Elephant flatulence
Well duh! What else do you say when someone points to the gigantic pachyderm squeezed into B.C.’s environmental closet, and notes the obvious fact that elephants fart – in this case, massive amounts of greenhouse gases.
A recent pronouncement by the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre was treated as if it was earth shattering news. Earth shattering it may well be; news it shouldn’t have… or rather, it should have been old news years ago.
The main UVic ‘finding’ was that B.C. is using a ‘flawed environmental assessment process” to arrive at its vaunted claim to leadership in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact recent decisions by the Liberal government are destined to make B.C. a global leader in the production of greenhouse gases as measured on a per capita scale.
What B.C. uses as its measure of mitigation success is greenhouse gases emitted by processes that take place in B.C. – including emissions generated in the extraction and production of carbon based fuels.
What’s left out of the accounting are the greenhouse gas emissions we export or will be exporting in the form of coal and – if Christy Clark’s Liberal vision for the future holds – liquefied natural gas, to be burned in other countries.
Bad as the first set of stats are likely to be – many predict B.C. will not be able to maintain even its purblind CO2 targets if it becomes a major producer of LNG – they will be dwarfed as countries like China burn the ever increasing sources of carbon based fuels we are intent on providing.
Instead of LNG, say B.C. went big time into the production of heroin for export to the world. We could claim we treat our workers well, that our health standards are high, and consumption low. But would the world not treat us as a pariah?
Of course they would; and rightly so.
Truth of the matter is we’re being sold an environmental bill of goods by the proponents of oil, coal and natural gas, and our children are going to pay the price.
Instead of investing in energy sources and technologies of the future, B.C. is being hoodwinked into coupling its future to energy sources that we have been repeatedly warned must stay in the ground.