Category Archives: Environment

Nov 04 2013
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Business, Economy, Environment

Pipelines hold both promise and peril

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Canada is one of the world’s great energy behemoths; a constipated behemoth, yes, but a behemoth, nonetheless. All it needs is a fact-acting laxative or, as Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall advises, a few more oil pipelines to. . .well, stay regular.

Here endeth the metaphor (you are welcome), but not the over-arching point, which is accumulating currency in political circles across the country these days: Canada’s natural resources, particularly oil, promise untold prosperity from coast to coast to coast, if we could only get them to markets.

At a Canadian Chamber of Commerce event last week week, Mr. Wall sounded downright dejected. Another “country with all this (oil) would find ways to move energy to tidewater, to improve the return to Canadians for the resource, to ensure there are jobs for the future for all of us – including First Nations – for the entire country,” The Canadian Press quoted him.

“We would do everything we could to ensure we had this great resource working not just for today’s economy  but helping for the economy of tomorrow. We have to get our head around moving that energy.”

In fact, it would seem, most Canadians agree with him. Research company CROP Inc. has released a survey that indicates that people in this country are generally keen on at least the idea of pipelines. According to the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris,  “The survey suggests that more Canadians agree with the major pipeline projects, including the Energy East proposal to bring oil to New Brunswick. The results found that 57 per cent of respondents endorsed the project compared to 25 per cent against.”

Meanwhile, “83 per cent of respondents said they are favourable to to the development of the oilsands,” though “41 per cent believe development should be slowed down, while 42 per cent are happy with the current pace.”

So, the solution to Canada’s energy stultification seems obvious. Or does it?

A recent CBC News investigation suggests the issue is a tad more complicated than the pro-pipeline lobbyists would have us believe. The public broadcaster reports that “pipelines regulated by the federal government – which include some of the longest lines in the country – have experienced a swell in the number of safety-related incidents over the past decade.”

Specifically, documents the CBC obtained under access-to-information from the National Energy Board (NEB) show that the number of “overall pipeline incidents”, which include leaks, spills and fires, has jumped by a factor of two since the turn of the century. The number of spills, alone, have tripled.

“More than four reportable releases happened for every 10,000 kilometres in 2000, or 18 incidents in total, according to NEB data,” the CBC reports. “By 2011, that rate had risen to 13 per 10,000 kilometres, or 94 incidents.”

In fact, that may not sound like much, given that 90-odd companies operate roughly 71,000 kilometers of pipe in Canada. And, in the context of this summer’s  devastating events at Lac-Megantic – at which a derailment of train cars carrying heavy oil exploded, killing dozens of people – pipeline leaks seem the far lesser of two evils.

Certainly, the NEB doesn’t appear overwrought about the numbers, attributing their rise to better reporting standards. “We’ve been out there talking with industry associations and the companies themselves to ensure that they are fully aware of what the reporting requirements are and I think that’s why we’re seeing an increase right now,” the NEB’s business leader for operations, Patrick Smythe, told the CBC.

It’s entirely possible he’s correct. But even if he is, that doesn’t change the fact that pipelines are, like any other piece of transportation infrastructure, vulnerable to the inexorable onslaught of time and weather. They must be maintained. And, just as importantly, they must be seen to be maintained.

In the end, nothing halts energy development in Canada with greater force than a distrustful, angry, agitated public.

The current shale gas debate in the pristine countryside of fair New Brunswick – where a pipeline might well wend  – proves definitively that industrial-strength spin has its limits.

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Oct 10 2013
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Culture, Economy, Environment

Counting down the days to the Great Transformation

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The world as we know it has been coming to end for years now. We haven’t had to look far to perceive the portents of impending doom: in the entrails of Wall Street corpses; in the tea leaves of governments that no longer work; in the uromancy that predicts widening income gaps between the rich and the rest.

We just haven’t been able to reliably nail down a year for the Great Transformation. Until now.

A researcher at the University of Hawaii, who used to work at Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., thinks he knows. The point of no return will arrive. . .wait for it. . .in 2047. . .give or take.

Camillo Mora, who studies numbers for a living, tells the Globe and Mail’s science reporter Ivan Semeniuk that, overall, this is the year in which climate change will become a permanent feature of life on Earth. . .more or less.

