On June 1, 2020, the Government of Alberta rescinded the provincial Coal Policy. This policy was created in 1976 to restrict open pit coal mining and coal exploration in the most environmentally sensitive areas in the Rocky Mountains. This decision came on the heels of another government decision in March 2020 to remove protections on 175 parks and recreation areas.
On November 18, join the Red Deer Chapter of the Council of Canadians, a concerned resident and Katie Morrison of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Association (CPAWS) for an online discussion about the future of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains and how to protect them from the Alberta Government’s regressive decisions around the Coal Policy.
Ottawa, Ont. – Environmental Defence is extremely disappointed that the federal government has allowed Alberta and Saskatchewan to move forward with weak methane regulations, rather than strengthening federal regulations and insisting that those provinces improve theirs to match. Finalizing these agreements represents a failure of conviction on climate change from the Canadian government, given that methane emission reductions are some of the cheapest climate solutions available in Canada.
The federal government’s own analysis shows that Canada will fall far short of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commitment to reduce methane emissions, foregoing 5 to 7 million tonnes of avoided greenhouse gases by 2025. These agreements will be challenging to open up before their expiry at the end of 2024, significantly increasing the chances that Canada will miss the 2025 target.
This meek approach to reducing emissions of a potent greenhouse gas – one that could be almost entirely eliminated in the next decade – casts further doubt on Canada’s commitment to fighting climate change, even while Canadians face mounting climate impacts. The Canadian government needs to stop bending over backwards to the Big Oil lobby and oil-friendly provincial governments at the expense of public health and action on the climate emergency.
About ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENCE CANADA (environmentaldefence.ca): Environmental Defence is a leading Canadian advocacy organization that works with government, industry and individuals to defend clean water, a safe climate and healthy communities.
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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has been working to stimulate the economy while also tying these efforts to its climate ambitions. One province that can particularly benefit from such investments is Alberta. There is a significant economic opportunity to be unlocked by enabling renewables at a faster pace than business-as-usual in Alberta, by way of investment, jobs and affordable electricity.
Alberta, alongside Saskatchewan, boasts the best solar and wind resources in Canada. A recent forecast by Rystad Energy anticipates Alberta’s utility scale solar and wind capacity could be the highest in Canada by 2025.
The Business Renewable Centre Canada — which facilitates corporate procurement of renewable energy between buyers and sellers in Alberta — aims to achieve 2 gigawatts of renewable energy deals by 2025, which would attract $4 billion of investment to the province. Several major commercial buyers, including Starbucks, Labatt, Marriott Hotel, and Telus, have shown interest.
These renewable energy projects not only catch investors’ attention, they also help support community economic development. They can provide a reliable source of revenue to local governments and landowners, create local employment, and advance community development goals, including contributions to local economic diversification. Assorted compensation and ownership models exist that can be designed to enhance shared benefits from renewable energy development.
A group of big, institutional investors with a combined US$41 trillion under management is turning up the heat on 161 fossils, mining companies, and other major emitters, demanding that they adopt a set of strategies to reach net-zero emissions and pledging to hold them to account for their actions.
“The targeted companies are responsible for up to 80% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions,” The Guardian reports, citing an announcement Monday by the Climate Action 100+ initiative. “They include mining giant BHP, which last week promised to reduce emissions from its operations by 30% over the next decade on a path to net zero by 2050 after sustained pressure from activist shareholder groups.”
The list also includes colossal fossils ExxonMobil, PetroChina, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell, mining and metals companies Rio Tinto and BlueScope Steel, and major Australian fossil and electricity companies AGL, Santos, Woodside, and Origin.
Are Albertans Victimized or Angry?
Tristin Hopper wrote in the National Post that if Canada doesn’t like Alberta complaining, they can always send back our money. He says we are getting fleeced by Ottawa. This article was written on April 11th. Perhaps he wrote that before he had a chance to see how much Trudeau was doing for the province. Maybe he assumed he was doing as little as Premier Jason Kenney. Either way, there isn’t any way to establish this tiresome rhetoric as belonging to anything other than a Postmedia newspaper.
Mr. Kenny’s notion that Alberta is paying Quebec’s bills simply isn’t true. Mr. Hopper crunches the numbers for us in the article expecting us to believe it. Still, there are three kinds of lies which are just as prevalent today as the first time I heard them. There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Do you think the provincial government is trying to keep us off-balance?
We’re witnessing the slow, painful death of fossil fuels. Milestones reached by other countries leave Canada as one of the last Western democracies with no coherent plan to cut ties with the industries that brought us a mounting global climate emergency.
There has been a stampede in Alberta. No, not cow — oil companies getting out while they still can. All of them weren’t so lucky though. Some didn’t have the money or resources. They died right where they lived.
Harvard scientists have found that fracking is associated with greatly increased radioactive particulate in the air, especially in West Virginia’s dependent petrochemical economy. People who live within about 12 miles of fracking sites are at the highest risk, with ambient radiation as high as 40 percent over the background level.
The data comes from 17 years of measurements at over 150 radiation monitoring sites. Scientists examined these measurements, combined with the location data on more than 120,000 fracking wells. While experts have known fracking can release chemicals into the groundwater in particular, this is the first study to analyze radiation levels.
Fracking may be a lot of things, but the idea that it’s literally radioactive could be surprising. The reason is that a lot of underlying rock contains small amounts of uranium, for example, as part of the naturally occurring bedrock found all over Earth. Where conventional mining adds safety precautions and traditional oil drilling doesn’t interact with bedrock the same way, fracking has gone a third way that pulverizes the bedrock and releases the uranium.
