Opinion

On Energy, Vancouver Sun Sees the Light!

Paper runs SFU prof's damning critique of BC Liberals' misnamed 'green' energy policies.

By Rafe Mair, 13 Jun 2011, TheTyee.ca

Sign on BC Hydro building

Shaffer says Libs force BC Hydro to vastly overpay for river-risking power.

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Hats off to the Vancouver Sun! In Tuesday's edition, the op-ed page contained an article entitled Clean Energy Act Is What Needs Renewing by Dr. Marvin Shaffer, adjunct professor at the School of Public Policy at SFU and widely accepted as an expert on energy matters in B.C.

Permit me to quote one line: "The fact that the electricity that BC Hydro is being forced to buy is costing more than double what the electricity is worth, now and in the foreseeable future, does not seem to matter."

This is the cornerstone of arguments regarding BC Hydro I've made here in The Tyee and also with my colleagues at the Common Sense Canadian, for which we have been pilloried by Citizens for Green Power and other apologists for private power companies.

This article by Shaffer is much, much more than the foregoing quote, and I hope you'll read it and pass it on. It can be found here.

If you are just coming to this issue, I must tell you that calling energy "clean" or "green" or both is blatantly Orwellian "newspeak." In this case, you can rely upon the fact that this terminology refers to private power companies and their lobby groups, which power requires that the company (forgive the technical term) buggers up the rivers and the ecologies they support.

This article in the Sun gives the cause I'm fighting an enormous boost. I wish today to offer profound congratulations to the editors.

For the grandkids

I think it appropriate to tell you why I'm so active in this cause. As others often point out, I'm an old man by whatever yardstick one uses. No matter how the fight ends, I'll not likely be here to judge. Corny as it sounds, I want to save our environment for my nine grandchildren and my great granddaughter. It is, I assure you, no more complicated than that.

The attack on our environment accelerated exponentially under premier Gordon Campbell.

The issues so desperately important are, broadly speaking, fish farms, rivers and the Agricultural Land Reserve. Each of these problems individually are massive. Taken together, they are abandonment of our heritage. A byproduct, so to speak, is the slow but sure strangulation of BC Hydro.

We're not dealing here with "left" and "right", but right and wrong. I invite all to simply watch this video of former finance minister Colin Hansen, in which he piles up one false statement after another. And here you can find my rebuttal, setting out the true facts.

Needed: more good journalism

What we've missed in this fight is the mainstream media holding government and industry's feet to the fire. Several eons ago, when I was in government, the media of the day questioned every move we made -- our discomfort came almost daily from the leading papers and television. And it was good, even though our government, like all governments, felt we were being unfairly treated. This policy continued through the Vander Zalm era, and the following 10 years of the NDP.

Somehow this all stopped with the arrival of the Campbell government. The hard-hitting journalists went into hibernation, and the public has had to rely on environmental organizations for information.

This article by Marvin Shaffer is bound to give British Columbians an appetite for more educated comment.

If the printing of this article is a harbinger of things to come, the Vancouver Sun is to be applauded, an applause I share.

The caveat is, of course, "one swallow doth not summer make," and we'll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, the editors of the Sun are to be congratulated for a very important article. May many others follow. [Tyee]

Rafe Mair writes a column for The Tyee every second Monday. Read his previous columns here.

13 Comments:

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  • Van Isle

    49 weeks ago

    You may cheer for the

    You may cheer for the Vancouver Sun Rafe but how come it's taken them about a decade to "see the light"? As far as I'm concerned the mass-media is just as guilty as the Liberals in economically raping this province.

  • A Drop in the Bucket

    49 weeks ago

    Too little, too late

    Fazil Mihlar and his Fraser institute ilk won`t change spots, they are pushing the HST down our throat, promoting private health care and lower, make that no corporate tacation.

    The Vancouver Sun and Province newspaper have played this game before, pretend to be on your side then we get close to an election and shazzaam...

    In fact Norman Specter on CKNW`s Monday morning quarterback show, roughly 6 months ago, suggested on air that the Vancouver Sun re-print Vaughn Palmer columns on Bill Vanderzalm.

    And the next day the Vancouver Sun started a series of 25 year old Vaughn Palmer column re-prints.

    Wake up Rafe

  • seth

    49 weeks ago

    no comment allowed

    Note like most fascist news outlets no comment is allowed to Shaffer's article. Would have made an interesting discussion.

    The current Christy/Global News government is pushing Site C which at the latest guesstimate is $ 16B/Gw average, destroying 10K acres of prime farmland. A similar sized Candu nuke would cost $2B/Gw and would fit on a few acres of industrial land at Burrard thermal.

    Hydro projects create enormous methane emissions from rotting vegetation making them worse GHG producers than burning coal.

    While BCHYdro is committed by the Christy/Global to buying $60B in power from stockbroker cronies at 13 cents a kwh, currently the cost of electricity on the Columbia grid is 2 cents a kwh daytime and free on weekends and at night. It will remain that way for years to come because Wa State's Bonneville power is required by legislation to produce gigawatts of worthless wind energy that it can't sell.