According to the article, “The turning point arrives. . .as a worldwide average, if fossil fuel consumption continues unabated; as late as 2069 if carbon emissions are curbed. City by city, the numbers are a bit more revealing. In Montreal, for example, the new normal will arrive in 2046, and for Vancouver not until 2056. But the real spotlight of Dr. Mora’s study is the tropics, where profound changes could be entrenched in little more than a decade.”

As the good doctor says, “Today, when people talk about climate change, the images that come to mind are melting ice and polar bears. People might infer from this that the tropics will be less affected.”

People would be wrong.

But, then, there’s nothing new about that.

Once, not very long ago, people assumed that economic globalization would insert several chickens in pots from Beijing to Kalamazoo – that gross domestic products around the world would rise like juggernauts, heedless of any and all counterforces they may encounter.

Once, not very long ago, people assumed that democratically elected governments served the best, common interests of the majority of voters – that reason and circumspection would effectively quell fanatical and reactionary figures intent on reshaping the public sphere in their own ideologically pinched and impoverished image.

Now comes word from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that, generally speaking, the world’s got itself in an economic ringer – one from which it is not likely to emerge any time soon. Welcome to the age of slow growth.

“Emerging economies have cooled off,” an item in The New York Times reveals. “Europe remains in the doldrums. The United States is facing fiscal uncertainty, and its powerful central bank is contemplating easing up on its extraordinary stimulus efforts, with potentially global ramifications.”

As things stand, the IMF “foresees the world economy increasing by about 2.9 per cent in 2013 and 3.6 per cent in 2014. That is down from 5.4 per cent in 2007, before the global recession hit.”

If its predictions pan out, a few will be spared, thanks to their impenetrable cocoons of wealth and privilege. But most can expect lower standards of living, fewer good jobs, higher costs and increasing poverty and homelessness.

Meanwhile, over in Washington, D.C., legislators are twiddling their thumbs.

“The federal government shutdown and looming deadline to raise the debt ceiling have merged into one major problem on Capitol Hill, though neither issue has a resolution in sight as the government shutdown heads into its second week,” CBS News reports. “Democrats and Republicans (have) dug further into their respective positions: Republicans are calling on Democrats to negotiate over a short-term spending bill and a debt-ceiling increase, and President Obama says he is ready to negotiate over any topic – once the Republicans pass legislation to re-open the government and raise the U.S. borrowing limit without any conditions.”

All of which prompted Laurence Booth of the University of Toronto’s esteemed Rotman School of Management to tell the Toronto Star, “Any sane person obviously believes the U.S. isn’t going to default. That would cause an earthquake in financial markets around the globe.”

Of course, once upon a time, any sane person obviously believed that climate change could very well spell the end of the world – at least, as we know it.

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Sep 22 2013
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Economy, Energy, Environment, Oil and Gas

Our increasingly dull song of praise for oil

You can just smell the methane

You can just smell the methane

One public page of the member-driven website, Geo-Help Inc., which bills itself as “The Virtual Geology Department providing Geological Expertise and Services to the Oil and Gas Industry in Canada,” offers a collection of quotes that reaffirms man’s (though, interestingly, not even one woman’s) abiding love affair with liquid, black gold down through the decades.

Odes have been written to exalt the substance, including this one, sponsored by Seneca Oil and published in 1850:

“The healthful balm, from Nature’s secret spring/ The bloom of health, and life, to man will bring/ As from her depths the magic liquid flows/ To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.”

Others, like Kansas geologist Wallace Pratt (1885-1981), also recognized the allure when he said, “Where oil is first found is in the minds of men.” Men, presumably, like American industrialist J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) who once declared that his formula for success was to “rise early, work hard, strike oil.”

The quotes are not uniformly laudatory. One describes oil as “the excrement of the devil.” Another complains, “You can’t get the grease without a lease.”

And some are way off the mark, as is one attributed to the Director of Anglo Persian Oil Company who, in 1926, observed, “Saudi Arabia appears devoid of all prospects for oil.”

Historically, though, our preoccupation with the stuff has been, until quite recently, laced with positive connotations. And this strikes me as somewhat paradoxical, because unless you happen to be an industry executive or petroleum geologist, the chances are very good that you, like me, find oil to be. . .well, pedestrian.

Or, if you will pardon the pun, boring.

