Why is British Columbia continuing its outdated role in international trade as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, exporting our natural wealth while depleting our resources and impairing our environment? Is it because we need the jobs or is it because B.C. Hydro has the desire to build its last major hydroelectric dam?
Instead of using our abundant, inexpensive and readily available natural gas to generate electricity, we are choosing to export it while proposing to flood yet another of our limited inhabitable, arable valleys.
Generating power from natural gas has many benefits, including the ability to produce electricity close to the area of need. Such onsite generation could save much of the significant “line-loss” of electricity that occurs between the Peace River projects and the Lower Mainland. Natural-gas electrical generating plants are scalable, meaning they can produce electricity on demand not only where but also when it is most needed.
Whether or not hydroelectricity generated from flooded valleys qualifies as clean energy is a matter of debate. Reservoirs release an abundance of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from drowned soils and forests. In addition, human-health considerations such as methylmercury contamination of fish and other food-chain effects further erode the credibility of “clean hydro.”
First Nations in the Peace Region continue to be affected by an onslaught of industrial development that is causing unsustainable cumulative environmental impacts.
First Nations are opposed to Site C. Have we not learned from other expensive and time-consuming court cases and multimillion-dollar settlement agreements that B.C. should not be proceeding with such large and destructive industrial developments that do not have buy-in from First Nations?
The days of B.C. Hydro running roughshod over First Nations by flooding their traditional-use areas should be a thing of the past.
B.C. residents continue to enjoy some of the lowest electricity rates of any jurisdiction. Low prices contribute to inefficiencies and waste. And while rate hikes are never popular, they are effective at reducing consumption.
What if we were to pay a price for power that more closely accounted for the true social and environmental costs of lost forests, farms, human heritage, and fish and wildlife resources. Would we not conserve more electricity to reduce demand and the need to develop more generation capacity?
There is no urgency to build Site C; the option to do so will remain for centuries.
Conversely, building it now will affect future choices as reservoirs eventually silt-in and become increasingly ineffective at storing water, not to mention the downstream effects of the reservoir’s silt retention on delta regeneration— in this case the Athabasca River Delta.
Moreover, B.C. doesn’t even know if its dream of natural-gas export will come true. No major player in the LNG export business has yet reached a final investment decision on whether or not to proceed. If the anticipated scale of natural gas exports is diminished, B.C. will have even more gas for power generation.
Some argue that Site C will create much-needed jobs. But many civic officials are arguing that money spent to build the Site C dam should instead be spent on municipal and regional infrastructure.
Shouldn’t we be investing in building a provincewide safe, efficient transportation network instead of building a dam of questionable economic value?
B.C. needs to upgrade its main highways and bridges, many of which were built in the 1950s and 1960s and with increased traffic have become among the most dangerous in North America. In addition to safety and job-creation considerations, better highways would also serve to improve the province’s economy.
Obliterating forests, farmland and critical fish and wildlife habitat by impounding another free-flowing section of the Peace River is too great a price to pay to generate electricity in a province with so many alternatives. As the displaced residents of the hydro-flooded Columbia, Kootenay and Finlay river valleys can attest, their lives were severely disrupted by the loss of their homes, their jobs, their communities and in some cases, their health.
The disruption to those people’s lives that will be directly affected by the Site C dam must be reconsidered by those of us who use the electricity so far away from the affected area — a job best suited for the B.C. Utilities Commission, which, because of the Clean Energy Act, has been intentionally restricted from dealing with this file.
Ray Demarchi is retired B.C. chief of wildlife and former Kootenay regional wildlife section head. Ross Peck is a Peace River resident, rancher and historian. Both authors are biologists.
