The Mackenzie River has long attracted the interest of Exxon Mobil and its subsidiary Imperial Oil. In 1942, the oil company worked alongside the U.S. military’s 388th Engineer Battalion to provide a secure source of oil for the wartime effort. The battalion’s role was to construct a road and lay four inch pipes along the surface of the primarily acidic soil “muskeg” from Norman Wells to Whitehorse in the Yukon. There was no knowledge of permafrost or other conditions.
Seven million litres of crude oil spilled during the construction and operation of this short pipeline. Quite a sizeable amount considering the pipes were only 4 inches in diameter! The long term impacts of the CANOL pipeline oil spill should be heeded when one considers the impacts of the forthcoming Mackenzie Pipeline.
The Canadian Oil Road (CANOL) is a ‘heritage’ trail that goes from Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories to Macmillan Pass on the Yukon border. Along the road in this picturesque valley, abandoned army machinery and vehicles lie in a rusting heap, classified as heritage artifacts.
For more information, read about Permafrost degradation in the Macmillan/Caribou Pass Region by GP Kershaw.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “the earth laughs in flowers” but that was before the cut flower business came into being.
If you’re living in North America, chances are the cut flowers you are looking at come from Colombia, one of the major exporters. Three out of every four freshly cut flowers sold in the United States are grown in Colombia. Multinational companies such as Dole Food Company are major owners. These flowers are grown in high concentrations of pesticides including: mancozeb, methylbromide, captan, carbofuran, malathion, and diazinon with toxic effects on workers who know little about the risks to their health. Vast amounts of groundwater is piped in to grow the flowers while chemicals continually leach out. The workers, mainly women, cut the flowers, then dip them in fungicide before placing them in containers to be trucked out.
Every day, flowers are cut and make the long journey by truck and then airplane to distribution centres around North America. Typically, cut flowers are packaged in cellophane and placed in plastic buckets with water and preservatives, arriving “fresh” and put on display. At the most, cut flowers are for sale 7 days, after which they are discounted or thrown into the garbage.
Is this the kind of industry you want to support? Think of all the water, pesticides, plastics and fuel that gets used for one bouquet of soon to be wilty flowers. Is this a wise use of resources?
There are two organizations that are attempting to change the cut flower industry: Sierra Eco and Veriflora. Both organizations certify growers that are fair trade and whose flowers are grown sustainably. Try to support them if you really must buy flowers.
Tags: Climate Change, flowers, water
Who wants to dam the Similkameen River in southern BC?
- Shanker’s Bend Hydropower Project is an 80 metre high, $260 million US water storage and hydroelectric project. The dam would be located eight km northwest of Oroville, WA. The dam would flood 10-15 miles into Canada, inundating Palmer Lake, the town of Nighthawk, and the entire midrange of the Similkameen Valley.
- The Enloe Dam Built in 1920, it ceased operation in 1959 because the equipment had become obsolete. Issues regarding the passage of fish have never been resolved. In August 2008 the Okanogan County PUD put in a completed a final license application to restore the dam. which is expected to be approved. The project will entail developing a small hydropower plant just below the existing dam, about 3.5 miles (6.4 km) northwest of Oroville.
What’s at stake? The Shanker’s Bend Dam would destroy vital habitat that could be protected by a South Okanagan-Similkameen National Park. In this small area that spans from Washington to BC, there are 47 species of Global Concern and 531 species of Provincial Concern. Some of these include the:
American Badger, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Yellow Breasted Chat, Western Screech Owl, Long Billed Curlew, Mormon Metalmark Butterfly, Western Yellow Bellied Racer, Nightsnake, Rubber Boa, Great Basin Gophersnake, Western Rattlesnake, Tiger Salamander,Great Basin Spadefoot Toad, Western Skink, Western Painted Turtle, are some of the animals that could lose their homes.
This is ecosystem is like none other. There are three options for the Shanker’s Bend dam: 1) is to flood above the U.S. border 2) is to flood on either side of the border and 3) is to create a “Run of River” project which would see the water disappear into a maze of tunnels.