Whenever a fixation becomes mundane, it has a tendency to subdue the other faculties of mind – imagination, ingenuity, creativity – that can, quite often, improve social, political and economic conditions.

This might help explain New Brunswick’s current circumstances. The rut the province is in – fiscally, commercially, even demographically – could well be related to, if not actually derive from, our single-minded focus on the promise of a pipeline from Alberta’s oil patch and the putative promise (and danger) of a fully functioning shale gas industry in the future.

I would never suggest that we should dismiss these projects for the sake of our becoming less tedious people. But it might profit us to pull our heads from the sand and take a look at what other jurisdictions around the world are doing with energy development. (A well-known writer – though, his name escapes me – on the industry from, of all places, Calgary made a similar observation on New Brunswick CBC Radio’s rolling-home show last week).

Science Daily reports, “It’s less costly to get electricity from wind turbines and solar panels than coal-fired power plants when climate change costs and other health impacts are factored in, according to a new study published in Springer’s Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.

“In fact – using the official U.S. government estimates of health and environmental costs from burning fossil fuels – the study shows it’s cheaper to replace a typical existing coal-fired power plant with a wind turbine than to keep the old plant running. And new electricity generation from wind could be more economically efficient than natural gas.”

Meanwhile, also according to Science Daily, “High school and college students got a recruiting call. . .to join the Solar Army and help solve one of the 21st century’s greatest scientific challenges: finding the dirt-cheap ingredients that would make sunlight a practical alternative to oil, coal and other traditional sources of energy.

‘Enough sunlight falls on Earth in one hour to provide all of the world’s energy – for 7 billion people – for an entire year,’ said Harry B. Gray, Ph.D., leader of the army. He is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. ‘If we can capture that energy and use it to split water, burning coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels will be history.’

Maybe. Maybe not. But even the thought is inspirational – which is more than I can say about oil.

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Sep 13 2013
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Economy, Environment

Such a fine line: economy versus environment

Four strong winds that blow from Alberta

Four strong winds that blow from Alberta

This music industry icon, this erstwhile miner for a heart of gold, steps off the bandwagon just long enough to cluck his tongue and sample the air in beautiful, downtown Fort McMurray.

It looks like a nuclear test site and smells like one, too, says Neil Young: “The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuel (is) all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”

What’s more, he told an American crowd the other day, “Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. . .a wasteland. . .The oil that we’re using here. . .they call ethical oil because it’s not from Saudi Arabia or some country that may be at war with us.”

Actually, there’s no need for atomic-era hyperbole. Good, old Fort Mac (population: 61,000) looks like Fargo, North Dakota, which is, in and of itself, bad enough. But I take Mr. Young’s point: The tar sands are despicable. Boo.

Among the celebrated elite, it’s a familiar refrain, gaining ever greater traction as U.S. President Barack Obama leisurely considers his next move in the Keystone XL pipeline kerfuffle. Indeed, the list of prominent “deathline” haters grows longer with each day that passes on the protest lines: There’s the Dali Lama and his pal, Al Gore; there’s Bishop Desmond Tutu and Sundance Kid Robert Redford; there’s actors Mark Ruffalo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kyra Sedgwick, and David Strathaim. All are wedded to the simple, if absolute, certainty that Alberta’s oil industry is killing the planet.

They are probably right. Still, no one in a position of authority ever looks at the long game of energy policy – not when the short game is so economically lucrative and politically profitable.

Consider the oft-repeated rejoinder of tar sands apologists to the environmental lobby’s claim that Alberta bitumen is dirtiest source of oil in the world: No, it’s not. Or, as Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver told The New York Times’s Joe Nocera recently, “That statement that the Keystone pipeline would mean ‘game over’ for the environment is absurd.”

Mr. Nocera – a confessed proponent of the project – grabbed the baton from Mr. Oliver and, in his column, sprinted to the finish line:

“Oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim. Extraction technology has improved to the point where there is almost no difference, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, between sands oil and old-fashioned oil drilling. The government has insisted that the companies extracting the oil return the land to its original state when the mining is completed. Indeed, for all the hysteria over the environmental consequences of the oil sands, there is oil in California that is actually dirtier than the oil from the sands.”

All of which misses the bigger point – the one that celebrity eco-warriors, themselves, invariably fail to make: If you’re pointing a shotgun to your head, does it really matter what calibre of shell you’re using?

