Political donations made to the BC Liberals under the name of a prominent Teck Resources lobbyist were actually made by the company and were registered in error, according to the company.

A joint investigation between DeSmog Canada and University of Victoria researcher Nick Graham of the Corporate Mapping Project uncovered seven Teck Resources registered lobbyists who have also donated to the BC Liberals.

According to the Elections BC database, Carleigh Whitman, manager of government relations for Teck Resources, made personal contributions totaling $4,275 to the BC Liberals.

Political donations by lobbyists are in the spotlight after a Globe and Mail investigation revealed some lobbyists are being reimbursed for their contributions, a practice that is illegal in B.C., a province with some of the weakest political donation laws in the country.

Last week Elections BC launched an investigation into the matter and, after receiving additional complaints regarding personal donations, it has now referred the investigation to the RCMP.

When asked if Teck Resources reimbursed Whitman for her donation to the BC Liberals, Chris Stannell, senior communications specialist for Teck, said the contributions “were listed in error as being made by an individual.”

“They were donations made by Teck and paid using a Teck corporate credit card,” Stannell wrote to DeSmog Canada in an e-mail.

“Our practice is to report all such administrative errors and request a correction as soon as we are made aware of them,” he said.

Stannell said the company does not make donations through individuals.

The BC Liberals previously admitted “there has been confusion” about how donations from individuals are registered in the party’s system because some donations made on the behalf of a company or special interest are not categorized as such.

Donations made on the BC Liberal website through a personal credit card are automatically registered as a personal contribution, even though the donation may have been intended to be made on a corporation’s behalf.

A spokesperson for the BC Liberals did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to Whitman, six other Teck Resources lobbyists have also made personal donations to the BC Liberals.

Mark Edwards (donations: $4,500)

James Fraser (donations: $1,186)

Mark Reder (donations: $3,465)

Marcia Smith (donations: $2,975)

Tom Syer (donations: $730)

Alexa Young (donations: $1,900)

Teck Resources declined to comment further on donations made by these six other individuals. The company also did not respond to questions regarding when Teck became aware of the donations being “listed in error” or when Teck reported such inaccuracies to the BC Liberals.

Teck Resources is the largest donor to the BC Liberals. Since 2008 Teck has donated $1,502,444 to the BC Liberals and $60,090 to the BC NDP. Since 2010, Norman Keevil, chair of the board for Teck, has personally donated $65,585 to the BC Liberals.

The company reported $8.3 billion in revenue in 2015 and operates five metallurgical mines in B.C. as well as an oilsands mine in Alberta.

Thirty Additional Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Contributed to BC Liberals

In total, 37 fossil fuel lobbyists from the 10 most prolific lobbying firms have donated to the BC Liberals since 2010.

Donations from these lobbyists total more than $116,000 with some individuals donating more than $11,000 through multiple small contributions.

The top 10 most active lobbying firms in the fossil fuel sector include the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Chevron Canada, Enbridge, Encana, FortisBC, Spectra Energy, Teck Resources and TransCanada.

Several of the lobbyists work under the employment of government relations firms including National Public Relations and Earnscliffe. Both firms did not respond to requests for comment on their policy regarding reimbursement for political donations.

DeSmog Canada also reached out to several of the top donors for comment, but those requests went unanswered.

BC Liberal Political Donations from Top Fossil Fuel Lobbyists April 2010 – March 2017 by DeSmog Canada on Scribd

Image: Teck Resources via Facebook

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We’ve all seen a chart like it: logos of corporations connected by thin lines to other logos, linking dozens of subsidiaries to spin-offs of even larger companies.

But such diagrams — whether they attempt to illustrate the concentration of media ownership or linking music record companies to arms manufacturers — rarely involve Canada or the fossil fuel companies that dominate lobbying and other political efforts.

The Corporate Mapping Project, co-directed by Shannon Daub of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and William Carroll of the University of Victoria, aims to remedy that.

“We need to have a conversation about how these forms of concentrated power can be problematic for democratic processes in terms of decision-making and the citizenry collectively determining its future,” says Carroll, sociology professor at the University of Victoria.

“To the extent that you have very strong concentrations of corporate power in key sectors of the economy, it limits the boundaries of permissible discourse: what can be said, what can be discussed openly.”

Project Maps 238 Fossil Fuel Companies in Canada

The Corporate Mapping Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, just concluded the first of its six years.

