Tag Archives: environment

Alberta reduces oilsands environmental monitoring

Signed July 7 by top bureaucrats in Ottawa and Edmonton, it cuts funding by at least 25 per cent. The budget has been cut to no more than $44 million this year. It was $58 million last year and $60 million in 2018.

The deal says no fieldwork is to be done on the main branch of the Athabasca River. That means the program won’t fund monitoring downstream of the oilsands even as the province considers proposals to allow the water from oilsands tailings ponds to be released into the river.

The deal also says there’ll be no field studies on wetlands, fish or insects.

A pilot project gauging the risks posed by tailings ponds has been dropped. Water quality assessment in Wood Buffalo National Park — part of a response to international concerns about environmental degradation at the UNESCO World Heritage Site — is gone.

Source: Alberta, Ottawa sign deal that reduces oilsands environmental monitoring | CBC News

This entry was posted in General and tagged alberta, emissions, environment, oilsands, UCP on August 4, 2020 by Steve.

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Will The Coal Mine Poison Lethbridge Water?

According to Yale University, “in humans, chronic exposure to high selenium concentrations can cause nausea, fatigue, skin lesions, and neurological disorders. In other animals, high levels of the element have been shown to cause liver damage, paralysis, and even death. In the waterways it leeches into, it bioaccumulates in fish and plants, meaning the concentration keeps becoming more toxic to its host. It will kill the fish and deplete the resources altogether. Larger animals like cattle have become infected and gotten sick so it’s very important to monitor any water supply where animals or birds will have access to.

August 4, 2020

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What Kenney Had to Kill to Embrace Coal | The Tyee

The result could be the stripping away of mountain tops across more than a million and half hectares of terrain — about half the size of Vancouver Island.

Gone, as of last May, is the province’s 1976 Coal Policy, which protected the headwaters of rivers that secure drinking water for Canadians across the prairies.

August 4, 2020

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Ottawa taps the brakes on huge coal mine expansion near Jasper National Park; Alberta’s UCP stays mum for now

Federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson tapped the brakes Thursday on the Vista coal mine expansion near Hinton with an announcement Ottawa will take a look at the environmental impact of the project after all.

In a report in the Globe and Mail, Mr. Wilkinson hinted he had concluded the mine’s owner — a subsidiary of Plano, Tex.-based Cline Group Inc. — may have been trying to pull a fast one by breaking its application to double or triple the output of the thermal coal mine into two parts. “That would lead me to be concerned that this is, perhaps, an exercise in project splitting for the purpose of avoiding a federal assessment,” the minister said.

So, according to the Globe, Mr. Wilkinson explained that Ottawa’s initial determination that no federal review would be needed was based on the first application alone, but with a second one submitted more recently its assessment had changed.

Source: Ottawa taps the brakes on huge coal mine expansion near Jasper National Park; Alberta’s UCP stays mum for now – Alberta Politics

This entry was posted in General and tagged alberta, coal, environment, Jonathan Wilkinson on August 2, 2020 by Steve.

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Peat fires, like those raging in Siberia, will become more common in Canada | CBC Radio

Peat fires not only release CO2, but other, more potent greenhouse gases such as methane, as well as particulate matter, “which is the stuff that gets into our lungs, it can cause respiratory disease and asthma attacks,” said Turetsky.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Nature showed that peatlands in Canada are drying up and that fires will become more common in the future.

One recent example was the 2018 wildfire at Alkali Lake in B.C., which scorched the Tahltan Nation community of Telegraph Creek.

Chad Thomas, a member of the Tahltan First Nation and CEO of Yukon First Nations Wildfire, a group of Indigenous firefighters who have worked in Canada as well as overseas, said peat fires are trickier to handle than more conventional wildfires.

For one thing, unlike crown fires, which take place in trees, peat fires happen largely underground. Because the heat can become trapped many feet below the forest floor, peat fires can be “very hard to extinguish,” Thomas said.

“The fires can creep underground and pop back up along your control lines.”

August 1, 2020

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Steve MacLellan

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Tag Archives: environment

Alberta reduces oilsands environmental monitoring

Ottawa taps the brakes on huge coal mine expansion near Jasper National Park; Alberta’s UCP stays mum for now