The world is hooked on oil. It’s going to stay that way until it runs out (not likely) or its economies collapse (increasingly likely). If Keystone fails to win presidential assent this time around – thanks, perhaps, to the pickets of the preeminent – it, or something like it, will roll out the next time around, or the time after that. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.

Just as there’s no point in pretending that anyone is giving serious consideration to the long-term economic benefits of the Energy East pipeline proposal for New Brunswick – though we might do ourselves a favour by curbing our crowing tongues for a change and spend a few minutes actually examining the post-construction-phase ramifications of, and the durable commercial opportunities generated by, the project.

After all, out here in New Brunswick, where we don’t lace our boots without a government shoestring, we’re not looking for a heart of gold.

Just the gold.

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Sep 06 2013
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Environment, Humour

Musings on the remains of daylight

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Where I walk, almost daily, to feed my illusion of youthful vigour, the mall at the corner of Champlain and Paul Streets in Dieppe posts signs that cheerfully remind patrons about its program of “daylight harvesting”.

One finds a fuller explanation on its website, which boasts “Champlain Place is leading the way in energy efficiency. 2008 renovations. . .included skylights with photo sensors able to ‘read’ sunlight entering . . .and adjust the interior lighting system, shutting lights off when sunlight reaches the pre-determined level. It’s lights out for the environment!”

That last phrase may be understood in one of two utterly different ways, but as the summer begins to recede and the sun seems ever lazier, I prefer the more optimistic interpretation. After all, every last morsel of daylight is, as Martha Stewart might agree, a good thing.

Unless you happen to live or work near Tower Bridge in a certain European capital of ancient repute.

“Developers have promised urgent action to cover up the Walkie Talkie skyscraper being built in the City of London after an ultra-bright light reflected from the building melted a Jaguar car on a street below,” reports a joint piece from the Independent and Associated Press.

“The 160m tall, £200 million ($397 million) building has been renamed the Walkie Scorchie after its distinctive concave surfaces reflected a dazzling beam of light which blinded passersby and extensively damaged vehicles below. . .Company director Martin Lindsay left his Jaguar XJ for an hour opposite the building, and returned to find warped side panels and the smell of burning plastic. ‘They’re going to have to think of something. I’m gutted,’ he said.”

In fact, “they’re” working on it. In a statement, the developers – Canary Wharf and Land Securities – explained that “the phenomenon is caused by the current elevation of the sun in the sky. It currently lasts for approximately two hours per day, with initial modeling suggesting that it will be present for approximately two to three weeks. . .We are consulting with local businesses and the City to address the issue in the short-term, while also evaluating longer-term solutions.”

One of these might be to stop building skyscrapers with so much glass. England’s weather service reports that London – traditionally, a dark and dank metropolis – has experience a record number of glitteringly sunny days this summer. The cause, it says, is most likely climate change, which suggests that residents can, in the future, expect regular occurrences of charred cafe awnings, melted dashboards and burnt doormats up and down Fenchurch Street.

But London is not the only place where Earth’s G-class, yellow dwarf star is causing headaches.

“Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power,” The New York Times reported last month. “At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry. ‘We did not get in front of this disruption,’ Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. ‘It may be too late.’”

The worry is that if roof-top solar panels continue to drop in price and rise in popularity – as they have in California and Arizona – the cost of regulated, distributed energy from more traditional, less environmentally friendly sources will shoot up, perhaps to unmarketable, unsustainable levels, forcing everyone back into the stone  age. As the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in July, the solar segment of the electric power sector in that country is expected to grow by 79 per cent in  2013, and 49 per cent next year.

Should I worry? Does Cadillac Fairview, which manages Champlain Mall, realize that its daylight harvests are contributing to the decline and fall of western civilization? Or am I simply suffering from a mild dose of sun silliness?

It seems to be going around.

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Aug 24 2013
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Economy, Energy, Environment

How to tame a vanishing wilderness

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One item that seems conspicuously absent from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s wilderness kit, as he tromps across the Canada’s vast Arctic expanse this month, is a well-thumbed copy of Farley Mowat’s 1956 children’s classic, Two Against the North, also known in some publishing quarters as Lost in the Barrens.

