May 16, 2011
If you are like me, when you think of EnCana, you think of climate change. EnCana is a major firm in the oil and gas industry. It is a player in shale gas production and has perfected techniques to extract the gas by fracturing the shale with copious amounts of water and chemicals. The toxic chemicals and contaminated water remain as a permanent legacy long after the gas is gone. Fugitive gas emissions accompany the process. Natural gas is a fossil fuel that generates Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.
So how does EnCana become the beneficiary of carbon credits for reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions? Beats me but under the Pacific Carbon Trust, the entity set up by the BC Liberal government to manage carbon trading, it does, along with a big forestry company and a cement company. All three industries are big emitters and are otherwise exempt from the provincial carbon tax.
But in BC, when they do something to reduce GHGs, they can “sell” the improvement to the Trust. There is apparently no assessment of overall performance. So presumably, Encana could (and does) generate more GHGs in its gas production then it lowers in its improved processes and still receive the benefit.
And who pays EnCana? The purchasers of the “carbon credits” are municipalities, government ministries, crown corporations and government funded organizations like universities and hospitals that cannot meet their carbon reduction targets. That is a literal cannot. Under the rules set up for measuring Greenhouse Gas reductions by the BC Liberal government, it is virtually impossible for these government entities to meet their targets. They are forced by legislation to purchase carbon credits, primarily from the Pacific Carbon Trust.
In reality, EnCana wins twice – presumably it saves by lowering its operating costs and it gets money for doing so from the Pacific Carbon Trust. The rest of us lose many times. Money flows out of the community to these large multinational corporations – a perverse transfer of public funds to the private sector. The community has less money to invest in climate mitigation. The taxpayer pays the piper both ways. And, most insidious, GHGs continue their relentless and destructive climb under a system that is supposed to lower emissions.
But that is the thing about trading – including carbon trading. It creates winners and losers. The big winners are always the big corporations and the stock exchanges. The big loser is the planet. Each dime of public good that is transferred to maintain the profit of the very companies that are wrecking the planet further delays the kind of radical action that is needed.
The current mythology is that our way of life can continue indefinitely despite evidence to the contrary. Climate change is rarely mentioned. We seem to have blown the climate change debate permanently at Copenhagen in 2009. When the nations of the world failed to reach an agreement, we slipped into permanent denial.
While scientists are telling us that the evidence of climate change is undeniable and we have once in one to three hundred year floods and devastating tornadoes never seen before, no connection is made to climate change. Freaky weather and extraordinary droughts and floods are predicted symptoms of climate change.
And in BC, under the guise of action, we pay companies to pollute. How perverse is that?
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