This has been another drought year for the Similkameen River which has suffered from low snowpack levels at its source near Manning Park. Despite this the Similkameen River remains a favourite amongst canoeists and kayakers alike. For more information, check out the South Okanagan-Similkameen National Park website or the Okanagan Simikameen Conservation Alliance.
Tags: hydro electric dams, water
I read recently about plans by various Hydro companies to introduce so-called Smart Meters, supposedly to catch all those indoor pot growers who are taking all the electricity without paying for it.
On the one hand it sounds like a good idea but so-called smart power grids are not secure. An article which appeared in Security Management, “Energy Insecurities: The Downside of Being Too Smart” emphasizes the point.
Here’s an excerpt:
The frequency of warning about these underlying vulnerabilities has been increasing. In January 2008, a senior analyst working for the Central Intelligence Agency stated publicly that cyberattacks had already been used to disrupt electrical power in multiple cities outside the United States. In March 2009, CNN reported that the high-tech electricity infrastructure known as the “smart grid” could be vulnerable to a devastating attack by computer hackers. The following month the Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese and Russian spies had penetrated computers that control the North American electric grid. Four months later, security experts speaking at Black Hat USA offered insights on hacking smart grid technology. Their discussion included a graphical demonstration of how a computer worm could infect thousands of smart meters in a major metropolitan area.
The idea behind Smart Meters is to improve the efficiency of the grid by allocating power from peak times and saving money by no longer requiring readers to go door to door. At the same time, these smart readers are being installed with little or no security features.
The meters currently being installed use standard protocols, such as the Trivial File Transport protocol (TFTP) or Domain Name System (DNS) that have proven vulnerable to cyberattacks in other contexts. Smart meters further involve two-way communication channels between the utilities and their customers. The channels may be provided through a number of ways, including wired Ethernet, such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or Broadband over power line (BPL) technology, or through wireless technology, such as cellular.
If that isn’t scary, read on:
In the early part of this decade, hackers shifted their focus from finding insecure modems to locating insecure wireless access points. This technique is called wardriving, which is the art of searching for wireless networks from a motorized vehicle using a computer loaded with some specialized software designed specifically for the task. Hackers in the coming decade will likely shift their attention to smart meters by writing and developing techniques to conduct “warmetering,” which is the art of locating and accessing metering architecture.
One potential mischievous activity that could be performed by warmetering hackers is the falsification of customer usage information being stored on the meters. If this information was altered to show a decrease in electricity consumption for individual customers, relative to the amount of electricity actually consumed, the customers’ bills would be lower than they otherwise would have been. Utility revenues would go down, along with company profits. This data could also be modified to show an increase in power consumption for individual customers…
If that doesn’t scare you enough, continue reading.
Tags: Energy, energy conservation, hydro electric dams, water
With the recent passing of Bill C9, the federal Canadian Environmental Assessment Act has been radically altered, allowing for projects to be entirely under the discretion of the Minister of Environment.
Instead of a study of the potential environmental impacts of an entire project, the minister could narrow it to only one small part.
“There would be nothing stopping the minister to say for this offshore facility [for instance,] ‘Don’t look at the alternative, don’t look at greenhouse gases, don’t look at contingency plans. Let’s just focus on, let’s say, wastewater discharges or the onboard storage or loading facilities, or just look at impacts on fish,” said Richard Lindgren, a lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association.
“What is supposed to be a very rigorous process is so narrow and so meaningless that we’re not going to be getting at where we should be, which is: at the end of the day, can we make an informed decision on what the overall impacts would be and whether this thing should go forward?”
Also, if the project is deemed to be ‘economically helpful’ and is an infrastructure project, then the government will just shut its eyes completely and press the start button. British Columbia is the most vulnerable province when you consider the provincial government under Premier Campbell decided to do away with any environmental assessments in 2002.
For further details, see the recent Hill-Times article
Tags: Alberta Tar Sands, BC, hydro electric dams
The next time you throw away your computer or laptop, do you wonder what happens to it? This video tracks e-waste from places all over North America to e-waste brokers in Hong Kong who know how to circumvent laws and send e-waste to China where women and children burn mountains of computers. Hard drives with personal information are sold to criminal organizations that in turn make victims of the previous owners. In Ghana, a pristine wetland has become a toxic, burning site of smelly plastic and lead fumes – children with bare feet and hands handling acids to pick apart computers and monitors, exposed to toxic fumes.