In that time, the project analyzed more than $50 million in corporate assets and “mapped” 238 Canadian corporations centred in the fossil fuel sector (which linked out to a total of 1,258 total corporations based in Canada and abroad).

Going far beyond simply connecting, say, Suncor and Syncrude, the project examines companies at the level of governance, tracking what Carroll dubs the “elite networks” of corporate executives and directors.

The project features another three strands that will be explored over the course of the next half-decade.

One will examine the reach of corporate influence into civil and political society, impacting and helping shape entities like think tanks, foundations, industry groups, lobby groups, universities and research institutes. A subsect of that will explore how corporations push certain discourses via advertising, corporate social responsibility reports and press releases.

Another will look at commodity chains, how power is organized within chains of production and the “flashpoints” of protest such as anti-Northern Gateway blockades and less place-specific movements such as fossil fuel divestment campaigns.

Corporate Connections to be Posted on Wiki Community

Rounding out the quartet will be the actual collection and transmitting of the learnings.

Carroll says an online interactive tool will be developed with a wiki community to keep it up to date, similar to how data is presented by the Public Accountability Initiative (a U.S. nonprofit that research connections between corporations and government).

There are a dozen or so co-investigators that form the core team for the Corporate Mapping Project. Partners include Unifor, the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of Lethbridge and the University of Regina.

It’s a sizable project. As Carroll notes, such resources are much needed given the changing landscape of new provincial and federal governments, the collapse in the global price of oil and the recent Paris climate change agreement.

Then there’s the fierce debate over TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, pitting Alberta’s NDP government against Indigenous communities, climate activists and the provinces of Québec and Ontario.

TransCanada used ‘Bullying’ and ‘Attempts to Buy People Out’

It’s a situation that well represents why the Corporate Mapping Project is so needed, and why its organizers are bringing Éric Pineault — sociology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal and author of the recently released "The Energy East Trap" — to Vancouver and Victoria for a series of free lectures titled “Extreme Oil: Corporate Power, Tar Sands Expansion, and the Capitalist Pressure to Extract.”

Pineault says TransCanada started its pitch for Energy East to local residents with “bullying and trying buy people out.”

Documents leaked to Greenpeace show TransCanada hired public relations giant Edelman to concoct a fake grassroots advocacy campaign designed to persuade the public to support Energy East. The scandal led TransCanada and Edelman to eventually part ways.

Since the federal Liberal government was elected, the company has entered a “seduction phase,” according to Pineault. But the underlying intentions of the company — which also owns the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — is the same: to increase shareholder value.

Such an ownership structure means the “progressive extractivism” agenda that suggests increased hydrocarbon production is required to fund the transition to a “greener economy” is almost doomed to fail.

“It ties you in and can co-opt…your transition.” He added, “I think [Alberta’s] Notley government is going in that direction.”

Private Ownership Makes Transition to Renewables Far More Difficult

Pineault argues that pipelines such as Energy East will likely be around for many decades and suck up investment, research efforts and competent workers that could otherwise be directed to renewable projects. In addition, efficiencies may be developed to “green” hydrocarbon production instead of cutting down on emissions from heating and transportation.

“If it was a publically controlled sector, then you could plan this phase-in, phase-out approach,” he says. “You can’t do that with private capital: they consider they’re sitting on assets that are worth billions and the value of these assets must be realized on a 60- or 70-year cycle.”

“They’re going to do everything they can to keep that cycle going as long as they can.”

Which is why it seems fairly important to know who’s calling the shots, what kind of tactics are being deployed and what entities are being potentially harnessed to promote a company’s agenda.

That’s where the Corporate Mapping Project comes in. After all, it’s pretty difficult to break those thin lines if you don’t even know they exist.

Tickets to Pineault’s free lectures are available online. RSVP details below:

Vancouver:

Wednesday May 18, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

SFU Harbour Centre (Hastings & Seymour)

Free but you need a ticket: http://www.ccpabc.ca/extreme_oil_van

Victoria:

Friday May 20, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Legacy Gallery (630 Yates St)

Free but you need a ticket: http://www.ccpabc.ca/extreme_oil_victoria

Image: Suncor/Facebook

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The end of the fossil fuel era is being signalled loud and clear here at the Paris climate conference as ministers enter the final hours of negotiations.

