Pumping offshore oil and gas

BC Business Examiner – Vancouver Island Edition
Letters
December 01, 2008

Re: “Pumping offshore oil and gas” (Business Examiner, Nov 3), it is unfortunate that former, interim premier-turned-industry-consultant Dan Miller is once again advocating for industry to open up British Columbia’s coast to oil rigs, tankers, pipelines and the risk of an Exxon Valdez-style catastrophe.

Every stage of the so-called “energy corridor” scheme poses a threat to cetacean populations on the coast, starting with harmful noise impacts generated by seismic activity all the way through to the prospective spills, underwater noise and ship strikes associated with the transport of the recovered oil and gas. Marine bird populations and wild-salmon stocks will be made vulnerable as well.

We do not need coastal oil exploration to satisfy domestic consumption in Canada and the crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands anticipated for shipping to Kitimat will be headed straight out of the country (likely to Asian markets) on VLCC’s (Very Large Crude Carriers) approximately the size of the Exxon Valdez-or larger. The not-so-hidden agenda behind all the chatter about rescinding the moratoria in B.C. has everything to do with export markets.

For instance, Canada ranks as the number-one supplier of oil to the U.S., whose oil usage makes up 25 per cent of world oil consumption.

In addition, Miller is apparently unconcerned about significantly contributing to the already dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere once all those foreign consumer countries of Canadian oil burn up the product. Parenthetically, climate scientist James Hansen of NASA has stated that we have passed what he considers the threshold for “maximum permissible concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Chris Genovali,
Executive Director
Raincoast Conservation,

Sidney

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