The Trudeau government will have its climate change work cut out for it, if a major omission from Environment Canada’s line of questioning about Kinder Morgan’s proposed Edmonton-to-Burnaby pipeline expansion is any indication.
The ministry, acting as an official intervenor in the early stages of the National Energy Board’s two-year review that will soon reach its zenith, asked the Texas multinational 127 questions about the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion's environmental impacts, but not a single question about how the pipeline would worsen climate change, NEB records show.
Canada’s highest environmental authority—a ministry with the express purpose of “keeping Canadians informed and safe” from environmental dangers —didn’t ask once how a massive fossil fuel pipeline expansion might deepen global warming, even though its experts also say global warming is raising sea levels, melting the Arctic, acidifying oceans, triggering more extreme storms and floods across the nation.
The expanded pipeline would increase the existing Trans Mountain pipeline's capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels of oil sands fuels per day for a half century or more.
So why did the ministry miss the ‘climate elephant’ in the NEB room?
Environment Canada twice deflected media inquiries about this story:
“The National Energy Board is best positioned to answer questions regarding the review,” Environment Canada spokesperson Maria Ivancic said recently.
Environment Canada also did not respond to a direct question about whether the ministry is aware of the total greenhouse gas implications of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion project.
'Sell oil regardless of the consequences'
To many critics, Environment Canada has long been directed away from climate issues by the former occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office.
“We had a [Conservative] government that wanted to sell oil regardless of the consequences,” retired DFO oceans scientist David Farmer said from his home on Vancouver Island. "[Harper] didn’t want scientists asking any awkward questions.”
So what did Environment Canada ask the company?
There were many questions about marine and land oil spills, including what would happen in the event of earthquake and tsunami disasters.
On wildlife, it asked Kinder Morgan to present the pipeline expansion’s impacts on rattlesnakes, badgers, woodland caribou, spotted owls, peregrine falcons, tailed frogs, giant salamanders and water shrew.
It also slapped the company’s hand for missing “peacock vinyl lichen” in its vegetation surveys.
Some of questions appeared to show more concern for how climate change would impact pipeline operations, rather than how the pipeline expansion would worsen climate change.
Environment Canada asked, for instance, if Kinder Morgan’s estimate of 0.5 metres of sea level rise by the year 2100 was sufficient. The ministry suggested the company’s planned expansion of its oil supertanker facility in Burnaby should design for even higher ocean surges, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted.
Environment Canada also quarrelled with Kinder Morgan about its figures for tailpipe emissions from oil super tankers in a concern over air quality in Vancouver's harbour. But ironically, the ministry asked nothing about the supertankers' actual liquid cargoes that would spur far more greenhouse gas into the environment.
What is the GHG impact from Trans Mountain expansion?
The bitumen oil deliveries to other countries would ultimately cause 89 per cent of the expanded pipeline's climate pollution, according to a report by Simon Fraser University climate economist Mark Jaccard. The so-called "downstream" impacts —the refining of the bitumen in China and the U.S., and the burning of the fuels in vehicles and factories—cause the biggest GHG bang.
Jaccard is one of the few experts, outside Environment Canada, who has worked out the full greenhouse gas implications for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. His "wells-to-wheels” analysis, prepared for the City of Vancouver, breaks down the GHG impact as follows:
- 9.6 per cent in upstream emissions from oil sands expansion, 7.7 million tonnes of CO2e annually
- 1.4 per cent in operation emissions from transporting the oil by pipeline, or 1.1 million tonnes of CO2e annually
- 89.0 per cent in downstream emissions from refining and combustion outside Canada, or 71.1 million tonnes annually
When reached for comment, Kinder Morgan did not dispute these figures. It has long said: ”Kinder Morgan Canada is not a large direct emitter of greenhouse gases."
And by the above analysis —the company would be right: the expanded pipeline would be just 1.4 per cent of the GHG total.
Environmental activists have said they seek to stop the pipeline in order to stop the oil sands from expanding.
Lack of climate questions a "national scandal"
A former top Environment Canada bureaucrat, who once led the country’s national weather forecast program and advised ministers on the Kyoto protocol, said his former ministry should have been doing this greenhouse gas analysis.
“I think that it has been, under Harper, a national scandal,” said past deputy minister Gordon McBean, who worked at the agency until the year 2000 to pursue academia.
“It’s absolutely essential that our [new] national strategy for emissions reductions take into account pipelines and their role in our overall impact on our climate system,” he said from London, Ontario.
Since its inception 1959, the NEB has said its environmental reviews have not included pipelines' upstream and downstream effects. Upstream impacts are provincial matters, it said. But perhaps not exclusively, for much longer. Federal Liberals have promised to reform pipeline reviews to include upstream greenhouse gas impacts —in Fort McMurray's oil sand facilities, for example.
When asked to comment on this story, Kinder Morgan Canada shared a blog from its CEO Ian Anderson about his views on climate change.
“As a father, I am deeply concerned with the future of Canada and the world, and want to ensure I leave my son and his kids with a healthy, thriving planet on which to live. I believe that thoroughly understanding human generated impacts on climate change will only be known sometime in the future, but we can’t afford to minimize the risks,” the oil-pipeline executive is quoted in the blog post.
The NEB must make a recommendation to the federal cabinet about the pipeline expansion by May 20. Trudeau promised to deliver Canada's national climate plan within 90 days of the COP21 summit, or sometime in early March.
Environment Canada's 127 questions for Kinder Morgan at NEB hearing
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