Christy Clark’s about to drive another nail into the coffin of B.C.’s economic and environmental future.
It’s such an unusual move for the B.C. legislature that so far it isn’t even listed on the official schedule.
Christy Clark has called a special meeting of the B.C. legislature for July 13 for the sole purpose of passing a solitary bill that would give Petronas, the giant $160-billion Malaysian government-owned oil and gas company, the go-ahead to build a massive terminal near Prince Rupert to liquefy and store fracked gas from northeastern B.C. and Alberta for shipping to the Asian market.
With the reckless insouciance of a speeding driver in a luxury roadster, B.C.’s renegade premier, working in intimate lock-step with Canada’s rogue prime minister, is working hard to steer the citizens of this province into a disastrous collision with one of the 21st century’s most important realities: global climate change.
No matter that independent B.C. scientists have also called this the worst site for a facility of this size and type.
Premier Clark repeats incessantly that she’s buying us all a winning Lotto ticket, protesting, in the face of strongscientific evidence to the contrary, that fracking produces “the "greenest fossil fuel in the world" and will power the B.C. economy for many years. She claims that people will “look back at [this project] over the decades ... and say those things really mattered."
I think she’s right, but not for the reasons she states.
Petronas: our ticket to prosperity – or is it?
In order to close a deal with Petronas, Clark decided to cut the province’s royalty rate to the bone and now, in an unprecedented move, she has insulated the profitable Malaysian giant against any and all tax or royalty increases for 23 years — no matter what happens to the B.C. economy.
Petronas, rated recently as the twelfth most profitable company in the world, and the most profitable in Asia, supplies 45 per cent of the Malaysian government’s revenue, and has an insatiable appetite for new sources of fossil fuels, because supplies under its direct control have been steadily dwindling.
Its famous twin towers in Kuala Lumpur are a monument to its profits from rampant fossil fuel exploitation.
Petronas has a murky internal structure. Malaysian politician and blogger Lim Kit Siang noted, in 2012, “The disclosure made by Jeffrey Kittingan (another Malaysian opposition politician) in June 2008 that 80 per cent of Petronas oil is not sold directly to the world market but is funnelled through six option-holders. Apparently these option holders or selling agents have obtained their supply from Petronas at well below market price for the next 20 to 30 years.”
In other words, insiders appear to be milking the Petronas system. Despite calls for a public commission to examine these allegations, there has been no response from the Malaysian government.
In 2012, in a controversial move, Stephen Harper allowed Petronas to buy Calgary-based Progress Energy Resources Corp. for $5.5 billion, and China to buy the Canadian oil company Nexen. He already hinted then at a behind-the-scenes plan to sell fracked gas to Southeast Asia.
The deals raised widespread concerns about the lack of transparency in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) — concerns so intense that even he, despite his well-known love affair with the fossil fuel industry, was forced to shut the door to further SOEs as soon as the deal was inked.
The Petronas deal still requires federal environmental approval — something that the intimate relationship between Stephen Harper and the fossil fuel industry makes a foregone conclusion.
The only immediate step taken to slow down or stop this project so far has come from the Lax Kw’alaams Band, part of the Tsimshian First Nation, which has unanimously — and courageously — rejected the offer of a $1-billion bribe from Petronas in exchange for the use of Lelu Island, the chosen site for the gas liquification plant — which happens to be surrounded by eel grass beds — critical habitat for juvenile salmon. The band have refused to approve the site because the plant and associated pipeline could easily destroy the Skeena River salmon run.
Most experts and ordinary citizens disagree with Premier Clark
Coupled with the Site C dam, situated strategically to collect water and generate electricity for the fracking community up north, this gas liquification and storage plant, the Premier claims, is her one-two punch to hammer out B.C.’s prosperity.
In reality, I believe Christy Clark’s fixation with fracking as the basis of B.C.’s economy, combined with Stephen Harper’s shared belief in fossil fuels as the basis for Canada’s prosperity, will seriously compromise the security of generations to come. That’s because their actions are ultimately based on climate change denial.
Christy Clark clearly won’t ever read Pope Frances’ latest well-researched and ground-breaking encyclical, linking industrial societies’ expansive and exploitative habits, built on fossil fuel use, to global climate change.
Clark is pretending she hasn’t heard about the recent successful class action lawsuit in Holland, in which three judges have ordered the Dutch government to stick to the science and cut back greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent in five years.
She doesn’t peruse scientific journals, so she hasn’t learned that the world-renowned publication Naturecarried a study this winter confirming that “most of the Earth's fossil fuels will have to be left in the ground if the world is to avoid catastrophic global warming.”
