A dispute between the elected and non-elected hereditary chiefs of the Lax Kw’alaams Band over the Pacific NorthWest LNG project on Lelu Island in Prince Rupert is raising potentially thorny legal and political questions.
When First Nations have both hereditary governance and elected chiefs and band councils, who ultimately represents the people on land-use issues off reserve?
Until recently, the Lax Kw’alaams appeared to be unified in its opposition to the Pacific NorthWest LNG project.
March 29, 2016 -- George George Sr., whose Nadleh Whut'en hereditary leadership name is Yutunayeh, signs a water policy declaration that covers the traditional territory of his First Nation and that of the Stellat'en. Nadleh Whut'en chief Martin Louie looks on.
The hereditary leaders of two northern B.C. First Nations proclaimed the first traditional aboriginal water laws in the province, which could have implications for industrial development including mining and LNG pipeline projects.
The number of proposals in serious contention to export liquefied natural gas from British Columbia has dwindled to four, down from a dozen viable plans in the fall of 2014, a new study concludes.
Trade publication World Gas Intelligence said the player with the best chance of forging ahead is Woodfibre LNG, a small-scale project near Squamish, 65 kilometres north of Vancouver.
[Webpage editor's note: It has long been suspected that one motivation for the proposed 10 lane bridge to replace the currrent 4 lane Massey tunnel under the Fraser River in Metro Vancouver was to enable larger ships to sail up and down the river (the tunnel limits a deeper river channel). Steve Ree's blog provides some evidence regarding LNG carriers.]
Protesters erected a 15-foot fracking rig last November in front of B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s Vancouver home. A new report, set to be published in the journal of the Seismological Society of America, examines an area straddling the B.C.-Alberta border and finds that between 90 and 95 per cent of seismic activity Magnitude 3 or larger in the last five years was caused by activity connected to hydraulic fracturing, widely known as "fracking."
The B.C. budget claims the province is making money from shale gas. But last month The Tyee showed the province is pouring more cash into the industry than it is getting back.
In fact the only time the B.C. government made any money from shale gas was during a land lease boom nearly a dozen years ago. Ever since then, revenues have dwindled to next to nothing due to low royalties and taxpayer-funded subsidies to the ailing shale gas industry.
As a policy analyst with the right-wing think tank, the Fraser Institute, Fazil Mihlar co-authored a paper that among other things, advised British Columbia to do away with its environmental assessment act.
First Nations leaders have rejected BC Minister of Natural Gas Development Rich Coleman's recent comments that the BC Government has the full support of First Nations impacted by the Petronas LNG project proposed for Lelu Island.
[Webpage editor's note: This scientific paper has great significance for the plans in BC to create a large fracking/LNG industry. The implication that the increase in methane emissions in the US may be partly due to oil and gas development is another reason to reject claims that BC LNG would reduce world-wide emissions by replacing coal in Asia.]
Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong.
Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.