It's crunch time and everyone is saying the elements needed for an ambitious deal are still on the table. An essential part of this includes establishing a clear long-term goal to guide investor confidence toward a low-carbon society.

And with a 1.5C degree target option currently alive in the text, along with words such as ‘decarbonisation’ and ‘carbon neutral’, the signal couldn’t be clearer.

“The message that we expect this conference to send investors in the fossil fuel industry is get out now,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “There is no future in fossil fuels.”

Pointing to the 1.5C target, Kasia Kosonen from Greenpeace added: “We are now for the first time really having a serious debate around strengthening the temperature target to 1.5C and recognising that 2C is already too much. This de facto means that we are talking about moving away from fossil fuels in a short period of time.”

Policy Framework

And it’s not just those inside the negotiations that are looking for clarity. Businesses have also been calling for a clear long term goal, stressing its importance for investors.

As Michael Jacobs, senior advisor at the New Climate Economy project, explained: “Emissions will be cut through the application of investment and technology in a whole series of infrastructure projects… that’s how you actually do this. And the piece of paper that will be signed is a push to those processes but it doesn’t guarantee them."

“The way it pushes them is it requires government to respond to goals by putting in place policies which will then help drive investment, and demand creation, and technological innovation.”

Alden Meyer, strategy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, agreed – and he’s been to virtually all the major climate talks since 1995.

He explained that a Paris deal must send a clear signal to the global industry that investments can shift from high-polluting industries towards clean energy – a trend he said we were already witnessing. 

“That will affect their decisions on trillions of dollars of asset investments,” Meyer told The Guardian. “If they think that governments are serious about going where the science says we need to go, then they will respond in kind. If they think that governments are wishy-washy, and are wobbling or uncertain, then they will hedge their bets.”

It seems the oil and gas industry is at the very least hearing what’s being said. But will it listen?

The Industry's Future

We’re already seeing dramatic shifts in the energy market signalling the end of coal. According to estimates by commercial intelligence company Wood Mackenzie more than 65 per cent of the world’s coal production is unprofitable as prices decline for the fifth year in a row.

Last Friday at a side-event inside the COP21 delegates’ space, oil executives from Shell, Total, and Statoil, along with industry trade bodies, sat down to discuss the future of their industry. While there was little talk of renewables, the industry figures recognised that there was strong global pressure to cut fossil fuel emissions.

Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of Virginia-based non-profit C2ES – and who was described as being close to negotiators – explained: “Paris has already sent many signals… The [pledges], the presence of world leaders, the agreement itself… [and] the debate on long term goals such as the decarbonisation of the economy.”

He continued: “If all of that comes together what we’ll have is a reshaped, reframed political and policy context. The question for all stakeholders is how do we engage coming out of Paris to achieve the transformation we keep talking about?”

Jean-Francois Gagne, head of technology policy division at the International Energy Agency, told industry figures in the room: “We have to realise the rate at which we decarbonise is going to have to increase, so we need to think about [what we invest in] in the future.”

Solutions which “would give credibility” to the industry, he said, included energy efficiency and renewables, as well as ending coal and reducing methane emissions from gas.

As Margaret Mistry, sustainability communications leader at Statoil, added: “We need to relate to the climate goals that people are talking about outside of our industry. Whether it’s two degrees or net zero emissions. It’s important to speak the same language.”

“From our point of view,” she continued, “the stronger the agreement the better. What we’re seeking is predictability and investment signals. The more certainty… the better it is for us to plan our business.”

Photo: UN Climate Change via Flickr

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The shift away from coal and towards renewable sources of energy is slowly beginning to gain traction, two recently-released reports from American and global energy agencies show.

“The biggest story is in the case of renewables,” International Energy Agency executive director, Fatih Birol, told the Guardian as this year's World Energy Outlook was released. “It is no longer a niche. Renewable energy has become a mainstream fuel, as of now.”

Almost half of the new power generation added in 2014 came from wind, solar, wave or tidal energy, the report found, and renewables now represent the world's second largest source of electricity after coal. Coal, whose share of the world's energy mix has been rising since 2000, has peaked, the agency indicated, predicting that within two decades, renewable energy sources will replace coal as the backbone of the world's electricity source.

Domestically, the growth of renewable energy has been especially pronounced in Texas and other states long famous for their drilling and mining histories, data released by the U.S.-based Energy Information Administration shows.

