As Alberta’s NDP government grapples with a cratering economy while simultaneously pondering ways to help burnish the province’s tawdry environmental image, debate inside Premier Rachel Notley’s administration has been guided somewhat by an existential question: Why are we here?
Scott Entz climbs a metal catwalk to show off the latest slaughterhouse technology that keeps Cargill Inc.’s kill floor humming while helping to “green” Alberta’s carbon-spewing energy sector.
Some 4,500 head of cattle are dispatched every day at the hangar-sized rendering plant about an hour’s drive south of Calgary. Just about everything that isn’t carved into steaks and roasts, from guts to the coarse hair on the animals’ tails, is incinerated in a state-of-the-art furnace that also serves as an unlikely cog in the province’s multibillion-dollar oil economy.
New air-quality tests in one of Canada’s largest petrochemical processing regions have revealed more evidence of short-lived but concentrated plumes of toxic chemicals.
The tests by a Nobel Prize-winning lab at University of California, Irvine, echo previous results scientists have recorded for known carcinogens in the area northeast of Edmonton.
The Canadian Medical Association will divest its holdings in fossil-fuel companies, a move doctors hope will send a powerful symbolic message that climate change is an urgent health concern.
“Given the health impacts of fossil fuels, we have to take a stand,” Courtney Howard, a board member of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and a physician practising in Yellowknife, said in addressing the CMA’s general council meeting on Tuesday.
Tempers in some quarters of Quebec are flaring after the head of Canada’s nuclear safety commission slammed a report by the province’s environmental regulation agency for allegedly “misleading Quebeckers and Canadians” on the safety of uranium mining.
The G7 nations have committed to eliminating the use of fossil fuels by 2100.
What Canada’s premiers said in July is wrong — there are simple answers to developing a national energy strategy — but what’s difficult is making tough decisions.
While the need for a Canadian energy strategy should be a key federal election issue for all political parties, it’s not just a national version that’s required.
Two proposed liquefied natural gas projects have received approval from the National Energy Board to export LNG, but they are counting on the United States to build pipeline capacity into New England in order for them to obtain the supply needed to underpin their ambitious plans.
[Introductory commenty by website editor: This is a useful article on the oil upgrading and refining sector in Canada.]
B.C. proponents, expecting a production surge, argue more refineries and upgraders would help Canada keep more of its oil wealth here. And where Alberta falters, B.C. hopes to rise with refining projects of its own
