While world leaders were meeting in Paris to tackle climate change, Port Metro Vancouver approved Fraser Surrey Docks’ application for a thermal coal facility on the shores of the Fraser River.
Fraser Surrey Docks applied to Port Metro Vancouver to amend its existing permit to build and operate a direct transfer coal facility, where coal would be loaded onto ocean-going vessels and shipped to Asia. The site is located across the river from Westminster Quay and Queensborough.
First Nation leaders urge Trudeau government to keep campaign promises, stop proposed Site C dam, and usher in new era of cooperation
OTTAWA - First Nation chiefs from British Columbia and representatives from the Assembly of First Nations are calling on the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take a second look at a Cabinet decision of the former federal government providing initial approval of the controversial Site C dam.
At an estimated $9 billion and counting, the proposed Site C dam in northern British Columbia is an economic, environmental and social catastrophe in the making.
Along the proposed route of the Northern Gateway pipeline, nothing is moving.
There is no clearing, mowing, grading, trenching, drilling, boring or blasting. Industry analysts have almost stopped asking questions because interested parties – contractors, engineering firms and others – have moved on to more realistic prospects. Meanwhile, the estimated cost of the project has climbed to $7.9-billion, while not one of the 209 conditions attached to its environmental certificate has been checked off as complete.
With work already under way on the banks where the dam is to be built, it might seem as if Site C is a done deal.
Premier Christy Clark certainly hopes so. She views the start of the $9-billion project as one of her two greatest accomplishments (the other being an agreement in principle with Petronas for proposed development of an $11-billion LNG plant).
But despite all the activity by contractors building access roads and clearing land for work camps, tunnels and dam foundations, BC Hydro’s Site C project could yet be brought to a halt.
B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s own climate change advisors will recommend a hike in the province’s carbon tax to avoid a complete blowout of a year 2020 climate target due to an aggressive push to build a highly polluting liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, National Observer has learned.
The government is expected to make the premier’s Climate Leadership Team’s report public Friday at 1 p.m. in Victoria, ahead of Clark’s trip to Paris for the UN climate summit next week.
A series of new aerial photographs show the massive scale of early construction work on the $8.8-billion Site C dam.
Victoria-based photographer Garth Lenz flew over what will be the dam site in June 2014 and returned Sunday to re-shoot the area. Lenz said even though he had flown over the site before, he was not prepared for what he saw.
“I was surprised at how big an area was being destroyed,” said Lenz, who photographed just a few kilometres of a flood zone that stretches more than 80 kilometres upriver.
