VANCOUVER – Environmental activists are shaking their heads at Premier John Horgan’s announcement that the province is giving a massive tax break and otherwise lowering corporate costs in a bid to lure LNG Canada into building a huge liquified natural gas facility in Kitimat.

 

“Greenhouse gas emissions are going to go through the roof with a project of this kind,” said Wilderness Committee National Campaign Director Joe Foy “From escaped methane at the drill sites to the massive carbon emissions required to cool the gas, to more escaped methane on the long trip across the ocean to Asia and then the emissions from burning the gas. It all adds up to a big bad climate changer. How would B.C. ever meet our climate commitments with this LNG plant chugging along?”

 

Estimates from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and the Pembina Institute show the annual carbon dioxide emissions from the LNG Canada project would exceed 9.6 megatonnes by 2050 — or a whopping 80 per cent of British Columbia’s total emissions target of 12 megatonnes annually by 2050.

 

“Fighting climate change requires a full court press, not fighting one fossil fuel export project like the Trans Mountain pipeline while championing another like LNG Canada,” said Wilderness Committee Vancouver Island Campaigner Torrance Coste. “If we keep paddling forward on climate change with one oar and backwards with the other, we’ll continue to go in circles, and that’s a disaster for our future.”

 

The Wilderness Committee is concerned that the proposed LNG plant would be supplied by fracked gas. Over the past decade, the Wilderness Committee has spent time in northeast British Columbia, listening to First Nations and community members’ concerns over both the massive use of and risks to freshwater resources from the fracking industry. 

 

“How can B.C. commit to ramping up this dangerous, polluting industry when the province has just announced that they will be looking at the environmental impacts of the fracking process through their scientific review?” said Foy. “Why does the government keep consulting the public and experts if they plan to go ahead as is anyway?

 

The Wilderness Committee argues that northeast B.C., where the fracking activity that would feed LNG Canada would take place, is already suffering the cumulative impacts of too many industrial projects too close together, and the group criticizes the B.C. government’s recently announced fracking review as being far too narrow in scope.

 

“Northeast B.C. and it’s wildlife have been hammered by coal mines, hydro projects, decades of clearcut logging and thousands of gas well sites,” said Coste. “A government begging for this industrial onslaught to accelerate, at a time when we know we need to transition away from fossil fuels, is the definition of reckless.”