The story tells the tale of a white boy, Jaime, and his Cree companion, Awasin, who overcome enormous odds to survive a season stranded on the brutal tundra. (Think Australian outback, except colder). During their sojourn, their cultural differences dissolve and heir friendship deepens. So does their respect for nature.

What’s not often mentioned in the literature reviews is that the book is also a pretty good survival guide for anyone who suddenly finds himself, say, needing to pitch a tent or light a pot of seal oil.

As the Globe and Mail reported last week, “An Inuit elder and Ranger dressed in traditional animal skins taught (Mr. Harper) how to build an inuksuk, the famous northern stone figure. They later erected a traditional animal skin shelter. Mr. Harper set up the pole inside the structure under direction from his wife, Laureen Harper. The Prime Minister was also instructed how to light a traditional carved bowl lamp – which uses seal oil – but was unable to set it afire. Mr. Harper remarked wryly: ‘I guess I’d die in the wilderness.’”

Sure, but what a way to go. Canadians’ – especially southern Canadians – love affair with their great boreal region grows more ardent in late summer, when the mug and grime of the urban landscape tests all but the most stoic, the Northern Lights crackle and dance in the imagination and the call of the wild is a primal scream.

“There is nothing worth living for but to have one’s name inscribed on the Arctic chart,” the 19th century English Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once remarked. Mr. Harper might well agree. Every summer, the glaciers continue their relentless retreat and the polar ice recedes into memory. Every summer, the prime minister is there to bear witness to both loss and opportunity, as if to say the north isn’t what it used to be and likely never will be again. But is that, he is wont to query, necessarily a bad thing?

“We recognize that the Arctic is growing more accessible to international shipping,” he said in Churchill, Manitoba, two years ago. “The various circumpolar countries are pressing claims that may conflict with our own. The global demand for northern resources is growing. . .The first and highest priority of our northern strategy is the protection of our Arctic sovereignty. And as I have said many times before, the first principle of sovereignty is to use it or lose it.”

Of course, the federal government’s commitment to the region depends on an essentially dialectical arrangement with the truth: Global warming is mostly hype, but that doesn’t mean we can’t exploit it. In this, the environment takes a back seat to geopolitics and whispering ski-doos.

“The Canadian military has been secretly test-driving a $620,000 stealth snowmobile in its quest to quietly whisk troops on clandestine operations in the Arctic,” reports The Canadian Press. “The Department of National Defence even has a nickname for its cutting-edge, covert tool: ‘Loki,’ after the ‘mythological Norse shape-shifting god.’”

The Arctic, today, is not only a proving ground for the armed forces; it is the site of previously undreamt economic development. Or, as Mr. Harper’s northern strategy declares, “From the development of world-class diamond mines and massive oil and gas reserves, to a thriving tourism industry that attracts visitors from around the globe, the enormous economic potential of the North is on the cusp of being unlocked.The Government is taking action to encourage future exploration and development by improving Northern regulatory systems and investing in critical infrastructure to attract investors and developers to the North.”

So much for the pitching of tents and the igniting of lamps. So much for the sentimentalities of the south. Soon, the brightest of the northern lights will belong to the derricks and diggers of industry.

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Aug 07 2013
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Energy, Environment, Oil and Gas

A tale of two shale gas protests

Quicksand for us; Grand Poupon for them

What shall we name it as midsummer slides effortlessly along the briny beaches of New Brunswick’s cottage country. The “kerfuffle in Kent County”? The “excitation of Elsipogtog”?  Surely, nothing so provocative as the “battle of Balcombe”. Besides, that name is already taken.

No one does controversy quite like the Brits. Compared to them, Americans are punters. Canadians are merely quaint. So it is with regular rounds of ministerial expense scandals. So it is with steamy love affairs, illicitly conducted in high office. So it is with shale gas exploration.

The battle of Balcombe, a town in West Sussex, roughly 75 kilometers due south of London, provides something for everyone. The controversy, says one recent “shortcuts” blog post in the online version of The Guardian, “has pitched police trying to ensure energy company Cuadrilla can drill an exploratory well outside (the) pretty, prosperous and hitherto sleepy. . .village against a coalition of protesters who fear the operation will lead to full-scale oil or gas production through the controversial process of fracking. The opposition alliance are a disparate bunch.”

