billion-tonne CO2 monster.

Keeping global temperatures below 2C requires a global CO2 diet that sheds 6 to 10 billion tons below 2011 levels by 2020 according to the latest science. And the diet must continue to push emissions lower every year thereafter.

What's Canada's excuse going to be to the world and future generations?

Lead blog image credit: ERCB. Tar Sands photo: Kris Krug via flickr.

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Canadian Scientists Must Speak Out Despite Consequence, Says Andrew Weaver

Carol Linnitt — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:00:00 +0000

“If people don’t speak out there will never be any change,” says the University of Victoria’s award-winning climate scientist Andrew Weaver.

And the need for change in Canada, says Weaver, has never been more pressing.

“We have a crisis in Canada. That crisis is in terms of the development of information and the need for science to inform decision-making. We have replaced that with an ideological approach to decision-making, the selective use of whatever can be found to justify [policy decisions], and the suppression of scientific voices and science itself in terms of informing the development of that policy.”

Since 2007 – when the Harper government established strict communications procedures for federal scientists – journalists, academics and scientific organizations have watched the steady decline of government transparency as a message management strategy usurps what was once the free flow of federal scientific information. Why Government Science Matters There are three ways science is conducted in Canada, says Weaver: in universities, in private industry, and in government laboratories. As far as industry is concerned, he says, research is conducted for the purpose of shareholder profit or to advance the position of the company in one way or another. Academic research –conducted in universities by professors and graduate students – is what Weaver calls “curiosity driven research.” Federal government research is “research done in the public good.” “There are certain projects, long term monitoring for example, that will never get done at a university where you have students come and go and university professors move,” says Weaver. “These projects will also not be done by industry where they might not necessarily be in the best interests of some shareholders if, for example, the company gets bought up or moved.” Weaver says the burden of public-interest research lies solely with the government. It is the only entity suited to the challenge of transforming evidence-based science into improved public policy. It is also the government’s opportunity to demonstrate to the public where their hard-earned tax dollars are being directed. “It’s important for the taxpayer to know what their funding is being used for,” says Weaver. “When the government is conducting science it is fundamentally important that taxpayers knows what science is being done and also that other scientists know what science is being done so science can evolve.” Two things happen when science communication is suppressed, he adds. The first is science fails to evolve. The second is that “public interest or public value in science diminishes.” The suppression of scientific communication we are seeing in Canada, says Weaver, “can be viewed as undermining the role of science in society and the role of science in decision-making.” There is an underlying explanation for this, he says. It is the current government’s energy superpower agenda, where science “can at times conflict with approaches to policy making.” Therein lies the rub. “This is why scientists in both universities and at the federal level are so aghast at what has been going in Canada during the last few years. It’s the muzzling of scientists, the shutting down of key federal science programs that were involved in monitoring for the public good, and the reliance of the government on industry to do monitoring for itself. As a member of the general public this concerns me.” This concerns Weaver most because of the crucial relationship between science and democracy. “Science can never proscribe policy,” he says. “It’s really important that scientists and the public know that. Science never says this is the policy we should implement. But what science is there to do is to inform those policy discussions. You make the policy based on evidence.” “What you cannot do in a democratic society is suppress evidence because then you’re into propaganda and ideology. And this is what is happening in Canada. Evidence used to inform society – to determine whether we are in favour of a policy or not – is suppressed. And the media’s access to that evidence is suppressed.” “The fallout is that media can no longer serve the role it should in a functioning democratic society: to inform the general public about the issues involved in making policy and to hold our elected leaders accountable for the information and policies that they put in place.” “We have a problem,” says Weaver, when the “silencing of science throws a wedge into our democratic process.” “We Cannot Stand By” Weaver says that federal scientists, especially those recently ousted from their public servant positions, are ideally situated to oppose what many have characterized the Harper government’s attack on science. “I do not accept that they cannot speak out. I think they need to muster the courage to tell it like it is. There are federal scientists who can tell it like it is. I recognize that there are consequences but you know what? This is a crisis and you can’t rely on a few individuals outside the federal government to speak up.” Get the public sector employees union engaged, says Weaver, and “stop cowering behind the façade of ‘I can’t speak or I’ll be disciplined.’” Weaver, these days, is in no mood to entertain silence because of the threat of reprimand. The stakes are just too high and the need for change too great. Even the public, says Weaver, is fighting on the scientists’ behalf. For that and many other reasons scientists cannot ignore their own plight. “They need to get engaged.” “I feel strongly about that because when anybody speaks up, of course, there are always consequences. But if people don’t speak out there will never be any change.” No matter our mild-mannered reputation, “we cannot stand by and watch what is happening to our scientific institutions and to the role of federal government science without standing up.” The days of protecting one’s own little turf and hoping someone else’s will be cut are over, says Weaver. In particular, the cuts are so deep and so devastating to monitoring programs that “everyone needs to recognize that what is happening in Canada is hurting all Canadians and we need to work together on this.” One need only point to the systematic dismantling of Canada’s ocean contaminants program to see what Weaver means. In May, the Harper government announced the marine contaminants program had to go. More than 50 employees were told their services had been terminated effective April 1, 2013. The loss of this program came with a massive reduction of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which lost over 1,000 employees in one fell swoop. “Look what is happening,” says Weaver. “We’re shutting down the ocean contaminants program in Canada, right across the nation. Canada no longer has a marine contaminants program. Oh, that’s convenient. Why would we want such programs when we might find nasty things, nasty toxins in the water that might actually cause us to not put pipelines across British Columbia or put tankers on the coast?” This is the cost of our silence, according to Weaver. “This is what happens when people don’t speak out. The next is the smokestack emissions group shut down. Why? We don’t want to monitor those emissions. Let industry monitor those emissions. We have the Experimental Lakes Area shut down. Why? We’d rather have industry look at that, we don’t need pristine areas for federal government and other scientists to work at.” Canada on the International Stage While the Harper government scales back the science in the country, we seem to be ramping up production of unconventional fuel sources, both with fracking for shale gas, most notably in B.C. and Alberta, and with the extraction of tar sands bitumen. At the same time, Canada has experienced a considerable flagging of the nation’s reputation on the international stage. Canada, once widely beloved as a peace-keeping bastion of diplomatic good will, is now seen on the world stage as a climate laggard, saboteur of the Kyoto Accord, and obstructionist of international environmental talks. “It’s embarrassing,” says Weaver. “It’s quite sad.” Like many Canadians, Weaver remembers a time when American backpackers would pin Canadian flags on their bags. “Things are a little different now,” he says. “As Canadians we’re not viewed like we were in the past. We’re viewed like we have a government that believes we are more militaristic than other nations; a nation that is built on the exploitation of a natural resource; that come hell or high water were going to extract and sell to Asia and that we don’t really care about environmental issues.” “This does not bode well for Canada’s long term international influence.” The fact that the Prime Minister and his administration seem hell-bent on removing any obstacles to tar sands expansion and exports seems to confirm the negative sentiments. “We’re so myopic in our vision that we’re just going to get that bitumen out of the ground, we’re going to ship it in pipelines to Asia as fast as we can. Let’s get it out, make money now. Who cares about the future, or future generations? Let’s do it now, for today. Let’s live the high life now.” “This is not economically sustainable, this is not fiscally sustainable, this is not socially sustainable and this is not environmentally sustainable. This is madness. But this is what we’re doing in Canada and this is the path our current government is taking while removing any barriers that might actually stop it from happening.” “This is a crisis of democracy.”

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