    Since the power is not needed until well into the future, it is quite possible that Teledyne/Brown's and China's new fundings for the Gen IV factory produced Molten Salt reactor which eliminates all issues in the current Gen III product at a dirt cheap cost, will make this unit available to provide for future power needs.

  • plebe

    49 weeks ago

    Rafe's gone nuclear

    I'm no apologist for private power companies. And I'm not a big fan of the ecological damage wrought by hydroelectricity. But in terms of carbon intensity per kWh (not to mention the risk of massive environmental damage - see Fukushima and Chernobyl), hydro is the only way to go.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_intensity
    http://www.isa.org.usyd.edu.au/publications/documents/ISA_Nuclear_Report.pdf

    At any rate, 3 cheers for critical media!

  • Skywalker

    49 weeks ago

    It is all in the one line.

    "The fact that the electricity that BC Hydro is being forced to buy is costing more than double what the electricity is worth, now and in the foreseeable future, does not seem to matter."

    A lot of questions need to be asked about why this is being done. An incompetent government paying off political contribution is one explanation. Either way it is criminal what is happening.

  • jnewcomb

    49 weeks ago

    look forward to the rebuttal

    Rafe Mair is just a looney-leftist shill for the unions like COPE 378 and CUPE and just because he keeps repeating the same tired old line about private power doesn't make him any more logical. Now that VanSun has published the Schaffer diatribe, I look forward to seeing the counter-arguments come forward. Hydro is clean, IPPs are good, and fish farms are the future.

  • skeptikool

    49 weeks ago

    Take a motherhood issue and sock it to the consumer

    Green energy - what better issue with which to milk the consumer. The terms on which these projects supply their power to BC Hydro are close to criminal, in my opinion. They could not be better designed to support patronage, sweetheart deals and all sorts of boondoggle. Let's have green power, and more of it, but let BC Hydro produce it - or buy only that at sensible cost.

  • Skywalker

    49 weeks ago

    Imagine that.

    jnewcomb calling Rafe a looney shill.

  • Stonebreaker

    49 weeks ago

    Just say NO to all renewables

    "The fact that the electricity that BC Hydro is being forced to buy is costing more than double what the electricity is worth, now and in the foreseeable future, does not seem to matter."

    That applies to all renewables in BC. So Rafe seems to be on the no-renewables bandwagon. Sure fossil fuels get to destabilize our climate for free...but hey it makes them cheap.

    I can't even imagine the wrath Rafe would have for solar power in BC coming in at 35c/kWh these days. Woah, none of that for us, thank you. Ontario, Germany and Japan might like buying stupidly expensive solar energy...but not BC. We are sticking with what we got right now.

    And what we got right now is almost all of our energy from burning fossil fuels in BC. BC loves to burn fossil fuels. In fact we even love to burn fossil fuels to make electricity like Island Cogen and Burrard. Lots of IPP fossil fuelled electricity...that's OK.

    Clearly we are in no mood to pay for the development of cleaner alternatives if they cost more than what we pay now.

    My favourite part of the "no expensive renewables" campaign is the alternative plan that Rafe and others are putting forward to end our fossil fuel use without raising prices of energy.

    Cheap is good. Say no to renewables.

  • Skywalker

    49 weeks ago

    Stonebreaker

    Are you assuming that BC Hydro being forced to pay more than double what it is worth is somehow going to be good for the climate? It will be good for the profits of private power investors but that is hardly the same thing and no guarantee that it will do what you intend.

    I don't see Rafe advancing fossil fuel electricity at all.

  • seth

    49 weeks ago

    Deniers

    Why is Deniers with your junk science keep bringing up problems with an old Soviet nuke weapons plant at Chernobyl which killed 56 and a 1950's design Model T reactor at Fukushima that was damaged by corruption not technical problems and hurt nobody. The same corruption caused no damage to seventies designed reactors just down the beach.

    A Fukushima sized earthquake in Vancouver will kill over 100K souls when the Cleveland dam collapses.

    While BC uses a lot of fossil fuels run of the river power will not be used to displace any of it as it is too unreliable and shows up when we don't need it. Basically its worthless.

  • Mooney

    49 weeks ago

    Glen Clark

    Shortly after standing up to America, for Canadian fishermen and threatening to not renew the American's lease on Nanoose Bay, NDP leader Glen Clark was driven from office.

    The RCMP alleged he accepted deck repairs and a knife as bribes to expedite issuance of a liquor license.

    Yet somehow, someone in the Liberal gov't has given special interests access to our rivers, huge tracks of land and committed the public (whom they are supposed to represent) to purchasing gigawatts of power for sixty years, at twice the market value and nobody at the RCMP takes notice.

    It appears the public interest has been betrayed and that the public has been significantly defrauded.

    Does someone have to make a complaint?

  • rantnic

    49 weeks ago

    PLEASE DON'T ASK THE RCMP

    Please don't ask the RCMP to look int some maybe, wrongdoing by the Liberal government while they are in the midst of negotiating a 25 year sweetheart deal with those same Liberals. Dogs that they are the RCMP are not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

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