When it comes to B.C. Liberal Premier Christy Clark giving the go-ahead on the five conditions for the Kinder Morgan expansion project, I do not see how the B.C. Liberal government could logically or morally have approved it, due to:
(1) The fact that CO2 emitted anywhere in the world in large amounts will have a profound effect on the global environment that will be contributed to, in part, by the go-ahead of the Kinder Morgan expansion project and others like it that Liberal governments on both the B.C. and federal level have collaborated to have approved.
(2) To the best of my knowledge, bitumen, once released into B.C. waters, will have a profound effect on the entire ecosystem and cannot be removed. So no amount of compensation will resolve such a situation should a tanker leak.
To further make my points about how unprepared both the Liberal B.C. provincial and federal governments are to handle the consequences of a bitumen spill, I’ll cite a May 21, 2015 CBC article. Thomas King, head of specialized lab analysis for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, states “There is no literature on it, no reports,” when referring to the removal of bitumen from the world’s oceans.
The article further states that a lake in Michigan had to be dredged when diluted bitumen leaked into the lake from an Enbridge pipeline that ruptured in 2010.
For more information please see the Wikipedia entry on the Kalamazoo River oil spill, where the cleanup costs, according to Wikipedia, were originally estimated at $5 million USD, and by September 2011 passed $585 million USD, and rose again to $765 million USD by summer 2012.
The B.C. Liberal government is showing that economic greed is valued at the cost of current and future man-made destruction of B.C.’s local ecology and worldwide effect on our planet’s environment.
I’ve lived in Burnaby for the majority of my 37 years on the planet, and this decision has me and most likely many other people very concerned for our long-term well-being going forward.
Having emailed a series of questions, multiple times, per my environmental concerns to Mary Polak, B.C.’s environment minster, during the latter part of 2016 and not receiving a direct answer, I’m further dismayed about the accountability from the B.C. Liberal government going forward, knowing now that when questions are asked of this government, a straight answer will not be given.
How can the B.C. Liberal government continue to lead, if it continues to be morally and logically bankrupt?
Aaron Keogh is a resident of Burnaby.