This article is really only the “tip of the iceberg” because the wastewater these wells produce can be lethal over time. It can contain such chemicals as:
Trisodium nitrilotriacetate:
Known as a carcinogen. Also, an environmental hazard as it hinders the elimination of heavy metals in wastewater treatment systems. It appears in products like Tilex Soap Scum Remover & Sunlight Laundry Detergent. It is also a common flame retardant. Although it is a known carcinogen, it is overly dangerous in wastewater.
Sodium Persulfate:
Exposure via inhalation or skin contact can cause sensitization, i.e., after initial exposure individuals may subsequently react to exposure at very low levels of that substance. Exposure can also cause skin rashes and eczema. Sodium persulfate is irritating to eyes and respiratory system and long-term exposure may cause changes in lung function (i.e. pneumoconiosis resulting in disease of in airways) and/or asthma.
Benzothiazole:
A chemcial ring of Benzene and Toluene. Short-term health effects of exposure include dizziness, headaches, loss of coordination, respiratory distress, and skin, eye, nose and throat irritation. Long-term health effects of exposure include kidney, liver, and blood system damage. Long-term exposure to benzene can affect bone marrow, causing anaemia and increasing the risk of leukaemia and diseases such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Benzene is a health hazard even in minute quantities. Australian drinking water guidelines for benzene state that there is “no safe concentration of benzene in drinking water.” [Read more]
Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman
Fossil fuels are dying a slow and painful death.
Milestones reached by other countries leave Canada as one of the last Western democracies with no coherent plan to cut ties with the industries that brought us a mounting global climate emergency.
This isn’t going to be a smooth transition by any means. I’m afraid were going to have to pry those oil barrels from Trudeau’s desperate grip. It’s obvious they don’t have something to replace these products with in foreign markets. It’s going to leave a large hole in our GDP. It doesn’t have to be this way. Canada’s governments have failed us from their lack of planning. The UN, WHO and several think tanks have laid out possible scenarios that they have successfully ignored. [Read more]
Pieridae Energy has a $10 billion idea to send natural gas to a refinery in Goldboro, Nova Scotia. It’s a rather ambitious endeavour backed by a US$4.5 billion loan guarantee from Uniper in Germany. They want natural gas that hasn’t been obtained by fracking. Most of the gas in Canada comes from fracking wells. Besides, once it’s in the pipeline, who can tell the difference?
‘Cept there isn’t a refinery in Goldboro. Unfortunately, they’re going to build it. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of investments in the project. According to Jessica Ernst it’s financed by AIMCo and about $10Billion in liabilities.
CEO Alfred Sorensen says the project will take advantage of existing pipelines so no new pipelines will be needed. It isn’t clear how all of this natural gas will be sourced. They were going to buy some of Shell’s old rusty wells and assets. However, the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) blocked the licence transfers over environmental concerns.
There was a webinar held recently and uploaded to Youtube on Oct. 8. It gives a good overview of the project and has some discussion on how it could go ahead. It’s fairly long, but a presentation starting about twelve-minutes into the video sums the majority of it up nicely and it’s only takes about twenty minutes.
In this presentation it shows where a new pipeline will be needed from Quebec. This isn’t clear, as other texts have said no new pipelines are needed. click here to open the map
In some stretch of the imagination, Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet claimed sole credit for killing the Energy East pipeline. That’s disputable, but then if a new pipeline is needed for this project, perhaps he’ll get a chance to further his claim by blocking this too.
Here is what you can expect from watching the whole webinar:
Germany has now finally decided to phase out coal for 2038 – much too late, as climate activists criticise. At the same time, however, it is this delayed and inadequate coal phase-out that is being used as an opportunity to announce a new era of fossil gas. This is happening at a time when scientific evidence shows that fossil gas – especially extracted through the fracking technique – is contributing massively to global warming.Furthermore, it is now pretty clear that we have only 10 – 30 years at most to prevent the worst climate catastrophy.
Nevertheless, the German government is supporting the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline and at the same time it is promoting the construction of import terminals for fracked gas in northern Germany. In addition, the same government is providing loan guarantees for the expansion of gas infrastructure in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals abroad, e.g. in Canada.
The Canadian company Pieridae Energy is planning to build the Goldboro LNG export terminal in Nova Scotia and has already signed in 2013 a 20-year supply contract with Uniper, a company involved in the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the Wilhelmshaven LNG terminal..
Apart from the fact that Pieridae will probably have to rely on fracked gas from Canada and the USA to feed the terminal with the contractually guaranteed quantities of gas, the project has been on rather shaky financial footing for 7 years now.
The Canadian investor desperately relies on a credit loan guarantee from the German government and has even engaged a subsidiary of the state-owned bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) for lobbying the government.
This online seminar offers in particular Canadian activists the opportunity to present local perspectives and regional impacts of the project to a larger international audience. In addition, the contributions should make clear that the financially highly risky project is dependent on fracked gas from the USA and Canada and, moreover, cannot be realized at all without German support in the form of a credit guarantee from the German government. The discussion will address, among other things, the question of whether the construction of new infrastructure for fossil fuels is compatible with a reduction in the use of fossil gas in the interests of the climate targets and what role the German Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) plays in financing such projects.
With:
Andy Gheorghiu, Food and Water Action Europe
Regine Richter, Urgewald
Constantin Zerger, Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V.
Activists from Nova Scotia – Canada
Moderator: Nadine Bethge, Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V.
On June 1, 2020, the Government of Alberta rescinded the provincial Coal Policy. This policy was created in 1976 to restrict open pit coal mining and coal exploration in the most environmentally sensitive areas in the Rocky Mountains. This decision came on the heels of another government decision in March 2020 to remove protections on 175 parks and recreation areas.
