Tag: news coverage

Links: Halibut controversy continues

Environment Fishery Links

Comox Valley Echo

Halibut decision tramples rights

>Larry Peterson
I am absolutely stinking mad.
DFO is going to close down recreational halibut fishing as of Sept. 5? This action is an attack on my rights as a taxpaying, law-abiding Canadian citizen.

Victoria Times Colonist

Halibut season end hurts communities

By Lanny Sawchuk, Oak Bay Marine Group

Last week’s announcement of a shutdown of recreational halibut fishing is terrible news for coastal communities.
Our company operates businesses on the coast, including sports fishing resorts and marinas. Several will be severely impacted by this closure. Our employees will soon be dealing with guests unable to fulfil their plans to fish halibut, guests who in many cases travelled from great distances, at great expense, to have that experience. We’re also dealing with cancellations. We’ll be cutting back staffing accordingly, resulting in a ripple effect of lost economic activity for communities.

Japan Quake Is Causing Costly Shift to Fossil Fuels: New York Times

Energy Link

New York Times
 Japan Quake Is Causing Costly Shift to Fossil Fuels

Japan, the world’s third-largest user of electricity behind China and the United States, had counted on an expansion of nuclear power to contain energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, its nuclear program is in retreat, as the public and government officials urge a sharp reduction in the nation’s reliance on nuclear power and perhaps an end to it altogether.

As its nuclear program implodes, Japan is grappling with a jump in fuel costs, making an economic recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami all the more difficult. Annual fuel expenses could rise by more than 3 trillion yen, or about $39 billion, the government says….

Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called for a gradual move away from nuclear energy, and proposed a goal of generating 20 percent of Japan’s electricity from renewable sources, including hydroelectric plants, by the early 2020s. The Parliament is debating legislation to spur that change…

Japan’s liquefied natural gas imports have jumped for three consecutive months, squeezing global supplies amid strong demand from China and other emerging economies…

The salmon study controversy. How to write a news release without answering the question

Environment

Fisheries minister Keith Ashfield and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans today issued a news release concerning the controversy over the muzzling of DFO scientist Kristi Miller and her genetic study of Fraser River salmon which suggests a virus may be responsible for the decline of the stock.  Although Miller published her study in the journal Science, she was not permitted to speak the media about it.

The DFO news release from this afternoon is a classic example of not answering the actual question while seeming to assure the public that the minister and department are doing their job. DFO also says it supports the department’s scientists, without mentioning that the DFO was originally willing to make Miller available to the media, it was Stephen Harper’s Privy Council Office that said she couldn’t.

You can read the full  news release. Response to Media Reports about Science at Fisheries and Oceans Canada

On Miller’s study the news release says:

 In fact, the research and report by Dr. Kristi Miller on Pacific salmon was not withheld from anyone; Dr. Miller’s report was published in a broadly circulated science magazine and remains widely available to the media and public through the Fisheries and Oceans Canada website, and as an exhibit through the Commission’s website.

(The Commission refers to the Cohen Commission on the decline of salmon stocks)

The publication of a scientific article in the journal Science is not at question.

What the Privy Council Office did was forbade a prominent scientist the opportunity to explain to the public in layman’s terms the significance of her findings.

Science journalism works like this. The major journals advise the media well ahead of time, under embargo, about the pending publication of major papers. The reason for this simple and supported by both the media and the scientific community. It takes time and effort to craft an accurate report of a scientific paper, whether reporting for a newspaper or the web. Creating an accurate and accessible television item on a scientific paper, a television item that also needs pictures and voice clips is both an art and science. Even in these days of cutbacks, the networks hunger for reporters and producers who can do it in under two minutes. If instead the media has to rush out a story on a scientific article on the day of publication, it is bound to be superficial and inaccurate. This was the process that was short circuited by the Privy Council Office when it, not DFO, muzzled Kristi Miller.

This is the question that the DFO news release ignores.

The news release then raises a smokescreen by saying:

Our scientists have also published hundreds of reports subscribed to by tens of thousands of people throughout Canada and the world. For example, this week, Fisheries scientist Dr. Kenneth Frank released a report about positive signs in the recovery of groundfish stocks off the coast of Nova Scotia. Dr. Frank’s research was published in Nature, the world’s most highly cited science journal, and he spoke to nearly a dozen interested members of the press on his report this week alone.

. While it is true, that the report on the rebound of groundfish stocks is receiving wide attention and as DFO says, Kenneth Frank was made available to the media, a cynical observer would be quick to point out that the Kenneth Frank story is good news for Canada and for the Harper government, while the Kristi Miller salmon virus could be bad news for both the country and the government.

So now it looks that the Privy Council Office is adopting a “good news” agenda. If it’s good, a government scientist can talk to the media, if it’s bad news, bury it.