Texas has become the largest wind-power supplier in the country, helping to slash as much carbon from the state's emissions in 2013 as both Vermont and New Hampshire combined produced that year, if Texas had gotten that power through burning an equal mix of coal and natural gas instead of wind.

Still, the transition away from fossil fuels is coming too slowly to prevent catastrophic climate change, the IEA warned.

"There are unmistakeable signs that the much-needed global energy transition is underway," the agency wrote in its report, "but not yet at a pace that leads to a lasting reversal of the trend of rising CO2 emissions."

For the world to have a shot at keeping emissions below the 2 degree of warming threshold, the agency identified five key steps: the least-efficient coal plants must be banned, many fossil fuel subsidies must be ended, infrastructure like buildings and transportation need efficiency improvements, investment in renewable power must rise from $270 billion in 2014 to $400 billion by 2030, and methane leaks from oil and gas companies must be slashed.

The good news? Those measures could be taken at "no net economic cost," the agency concluded.

All told, this year, renewable energy sources represented over 17 percent of the U.S. electrical generating capacity — an unprecedentedly high number, but still far less than fossil fuels.

Remaining dependent on fossil fuels brings economic as well as environmental risks. The IEA warned that while oil prices remain low currently, the cost of a barrel is expected to roughly double over time, and that in some situations, the world's oil industry would be vulnerable to shocks that cause oil prices to spike.

But many policy makers have yet to absorb this message. Despite concerns about the environmental and economic prospects for fossil fuels, the oil, gas, and coal industries continue to benefit from roughly four times the amount of government subsidies as the renewable energy sector, the IEA said.

"[W]e estimate this global subsidy bill [for fossil fuel consumption] at around $490 billion in 2014, although it would have been around $610 billion without reforms enacted since 2009," the agency wrote. "Subsidies to aid the deployment of renewable energy technologies in the power sector were $112 billion in 2014 (plus $23 billion for biofuels)."

Not Just CO2

While energy agencies are primarily focused on carbon emissions, evidence is growing that methane leaks from oil and gas drilling, fracking, pipelines, and other infrastructure pose a grave climate threat that the U.S. government has underestimated.

"Because of the increase in shale gas development over recent years, the total greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use in the USA rose between 2009 and 2013, despite the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions," Prof. Robert Howarth, a scientist whose pioneering work on methane emissions suggests that burning natural gas — which the IEA predicts will be the only fossil fuel to gain market share — may be even worse for the climate than burning coal, wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Energy and Emission Control Technologies. 

Methane, especially from shale gas sites, is leaking from the gas industry at a far higher rate than previously believed, Howarth said, writing that while the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that leak rates are just 1.8 percent, those conclusions are based in part on flawed data collection.

The true methane leak rate, Howarth concluded after reviewing the available research, may in fact be more than 10 times that rate in some cases — and on average,12 percent.*

There are some signs that energy experts worldwide are increasingly taking note of the hazards of methane leaks.

"Emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, along the supply chain will dent the environmental credentials of gas if there is no concerted policy action to tackle these leaks," the IEA noted in its report, though it also labeled the fuel "a good fit for a gradually decarbonising energy system."

But the carbon emissions from burning natural gas are significant as well. In 2013, the U.S. produced roughly 2.17 billion tons of carbon from burning oil and 1.7 billion tons from burning coal — and another 1.4 billion tons came from burning natural gas, the EIA reported, making natural gas responsible for 26.7 percent of America's CO2 pollution.

A Shift to Pure Renewables?

The Obama administration has made its support for an "all of the above" energy strategy that envisions increasing reliance on natural gas in the short term as a "bridge" to the eventual shift to renewable energy.

But even without subsidies, there are already some markets where renewable energy remains competitive against fossil fuels, even as oil and gas prices have nose-dived this year.

In Houston, TX a newly built solar plant is expected to provide electricity for an average of 4.8 cents per kilowatt hour for 20 years.  That's roughly half a cent more than Houston's fossil-fuel based power plants in today's over-supplied market — but two cents per hour cheaper than the 5-year average cost of conventional fuels, highlighting the unpredictability of the market for those fuels.

And wind power in that state has become so abundant that the New York Times is reporting it is literally too cheap to meter at night.