There are, of course, the usual suspects, such as Friends of the Earth and the anti-gas groups Frack Off, Frack Free Sussex, Gas Field Free Sussex and No Fracking in East Kent. And there are the celebrities, including Bianca Jagger (ex-wife of Mick), Natalie Hynde (daughter of another rock icon, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders).

There is Simon Medhurst, the well-known activist about whom the Guardian writes, “also known as ‘Sitting Bull’, (he) earlier this year successfully delayed work on a new Bexhill-to-Hastings link road by tunnelling beneath it.”

And there is Marina Pepper (nee Baker), an East Sussex local councillor who was once a tabloid model, a Playboy Playmate of the Month for March 1987, actor and journalist. A Wikipedia entry says the ardent environmentalist “is known today as a practising Wiccan and author of several children’s books on Witchcraft, including Spells for the Witch in You; Spells for Teenage Witches: Get Your Way with Magical Power; Marina Baker’s Teenage Survival Guide; and Spells for Cats (the last was published under the name Daisy Pepper). In 2001, she worked as a magic consultant for a BBC documentary about the Harry Potter books.”

All of whom are dead, set against even the possibility of a shale gas industry in their green and pleasant land, a posture which moves the Telegraph to testily observe, “Unfortunately, the Balcombe protest against proposed exploratory drilling in the Weald has been hijacked by professional Swampy-style eco-warriors who would happily return the nation’s economy to pre-industrial times.”

In contrast, New Brunswick’s organized opposition to shale gas development, while vigorous and vocal, has been largely lacking in hot-headed celebrities – at least, on the ground. Where are the David Suzuki sand Margaret Atwoods, chaining themselves to trees felled to block the progress of seismic testing trucks?

Yes, police have made arrests. And yes, there have been incidents that appear very much like orchestrated vandalism. Still, the mood seems to have changed of late. It has become more reflective.

“The biggest thing that came out of this was we got to unite the people,” John Levi, an Elsipogtog warrior chief for the protestors in Kent County, told the Moncton Times & Transcript not long ago. “Like the non-natives, like the Acadians, the English, Metis, all the cultures, so that’s the biggest accomplishment here I see.”

Added Wendall Nicholas, a peacekeeper in the anti-gas movement, “Each time we’ve done our best to use our utmost respect and patience to see a peaceful outcome. We work in a very respectful and patient manner –  whether it’s on a logging road in 40-degree heat or a telephone conversation.”

It’s no sure bet that SWN Resources, which has been the target of much of the protests, would agree. Still, they’re not saying one way or the other.

Nope, we Canadians just don’t controversy like the Brits. Maybe, that’s a good thing, after all.

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Jul 27 2013
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Environment, Municipal Affairs, Society

Catching Moncton’s “chocolate wave”

Resurgo is action in latin. And that's a dead language. Get 'er done boys and girls

My father, the esteemed writer Harry Bruce, once allowed that while the construction of a causeway, in 1968, through the Petitcodiac River was not “the most monumental blunder in the history of atrocities mankind has inflicted on the environment,” it was, nonetheless, amongst the dumbest.

“By blocking the bore, the causeway forced it back on itself, and the silt that once hurtled upriver settled in the lower reaches of the Petitcodiac,” he wrote in 1995, in a piece for the Montreal Gazette. “It created a huge plain of greasy mud, and turned the river into a sluggish, unnavigable joke. The Tidal Bore deteriorated until the locals called it the Total Bore.”

He noted, pointedly: “American humorist, Erma Bombeck, drove across North America with her family to see what they expected to be a thrilling natural phenomenon. When they reached Moncton, she wrote, ‘A trickle of brown water, barely visible, slowly edged its way up the river toward us with all the excitement of a stopped-up toilet. . .I retained more water than that. . .It was a long time before anyone spoke. About 5,000 miles to be exact.’”

Ms. Bombeck didn’t live long enough to see what became of the river and its bore. But had she been one of the estimated 30,000 happy gawkers, who gathered along the Petty’s banks the other day, she would have sung an altogether different tune as a three-foot high wall of water, bearing a clutch of professional surfers from around the world, coursed upstream. One of them, a bright, young fellow from California, called it a “chocolate wave”. And it was.

Experts had predicted that, following the causeway gates’ permanent opening three years ago, decades might pass before anyone noticed any appreciable change in the river. The experts were wrong, though they weren’t complaining.