 Finally the government relies in this case, on the “before the courts” excuse it used when the story of the salmon study first broke in Post Media News, referring to Justice Bruce Cohen’s commission of inquiry into the decline of the Pacific salmon stocks.

 Moreover, at Justice Cohen’s request, the government has provided almost 500,000 documents and many hours of testimony deemed relevant by Justice Cohen to his inquiry. Dr. Miller will also present her research findings at the Commission in the coming weeks along with several other scientists and officials.

Our government has been very clear that judicial inquiries are not conducted through the media. Evidence that may be relevant to Justice Cohen’s findings should be managed through the commission process.

What this means is that government may use the “before the courts” excuse in the future to muzzle any scientific debate on a controversial issue. In reality, of course, that simply means excluding the public and media from a debate on any subject that would likely be discussed openly at any scientific gathering or congress.

Of course, if the Harper government is in favour of something, then a “commission process” appears to be irrelevant. As has been widely reported, the Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, is ignoring the quasi-juidicial nature of the National Energy Board hearings into the Enbridge Northern Gateway project and the various LNG projects, all potentially using the port of Kitimat, by telling any reporter and any audience that the projects are in the “national interest” when finding the public interest is the mandate of the NEB.

Harper government muzzles scientist who studied salmon collapse, noted possible virus as cause

Environment
Post Media News

Feds silence scientist over West Coast salmon study

Post Media News reports that the Privy Council Office, part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, is refusing to allow a prominent scientist speak to the media and the public about her study on the collapse of salmon stocks on the west coast, suggesting a virus may be involved in salmon deaths, despite the fact her scientific findings have already been published in the journal Science.

Top bureaucrats in Ottawa have muzzled a leading fisheries scientist whose discovery could help explain why salmon stocks have been crashing off Canada’s West Coast, according to documents obtained by Postmedia News.

The documents show the Privy Council Office, which supports the Prime Minister’s Office, stopped Kristi Miller from talking about one of the most significant discoveries to come out of a federal fisheries lab in years….

Science, one of the world’s top research journals, published Miller’s findings in January. The journal considered the work so significant it notified “over 7,400” journalists worldwide about Miller’s “Suffering Salmon” study…

Miller heads a $6-million salmon-genetics project at the federal Pacific Biological Station on Vancouver Island.

Abstract of Miller’s paper in Science. (Subscription required for full text), Jan 14, 2011.

Long-term population viability of Fraser River sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) is threatened by unusually high levels of mortality as they swim to their spawning areas before they spawn. Functional genomic studies on biopsied gill tissue from tagged wild adults that were tracked through ocean and river environments revealed physiological profiles predictive of successful migration and spawning. We identified a common genomic profile that was correlated with survival in each study. In ocean-tagged fish, a mortality-related genomic signature was associated with a 13.5-fold greater chance of dying en route. In river-tagged fish, the same genomic signature was associated with a 50% increase in mortality before reaching the spawning grounds in one of three stocks tested. At the spawning grounds, the same signature was associated with 3.7-fold greater odds of dying without spawning. Functional analysis raises the possibility that the mortality-related signature reflects a viral infection.

Al Arabiya turns its eyes on Kitimat

Energy link

The English-language website of one the world’s major Arab-language satellite television networks  Al Arabiya, has turned its eye on Kitimat, the Northern Gateway pipeline and the repeated claim by the Conservative government that Canada is an “energy super power.”

The article:  Canada: Energy Superpower?  is an analysis by Mary E. Stonaker, described as “an independent scholar, most recently with the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.” Stonaker puts Canada’s energy policy, including the pipelines to Kitimat, in a world wide perspective, summing up the story for  Saudi-owned Al Arabiya‘s main audience in the oil-rich Middle East. It doesn’t just look at oil and gas energy, but hydro, solar and wind.

“Northern Gateway” has yet to be fully hatched though it is encouraging to see Canada expand its partnerships beyond its southern neighbor especially during the recent economic downturn. Relying too heavily on one consumer, no matter who that consumer may be, is setting up an extremely weak energy security strategy.

Energy media turns its eyes on Kitimat, LNG and Enbridge

The prospect of Kitimat becoming a major port for export of Liquified Natural Gas was bound eventually to spark interest in the media covering the energy sector.

This week, photos of Kitimat mayor Joanne Monaghan turned up on as the lead on stories in Alberta Oil magazine and The Financial Post.
In Alberta Oil’s Export visions stoke deep divisons in a coastal town, the longest of the two articles,  feature writer Jeff Lewis, puts the history of Kitimat into some perspective for the Alberta oil patch. 

Alcan came to northern British Columbia in the early 1950s with plans to build the world’s biggest aluminum smelter…. 

Even by today’s standards of engineering, the $500-million “Kitimat Project” was ambitious…. They bored into a mountain to create the Kemano hydro plant. They blasted enough rock to dam and reverse the Nechako River. They strung high-wire transmission towers across a rugged valley. And they built Kitimat – complete with schools, pre-fabricated houses floated in on barges, roads and even a toastmasters club – from scratch. 