Meanwhile, keeping oil and gas flowing is expected to become increasingly costly. The IEA estimates that “just to compensate for declining production at existing fields and to keep future output flat at today’s levels,” the oil industry will require $630 billion in investments.

And building new pipelines to deliver oil and gas from areas like shale drilling regions adds to the expected costs.

“Keeping these project costs under control (contrary to numerous recent examples of overruns) will be vital to the future competitive positioning of gas,” the IEA said.

Crunching numbers like these has some environmentalists targeting a near-term transition away from all fossil fuels, not just oil and coal.

“The impossible is becoming possible. The global breakthrough of renewable energy has happened much faster than anticipated,” Emily Rochon, global energy strategist at Greenpeace International, told EcoWatch. “We believe that with the right level of policy support, the world can deliver 100 percent renewable energy for all by 2050.”  

*Ed note: This sentence was clarified following a reader's suggestion.

Photo Credit: Arial view of a solar farm under construction in the UK, via Shutterstock  

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By focusing on fossil fuels, Canada is missing a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on clean energy technology, according to a new report from the Pembina Institute.

Through both a review of recent literature and one-on-one interviews with 21 of the country’s “clean energy leaders,” the report, entitled Competing in Clean Energy: Capitalizing on Canadian innovation in a $3 trillion economy, exposes the financial cost of the federal government’s overwhelming emphasis on the short-term profits provided by oil, gas and shale.

Interviewees include Nick Parker of Cleantech Group, who admits he finds it “difficult to not be acerbic or negative when it comes to how Canada ranks in the clean energy race.”

What are we missing?

As world leaders move to make the changes necessary to comply with the Copenhagen Accord which aims to limit global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius, they are increasingly looking for options to cut down on carbon emissions and move to renewable energy sources.

“Yet much of the focus of leaders in government and business has been on Canada’s abundance of raw fossil fuel commodities — from oilsands to shale gas and coal — and the opportunity to generate prosperity by exporting these resources.”

Thus far, the Canadian government has favoured a “go slow” approach to energy innovation, “betting on a slower emergence of a low-carbon economy, and a reluctance to impose additional costs on domestic industries and consumers to address a global problem [climate change].”

This has left us behind in the lucrative field of energy innovation. Although Canada is one of the top research and energy development funders in the world, our rate of funding as a percentage of GDP is presently less that the peak in 1984. Furthermore, poor coordination and short-sited funding have left us in fifth place in terms of clean energy inventions behind Korea, Germany, Japan and the United States. 

The report shows that aiding in the global transition toward clean energy is not only a moral imperative, but also a potential windfall for Canadian businesses, as well as an excellent way to create new jobs for Canadian workers. 

“With more than 700 companies, the cleantech sector has emerged as a major driver of innovation and employment growth in Canada, investing almost $2 billion in research and development and seeing an 11 per cent increase in employment between 2008 and 2010. Yet Canada currently captures just one per cent of the $1 trillion global clean technology industry. It is estimated that, as this industry grows to a projected $3 trillion by 2020, Canadian clean technology companies have the potential to increase their market share from today’s $9 billion to $60 billion.”

What can we do?

The report outlines three opportunities for the Canadian government to encourage growth in the clean energy entrepreneurship:

• Improve access to capital to keep emerging companies from falling into financial “valleys of death” before they are able to bring their new technologies to market. Chief Environment Officer of TD Bank Karen Clarke-Whistler provides advice on what the government could do to make banks more “comfortable” with supplying much needed financial resources to clean energy companies which tend to be high risk and have high capital needs.

• Create a national energy strategy that would focus hitherto poorly distributed funds. Many interviewees, including Tom Heintzman, co-founder and CEO of Bullfrog Power, suggest using fossil fuel resources to fund clean energy research, thus aiding in the smooth transition to sustainable technology.

• End preferential tax treatment for fossil fuel production and begin to figure the real cost of greenhouse gas pollution into the price of carbon-based energy. Dawn Farrell, CEO of TransAlta, encourages us to see the atmosphere that takes up CO2 emissions as a scarce resource and then price that resource to encourage more efficient use.

It concludes that if the federal government can go the way of some provincial governments and shift its focus away from the development and sale of fossil fuels, this country is, “well positioned to compete in the field of clean energy technology, creating jobs and economic prosperity across the country.”

Image Credit: Green Energy Futures on flickr.

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