British Columbia

New evidence proves the expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline presents a grave threat to the City of Vancouver’s health, economy and environment, said Mayor Gregor Robertson.

The city commissioned expert reports on the potential impacts of the $5.4 billion proposal and the findings were presented to council on Wednesday.

“Today we heard overwhelming evidence that the Kinder Morgan pipeline proposal and the oil tankers associated with it are incredibly disastrous for Vancouver,” said Robertson outside council chambers after the meeting.

Note: Several Canadian law professors issued this joint statement May 26, 2015:

We write as professors of law at several Canadian law schools to recognize and commemorate the May 26, 2015 release of Tsleil-Waututh Nation’s Assessment of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Tanker Expansion (“TMEX”) Proposal(the “Assessment”).

In an old legend from the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, a two-headed serpent brings hunger and disease to the Burrard Inlet, killing off the salmon. In order to survive, the people had to confront the serpent and slay it.

“We’re now facing another long dragon that needs to be slain,” Tsleil-Waututh Sacred Trust Initiative member Rueben George told a crowd of 100 gathered at Whey-ah-Wichen Park in North Vancouver on Tuesday.

“That’s the Kinder Morgan pipeline.”

When the federal government announced its plan to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, it gave little indication how it planned to do it, exactly.

Canada produced 749 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, according to Environment Canada data. By cutting 30 per cent, the Conservative government is hoping to eliminate more than 200 MT a year.

So, just how doable is that?

A new report on liquefied natural gas prospects for British Columbia challenges government claims that gas exports will lower greenhouse gas emissions, or generate $100 billion in profits for the province.

The report published today by David Hughes, one of Canada's foremost energy analysts and a former federal government geoscientist, also contends that the provincial government has vastly overestimated the amount of gas available for export.

B.C.’s liquefied natural gas industry threatens to harm the environment and erode Canada’s energy security, says a new analysis.

Geoscientist David Hughes, in a study for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, warns that LNG is far from the clean fuel that the B.C. government portrays it to be. Water filling the equivalent of nearly 22,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools a year would be required in the industry’s fracking process in drilling for natural gas in northeast British Columbia, he said.

Treaty 8 First Nations Astounded at PNW LNG MOU Signing

https://twitter.com/UBCIC/status/601739918692323328

Economist and former ICBC president and CEO Robyn Allan withdrew from the National Energy Board’s (NEB) review of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project Tuesday, saying she can no longer “endorse a process that is not working.”

In a letter addressed to Sherri Young, secretary of the NEB, Allan said the “review is not conducted on a level playing field” and that because the panel is “not an impartial referee…the game is rigged.”

Allan said she began to seriously question the process when oral cross-examination was removed from the process.

The prospect of a liquefied natural gas industry in B.C. would be a game-changer for aboriginal communities, Premier Christy Clark said on Wednesday. But she sidestepped the question of what happens if some of those communities continue to say no to the developments.

Instead, Ms. Clark’s announcement about a major step along the path toward securing the Pacific NorthWest LNG plant – a proposal already rejected by the Lax Kw’alaams – left the door open to pushing the project through, despite the province’s preference to avoid a confrontation over aboriginal rights and title.

From the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, what unfolded in B.C. last week must have looked strange.

While the Lax Kw’alaams First Nation was voting against a $1.1 billion offer of cash and land to support Petronas’ $11 billion Pacific NorthWest LNG (PNW) project in Prince Rupert, some members were reportedly giving a tentative thumbs-up to the Eagle Spirit Energy refined oil pipeline proposal.