Back in 1990, as the debate over climate change was heating up, a dissident shareholder petitioned the board of Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil companies, imploring it to develop a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from its production plants and facilities.
The board’s response: Exxon had studied the science of global warming and concluded it was too murky to warrant action. The company’s “examination of the issue supports the conclusions that the facts today and the projection of future effects are very unclear.”
The Squamish First Nation has given the green light to the $1.7 billion Woodfibre LNG project in the form of a Squamish environmental certificate.
Squamish council has issued an environmental certificate to Woodfibre LNG, but has yet to give one to FortisBC, which would build the pipeline infrastructure needed to supply the plant with gas.
However, both FortisBC and Woodfibre have agreed to all 25 conditions that the Squamish have set out for approving the project.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — MILLIONS of Americans once wanted to smoke. Then they came to understand how deadly tobacco products were. Tragically, that understanding was long delayed because the tobacco industry worked for decades to hide the truth, promoting a message of scientific uncertainty instead.
The same thing has happened with climate change, as Inside Climate News, a nonprofit news organization, has been reporting in a series of articles based on internal documents from Exxon Mobil dating from the 1970s and interviews with former company scientists and employees.
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?
VICTORIA — Cabinet minister Rich Coleman admitted to being caught off guard this week by news of potentially “catastrophic” lapses in safety at the Malaysian operations of Petronas, the company the B.C. Liberals are counting on to build the first liquefied natural gas terminal here in B.C.
“I had not had a chance to see it or read it,” Coleman told me Friday, referring to the 732-page audit that exposed concerns ranging from decades-long delays in inspections to corrosion that endangered the structural integrity of the company’s offshore oil and gas platforms.
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.
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s B.C. lieutenant said he’s confident a new oilsands pipeline will eventually be built to the West Coast, and one of his key arguments for such a megaproject is public safety in the Lower Mainland.
Industry Minister James Moore raised the spectre of the deadly Lac Megantic rail disaster that killed dozens in an inferno of blazing oil that engulfed the Quebec town in the summer of 2013.
“The people of Lac Megantic wished they had pipelines instead of rail,” said Moore, who represents the Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam riding.
According to oft-cited statistics, climate scientists are 95%-99% certain of climate change – about as certain as they are of the link between smoking and lung cancer. Nonetheless, an estimated 58% of US Republican congressmen claim to be unconvinced of it. This group, the so-called “climate denier caucus,” is a big part of the reason that meaningful climate activist legislation keeps getting shot down. And according to a recent report, some of America’s most popular companies are helping to fund the effort.
A new study suggests the Supreme Court of Canada ruling to extend Aboriginal territorial rights will mean a more active role for government to ensure oil and gas development.
It's hard to believe the current federal government could do more to actively promote Prime Minister Stephen Harper's longstated ambition for Canada to be a "global energy superpower" but that's what the Fraser Institute predicted in a report Thursday.
WASHINGTON — Coca-Cola has always been more focused on its economic bottom line than on global warming, but when the company lost a lucrative operating license in India because of a serious water shortage there in 2004, things began to change. Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke’s balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force.