Last month, when the first of the new “super bores” arrived, Global News reported, “This is biggest one of the year. Daniel LeBlanc with Petitcodiac Riverkeeper, says it is only going to get more impressive in the coming years. ‘There’s no question that the reason we have a beautiful bore is because of the restoration of the river, (he said).’”

There’s also no question about the fact that nature, when left alone, can be remarkably self-correcting – a certain comfort at a time when the Province is struggling with the environmental implications of onshore oil and gas development.

For Moncton, at any rate, the return of the bore fairly drips with the sort of symbolism that city officials might otherwise pay good money to manufacture. The community’s motto is “resurgo”. What better way to illustrate the efficacious effects of sound planning (in the river’s case, the decision to allow its water to flow freely), than a resurgent tide?

What a stunningly marvelous backdrop to the statistics we routinely deploy to persuade newcomers to settle here: The fact that Moncton’s population growth rate since 2006 is 9.7 per cent, making it the fifth-fastest growing Census Metropolitan Area in the country; the fact that Westmorland County has typically attracted at least three times as many people every year than any other county in New Brunswick; and the fact that, since 1990, the city has added more than 25,000 jobs to its workforce.

The bore is, of course, a creature of moon and tide, of gravity and specific density. But it is also a testament to change, to renewal, to possibility. Its return to its past glory is a handshake with the future – a future we write with every decision, every move we make today. What else do we imagine for ourselves? What will be the shape of our community 10 or 20 years from now?

The Petitcodiac’s restoration is not yet complete. The “monumental blunder” still stares at us, waiting grimly to be replaced by a partial bridge. Meanwhile, the tidal bore rushes in from the sea, roaring at us to greet all the days the will come with courage, conviction and, most of all, sheer, untrammelled delight.

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Jul 27 2013
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Climate, Energy, Environment

Here comes the sun in N.B.?

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Lost in New Brunswick’s roiling energy debates over shale gas (will hydrofracking transform us into mutant mole people?) and wind power (will the turning of turbines send us to the loony bin?) is one alternative about which you almost never hear.

You won’t find it easily in the official literature dutifully compiled by the province’s  energy and environment departments or by NB Power, now gamely justifying is disastrous investments in the Point Lepreau nuclear plant.

But it is the ubiquitous feature of every hot summer morning, every frigid winter afternoon and all the days between: the sun.

While much of Canada has been consumed, in recent years, by the thankless task of weighing the virtues and vices of its plentiful supply of fossil fuel, other nations of the world have been moving ahead with plans to increase their solar energy capacities. The reasons are as mundane and familiar as they come: improving technology and falling costs are making a solid business case for manufacturers and operators, alike.

Writing, recently, in the Huffington Post, reporter James Gerken observed, “A dramatic drop in the price of solar power technology last year helped the continued growth of renewable energy, according to a U.N.-backed report. . .Global energy-generating capacity from renewable sources rose by 115 gigawatts in 2012, compared with 105 gigawatts the previous year, the report by the Paris-based think tank REN21 showed.”

Specifically, he reported, “The drop in solar prices – fuelled by Chinese manufacturers – helped bring the overall cost of investment in renewables down 12 per cent to $244 billion from $279 billion in 2011, effectively boosting the amount of generating capacity investors can get for their money.”

Meanwhile, according to a Reuters piece last month, “New solar photovoltaic power installations in the United States totaled 723 megawatts (MW) during the first quarter, up 33 per cent over the same period in 2012. . .GTM Research and Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) forecast that during 2013, the industry will install 4.4 gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic power facilities – enough to power about 800,000 average American homes.

“That will rise to nearly 9.2 GW annually in 2016. As the cost of solar photovoltaic panels declines, solar power is one of the fastest-growing new energy sources in the United States. ‘Installations will speed up over the next four years as projects become economically preferable to retail  power in more locations,’  said Shayle Kann, vice president of research at renewable power information company GTM, a unit of Greentech Media.”

In fact, in a recent letter to the Globe and Mail, a spokesperson for the Canadian Solar Industries Association declared, “Last year, Europe added almost all of Ontario’s current generating capacity in one year and most of it was solar.” Ian MacLellan went on to write, “The world is in the middle of a fundamental transition in our energy-based economy. It started about 20 years ago and it will take about another 20 years to complete. This transition is happening much faster than even most solar experts had predicted.”

