BC First Nations and Enviros Marching to the Natural Gas Chambers: LNG, Fracking, ENGOs and All

LNG, Fracking, ENGOs and All

by Michael Major

[Article extracted from an ongoing listserve discussion, reprinted here with permission of the author. -ape]

Fracking, for the Haisla or at least for the person you are quoting, is done far away and in someone else's territory. Within Haisla territory, there is only a gas pipeline from nowhere carrying $100 million per day in raw material in which the Haisla have a compelling financial interest. But to put the fracked shale gas in the pipe, more water has to be inseparably polluted with noxious chemicals than is presently used daily in all of the other industrial and residential activities throughout the province. Pulp mill effluent is a lot less toxic than waste fracking water and relatively easy to treat.

Fracking water is not and cannot be treated for its pollution at a cost less than the value of the resulting produced fracked gas. Fracking water can only be diluted with vastly more clean water to render it briefly LD50 safe for fish. We subsidize fracking costs and profits by allowing vast amounts of water to be consumed and permanently polluted such that it can never be returned to the aquatic biosphere without severe biological consequences. When you choose fracking you are choosing to terminate the ecological conditions that sustain wild fish and healthy lakes, streams and rivers and even people.

Presumably, the precautionary outlook for the Haisla accepts that wild fish will not be on the 7th generation's menu. The Haisla gas pipeline and the LNG production compressor trains will require approximately doubling the amount of hydro power produced in BC. That power will be bought by BC Hydro above costs and sold below cost to more attractively further subsidize LNG production. The production of that power will involve the build-out of Peace River Site "C" and several hundred conventional dams and RoR diversion generators all of which will reduce oxygen, increase water temperature, increase turbidity, acid drainage and change the stream access and characteristics required by wild fish. Perhaps the Haisla agree with the Harper government that wild fish are in the way of economic progress and can be quickly replaced for the barbecue and table with atlantic engineered phish substitutes. Certainly in BC the subsidized production of atlantic pharm phish is intended to establish a financial basis for compensating industry caused wild fish bearing stream losses resulting from fracking progress and hinterland development.

The environmental consequences of wrecking even an unloaded bitumen or LNG supertanker in Douglas Channel will be an incomparable ecological disaster. Supertankers typically burn 1,500 gallons of bunker fuel per hour and carry at least enough for 20 days cruising so losing just half of the fuel in an inbound accident could put 360,000 gallons of heavy bunker in the salt chuck. There are probably only 5 or 6 weeks of weather at the mouth of Douglas Channel where a full 15% recovery of lost fuel might be achieved. The unrecoverable 85% will likely be broken-up and sunk with Corexit causing a less visible environmental crisis which cannot be further mitigated and the navigational complexity and increased vessel traffic guarantees that this will happen again and again.

The difference in consequences between a loaded or unloaded, LNG or crude oil supertanker accident are important but loaded or unloaded either is an ecological risk, serious threat and expanding catastrophe of enormous proportions. And, yes an LNG supertanker bleve and vapour cloud explosion (aka fuel air explosion) would closely approximate a nuclear weapon air blast with the blast wave front traveling out to become geomorphically concentrated at several thousand miles per hour --very large rocks miles away may remain undisturbed.

The tally of environmental consequences from fracking for LNG is huge, diffused and the economic benefits are financially concentrated only within the corporate elites and their henchflak and enablers. In comparison with fracking & LNG production, original old growth forest liquidation logging for cheap mass production of commodity lumber was positively environmental and quite socialist in its consequences. Any enviro convinced that Fracking & LNG production in BC is environmentally benign or climate friendly is either a fool or a corporate tool. Anyone buying the PR nonsense about LNG being a bridge to bio-gas & hydrogen is buying a Brooklyn Bridging fuel. It is truly unfortunate that in our co-opted corporate sustainabilism we can't hold a BCEN conference in which to inform ourselves of how to confront the fracking disaster and its hundred generation expanding environmental consequences.

If we can't get on the same page about the consequences of fracking and LNG there won't be anything else environmental left to worry about. Never before in the brief history of environmentalism has anything so completely un-evironmental been championed by so many so-called environmentalists. It is even worse that so many of the so-called enviro's think that by allowing production of LNG for shipping on "Green" supertankers somehow the "Brown" bitumen supertankers won't also arrive.