She is notably indifferent to the effects climate change is already having on the animals that share this planet with us.
She steers around concern about the “inconvenient truth” widely discussed in the fossil fuel industry around what’s known as the “carbon bubble”, in which profits for oil and gas will shrink as ecological concerns grow.
She can’t hear the loud political noise made by the global fossil fuel divestment movement, one of the fastest growing social actions on the planet today, now taken up by Britain’s Guardian newspaper as the “Keep it in the Ground” campaign.
The divestment campaign is particularly active among young Canadians.
She’s turning a blind eye to the fact that the Obama administration — despite rancorous and anti-intellectual opposition from the Tea Party and others — has managed to reduce carbon emissions to their lowest level intwo decades. And that the president has affirmed this as a critical national goal.
She can’t be bothered to think about a report, late last year, by Britain’s chief scientist (remember, we used to hear from publicly-funded scientists in Canada? Now they're locked behind closed doors, and fronted by PR hacks) that compared the potential hazards of fracking to those of thalidomide and asbestos.
What does Clark really believe?
This view of climate change as an anti-capitalist plot falls in line with “the (US Republican Party’s) 169 climate deniers, Big Oil, the Koch Empire and all hard-right conservatives” who are madly shoring up the crumbling edifice of climate denial.
Her main thesis, which could have been cribbed out of a recent public relations report from the Fraser Institute, asserts that “energy use and economic output grow together over time… if you limit energy use you damage future economic growth prospects." In other words, limit energy production (and the Fraser Institute, for some reason, considers that renewable energy plans do that) and the economy falters.
(On almost the exact same day the Fraser Institute piece was published, a detailed analysis of energy use and economic growth, by the University of Calgary’s Canadian Energy Systems Analysis Research group, showed that “between 1995 and 2010, the output of the Canadian economy grew by 46% but because of the improving energy productivity of the economy, the demand for fuels and electricity only rose by 12%.” In other words, increasingly efficient use of energy produced economic growth three times greater than the increase in theactual energy supply.)
Christy Clark won’t admit what the fossil fuel industry itself sees more and more clearly — renewable energy is the future of energy production world-wide. Industry, fighting a rear-guard action to mitigate this trend, has infiltrated international renewable energy trade bodies, causing a slowdown in support for renewable energy expansion. As one commentator noted: “From being system-relevant, renewables were suddenly becoming system-dominant. The big companies decided that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them. And if you join them, slow them down so that you can survive in the market.'”
The premier's approach is far simpler: just act like renewable energy isn't there.
Another situation, same problem
On Thursday Feb. 5, the BC Liberal Party held a fundraiser in Woodfibre, sponsored by a company called Woodfibre LNG, a few weeks before a B.C. government decision was due on its planned facility near Squamish, in the pristine coastal waters of Howe Sound.
Woodfibre LNG is a subsidiary of Pacific Oil and Gas Ltd., itself a subsidiary of Royal Golden Eagle, a $15-billion holding company owned by Indonesian businessman Sukanto Tanoto, who, at a net worth of $2.3 billion, is one of the richest men in that country. He is also “considered by many to be one of the planet’s worst environmental plunderers,” according to a recent report, causing well-documented and extremely troubling rainforest destruction, orangutan habitat obliteration and human rights offences.
Squamish city council has already voted against test drilling for a pipeline to the proposed plant and the grassroots advocacy group No More Pipelines has prepared an information poster, with references, about the Indonesian magnate’s unsavoury past.
Where to now?
Christy Clark, in her obsessive pursuit of fracking first and every other economic driver last, is leading this province, a key destination for visitors and tourists from all over the world, and a hub for IT and other businesses, into a disaster zone. She is doing this even though the fossil fuel industry plays only a very tiny part of the overall B.C. economy.
I believe this calls for pushback. I think it’s time for citizens to look at the facts, not slanted government public relations announcements, and do something about it.
I think we should commit to standing shoulder to shoulder with the honourable and fact-based stand of the Lax Kw’alaams Band, a stand that is of benefit, in the long run, to every single British Columbian.
And wouldn’t it be a fine thing if a few thousand people gathered on the steps of the legislature, on July 13, and made it clear to Christy Clark that this outrageous flouting of science, ecological principles, the economy of B.C., and the strongly stated opinion of our First Nations friends and neighbours has to stop?
Source: vancouverobserver.com/
Author: Warren Bell
No comments:
Post a Comment