That last statement might be a little rose-coloured. The economic forces that now make solar energy viable for many are also eminently reversible. What’s more, the biggest advances in all forms of renewable energy (including solar) appear to be taking place in developing and emerging economies, simply because these are, effectively, “greenfields” without integrated, fossil-fuel-dominated infrastructure.

Then, of course, there’s always the not-in-my-backyard syndrome, of which it is never wise to discount.

“A Devon (U.K.) councillor has branded solar farms as being like concentration camps after the latest plans to install panels in the countryside was revealed,” The Telegraph reported in April. “Julian Brazil, a Lib Dem councillor at Devon County Council, spoke out as another solar energy farm was given the green light by the council’s development management committee. He told the meeting: ‘They look horrible, not dissimilar to concentration camps. But we are told by the Planning Minister to press ahead with these.’”

Still, these problems are by no means unsurmountable. And solving them could happily preoccupy New Brunswick’s innovators (and elected officials), who are always looking for new ways to dispel the clouds that hang over the province’s economy and let in a little sunshine.

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Jul 02 2013
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Business, Economy, Environment, Government

A cold-water wake-up call from Mother Nature

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As the flood waters in Calgary begin to abate, the question turns – as it so often does in such cases – to the issue of culpability. Who’s to blame?

Was Mother Nature having an especially bad day when she dumped more than 100 millimeters of rain in less than a day on the western city? Or was there more to the deluge than met the eye? Did we humans exacerbate the hydrological cycle through global warming and then promptly ignore the predictable consequences?

In his commentary, which appeared in major newspapers across the country last week, nationally award-winning energy writer and Calgarian Andrew Nikiforuk answers definitively. “If nothing else the city’s often arrogant elites have been reminded that the province’s Chinese-style economic growth is vulnerable to extreme events,” he notes. “A crowded and overdeveloped province of four million is nowhere near as resilient as a province of one million. . .Albertans have also learned that climate change delivers two extremes: more water when you don’t need it, and not enough water when you do. The geographically challenged have also become learned, once again, that water travels downhill and even inundates flood plains. So climate change is not a mirage. Nor is it weird science or tomorrow’s news. It is now part of the flow of daily life.”

In fact, according to a Global News report (also covered by other print and broadcast outlets), “Strategies to prevent another devastating Albertan deluge sat on the provincial government’s desk for more than half-a-dozen years. George Groeneveld headed a flood mitigation committee after record-breaking rainfall and river levels soaked the Calgary region in 2005. They were tasked with figuring out how to lessen the risk of a recurrence and spent a year coming up with 18 recommendations.”

The suggestions included ensuring the Alberta Environment “coordinate the completion of flood risk maps for the identified urban flood risk areas in the province; develop a map maintenance program to ensure that the flood risk maps are updated when appropriate; identify priority rural flood risk areas that require flood risk mapping and develop a program to prepare the maps.”

In an interview with Global News, Mr. Groeneveld said “Of course I’ve always been disappointed. . .People have very short memories with floods: Go through one good year and they start to relax again.”

The signature feature of climate change is the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events. On the East Coast, that means the number and severity of hurricanes is rising. On the Great Plains and prairies, the number of super cells producing supremely destructive tornadoes is on the upswing. It means more and longer droughts; more and deadlier wildfires; and it means more water falling from on high. Much more.

According to an item in the Calgary Herald, John Pomeroy, a Canada research chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, says the floods in the Alberta foothills has “changed changed the Rockies. . .forever. . .He says the overflowing waters have changed everything from how the landscape will handle future flooding to the animals that live in it. Pomeroy says Alberta towns and cities will need much better flood defences in the future to handle high rainfall events. He says the Bow River has swallowed so much silt from eroding banks that its status as a blue-ribbon trout stream is in doubt. Pomeroy says many of the developments that have been affected by the flooding should never have been built in the first place.”

Given the crucial role Alberta now plays in the Canadian economy, these so-called “natural disasters” are no longer local calamities; they are clear and present threats to national security.

And while it may be one thing to turn a blind eye to the science of global warming, it is quite another to reject the evidence one’s own eye gathers as the sky proceeds to fall on one’s head.

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