The mining lobby is fighting hard

The B.C. government is ready to enact a new Environmental Assessment law that could go a long way toward protecting the environment when new mines and other industrial projects are proposed.

But all of it is worthless if companies continue to dodge the Environmental Assessment process altogether – and I’m afraid that’s why I’m writing to you today.

The Environmental Assessment Office is inviting public comments on their proposed “Reviewable Projects Regulation” until Monday, October 7. These regulations will determine which projects in B.C. actually trigger an environmental assessment. This is our chance to fix parts of the regulation that have been broken for a long time.

• Ever since the BC Liberals rewrote the rules in 2002, metal mines producing less than 75,000 tonnes of ore a year have been exempt from review. That’s way too high. The original threshold was 25,000 tonnes.
   
• Even more disturbing, the amount of “pay dirt” required for a placer mining operation to undergo the Environmental Assessment process is so high that no placer mine has ever been reviewed. These are big, mechanized operations that scour entire creek beds for gold. The province needs to prove its new regulations will actually apply to the Wild West of placer mining.

This public consultation is also a chance to push for more realistic “impact thresholds” (how much greenhouse gas a project would create, or how much land would need to be cleared). With what the province is proposing right now, most companies would wriggle out of a review.

• For example, B.C. won't require an assessment based on climate impacts unless a project is going to emit less than 382,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. That’s huge. 100 projects that size would gobble up the province’s entire carbon budget by 2030.

• Same goes for projects that require fewer than six square kilometres of land to be cleared, or a “linear corridor” up to 60 kilometres in length. In other words, you could clearcut and level an area the size of Stanley Park without triggering a review based on impacts.

Our allies at West Coast Environmental Law are recommending a GHG trigger of 50,000 tonnes, and a land-disturbance trigger of 75 hectares.

One last thing to keep in mind: right now companies get around environmental assessments by breaking up projects into different chunks, each of which falls below the relevant triggers. It’s called “project splitting” or “phasing” and it makes a mockery of the whole exercise. The new regulations should be applied to projects as a whole.

Here’s the survey the government is using to gather public input on these regulations. I did it in about 10 minutes. It would really help if you could add your voice, and make sure that common sense is not drowned out by industry lobbyists.The deadline is Monday, October 7!

Thanks,

Kai

P.S. For more background on this public consultation, I recommend environmental lawyer Gavin Smith’s summary. The government’s intentions paper is here. When you’re ready, please take 10 minutes and fill out the public survey. The deadline is Monday, October 7.