In the past years, I’ve been getting a new kind of seasonal summer depression.
This year felt kind of alright: Here in Squamish, we didn’t choke on wildfire smoke, the heat was only mildly oppressive, and it even rained a fair bit. Pretty nice overall. Minus the suspiciously low groundwater table that left the channels at the Mamquam golf course without flows (good luck to those juvenile fish left high and dry or deprived of oxygen).
Minus the Mamquam River itself being thick and milky-white awash with the silt of morose glaciers (good luck to those few chinook salmon trying to find their rare mates in the dark and to their fertilized eggs–if any–that may all be covered in a suffocating layer of slickness). Minus Jasper National Park and township being devastated by wildfire (good luck to their inhabitants, too).
Out of sight, out of mind?
Meanwhile, Woodfibre LNG (WLNG) and the FortisBC pipeline are gaining momentum with construction.
Meanwhile, WLNG continues to advertise to not have “major impacts,” while omitting that the BC Environmental Assessment Office issued a Warning Letter for WLNG’s failure to comply with the requirement to establish a joint committee with FortisBC to assess the cumulative social impacts on the community of the District of Squamish.
Meanwhile, the FortisBC’s tunnel seems to require copious pours of concrete so close to the estuary.
Meanwhile, in central B.C,, the magnitudes bigger Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Pipeline (PRGT) is announcing the start of construction, although its destination facility, Ksi Lisims LNG, is not even fully approved.
How will there be enough power to electrify all those “net-zero” LNG plants that are supposed to come online in the coming years? With the widespread drought conditions we are experiencing, energy security through hydropower is standing on a shaky leg. Which watersheds—and with that, whose livelihoods —will be the next sacrifice zones?
A controversial proposition: Would it not be smarter to “leave it in the ground” as a (hopefully not needed) backup for domestic energy needs while we diversify our energy portfolio with renewables rather than racing the methane to artificially created markets that will lock us in with sunk cost fallacy?
These are certainly topics of great complexity in which a diversity of voices is dearly needed.
Dan Tetzlaff
Squamish