Maybe someone should send this video out to Bill Gates’ Foundation. If he cares enough, maybe he can become the Al Gore of E-waste.
Drew Landry, a crawfisher from Louisiana, sings about the impact of the oil spill on his way of life and the lives of other Acadians in the Gulf of Mexico. What will happen to their homeland when hurricane season starts? Will this be a new expulsion? As he talked, I couldn’t help but notice all the empty seats. Where is everybody?
Tags: offshore oil drilling, oil spill
Can you help save the Rockfish of Davie Bay?
Texada Island lies in the Strait of Georgia, a short ferry ride from Powell River on BC’s Sunshine Coast. On the southeast part of Texada Island is Davie Bay, the sight of a proposed cement quarry. Friends of Davie Bay are fighting a proposal by Lehigh Northwest Cement (a division of Heidelberg Cement Group) to quarry above Davie Bay and build a barge loading facility in the bay.
Davie Bay is home to hectares of native eelgrass and home to the endangered rockfish. The population of rockfish, which is slow to reproduce, has plummeted to an all-time low in the Strait of Georgia.
In 2002, the province of British Columbia dismantled environmental protection allowing for mining or dams to go ahead without any public input or environmental assessment. Right now, the only hope is to pressure the federal government to save this pristine area.
In the case of Davie Bay, the areas to be mined include rare plant habitat for a newly described coastal juniper (Juniperus maritima) that is BLUE-listed and considered relatively rare local endemit. Among BLUE-listed species, Macoun’s groundsel (Senecio macounii) occurs in the upland area as well as RED-listed California holly fern (Polystichum californicum) which was recently discovered here and is the only known location of this species in British Columbia.
It’s interesting to note that the U.S. is planning to implement tighter controls on cement plant emissions of mercury. Could this be why Lehigh Cement is coming north to BC where no such regulations exist?
Tags: BC, building materials, cement plants
Lyall's Mariposa Lilly
Environmentalists have been asking for a new national park to be created in the South Okanagan area of British Columbia.
To understand the significance of this contentious area, you only have to look as far as Kilpoola Lake near Osoyoos.
Bird Studies Canada lists Kilpoola Lake as an “Important Bird Area” with the following rare/endangered bird species:
Brewer’s Sparrow, Flammulated Owl, Grasshopper Sparrow, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Sage Thrasher and White-headed Woodpecker.
What about the Merriam’s shrew? This tiny mammal, endemic to this area, is a favourite source of food for owls and other animals. It is also prime habitat for many mammals, including Spotted Bat and Nuttalls Cottontail, and amphibians, such as Great Basin Spadefoot Toad and Tiger Salamander.
The flowers! Several rare and threatened flowers are found here. Lyall’s mariposa lily only occurs in British Columbia and Washington state. On the Canadian side of the border, it is considered a threatened plant, as it can be found in only a few locations within 5km (3 miles) of the Canada-US border.
This video from Mining.com shows an interview with Preston McEachern, adjunct professor at the University of Alberta and Sayta Das, Principal of Cambridge Strategies. Sayta Das is a former journalist and a really good PR guy who has written a book called “Green Oil”. Here’s an excerpt from his blog:
Already, it is becoming clear that fossil fuel energy companies have the capital and the resources necessary to pursue alternatives: whether this is “green washing” or a serious commitment remains to be seen, yet there is little doubt about the capacity. Alberta, however, as owner of the oil sands*, can put in place both the regulatory framework and the public resources necessary to ensuring that greener oil sands production and non-fossil-fuel energy sources can evolve as expeditiously as possible.
Listen as Mr. Das coaxes along Dr. McEachern who went a bit overboard recently and defamed two other scientists in his quest to preserve his job as the top oil sands scientist.
*the oil sands were formerly owned by the government of Alberta, now Sinopec and Petro-China have been increasing their ownership. For more background info on foreign ownership of the tar sands, read this article that appeared in Alberta Venture magazine. The asterisk is mine.
Tags: Alberta Tar Sands, oil