It is to this history that Mayor Joanne Monaghan refers when she dismisses fears about development in the region ruining a natural wilderness. “Kitimat is geared to be an industrial town,” she says over lunch at the local Chalet Restaurant. “That’s what it was built as.” Distinct neighborhoods and services were laid out for a population many thought would crest 50,000, with heavy industry built at a remove from the commercial and residential areas of town. 

 The vision never quite materialized…  Monaghan… insists job prospects in the town are poised for recovery. The unemployment rate was 9.5 per cent in 2006. “I think it can only get better from here,” the mayor says. “I really feel like we’re a sleeping giant, and the giant is waking up.” 

It is also true that the town remains partially stuck, very much groping in what is perhaps the darkest hour before the mayor’s dawn. Local divisions aren’t limited to the physical split between the town’s industrial park and its residential streets. While the Apache-sponsored gas terminal has progressed to the point where site preparation is underway, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway faces tremendous opposition – from the Haisla, but also from pockets of local residents. The multibillion-dollar pipeline has underscored deep-seated tensions in the region to such an extent that the local council refuses to talk about it. Some, including Monaghan, favor a referendum on the project. “It’s a contentious issue,” she says.

The Financial Post’s energy reporter Claudia Cattaneo focuses more on the issues on her beat in LNG Trying to Dock    Catteneo notes that the March earthquake in Japan which crippled the country’s nuclear energy raised interest in exports of liquified natural gas from Alberta through the port of Kitimat.

Her article also reflects the hints of skepticism that have arisen about natural gas exports in the past couple of weeks.  She points out that part of the price advantage that Alberta gas may have in Asia is not the “molecules” the term so beloved of  the experts in the energy industry but “arbitrage” the difference between the Asian price of natural gas which is a percentage of the price of oil (which is going up) and the North American price, which is based on supply and demand, North American gas  supply is up due to exploitation of the shale gas reserves and so the price of natural gas has dropped. (Kitimat residents of course haven’t noticed the drop in the price of natural gas due to the high transportation “bill” charged by the local monopoly Pacific Northern Gas).  The companies that want to build a port at Kitimat are basing part of their profit picture on that price difference.
Cattaneo quotes Chris Theal who works for a Calgary hedge fund who says that the Asian demand for natural gas will continue to increase in the coming years, but export could be strangled by limited capacity on the BC coast even if all the projected Kitimat projects go ahead and there is an expansion of the port of Prince Rupert to handle natural gas from pipeline or rail tanker. Theal says (ideas that also recently came out at the NEB hearings in Kitimat) that alternative export ports could exist in the United States at ports like Coos Bay and Clataskanie, Oregon and Astoria,Washington.

Oil and gas spills in North Sea every week, papers reveal: Guardian

The Guardian


Serious spills of oil and gas from North Sea platforms are occurring at the rate of one a week, undermining oil companies’ claims to be doing everything possible to improve the safety of rigs.

Jake Molloy, general secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC), a union representing North Sea workers, said Deepwater Horizon showed that “even the most up-to-date, cutting-edge safety technology can go wrong if it is not maintained properly and not operated by competent people….

Other major oil companies which are high in the spills league include the Danish conglomerate Maersk and Canadian firm Talisman, which both have a rig with five leaks. Four spills came from a rig known as Mungo Etap, which is owned by BP.

B.C. first nation challenges oil and gas tenures sale: Globe and Mail

Globe and Mail


The sale of oil and gas tenures in northeast British Columbia by the provincial government for $260-million is being challenged in court by a native band.
The Dene Tha, a first nation that straddles the B.C.-Alberta-Northwest Territories boundaries, has filed a petition with the Supreme Court of B.C. The band alleges that the B.C. Ministry of Energy and Mines failed to adequately consult with the first nation, or to undertake studies on the environmental impact of gas drilling, before selling the leases in the Cordova Basin, near Fort Nelson. Shale-gas deposits in the Cordova Basin are thought to be extensive.

Encana, PetroChina shale gas deal collapses

A  $5.4 billion deal between Canadian exploration giant Encana, one of the partners in the KM LNG project, and PetroChina collapsed Tuesday, sending shocks through both the financial markets and the energy exploration and production sector.

International analysts are already saying that China may be pulling back in its strategy to get a foothold in key resource areas and perhaps the Canadian energy sector was too optimistic.  Perhaps.

If the analysts are correct,  that means that some of the grand plans to export natural gas, at least to China, may still go ahead, but won’t immediately  turn British Columbia back into the fabled Golden  Mountain that brought the labourers from China more than a century ago to build the railways. Nor does this mean a major threat, at this point, to plans to export gas through Kitimat as there are plenty of buyers in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia looking at northeast BC shale gas.

    The Wall Street Journal Heard on the Street blog says

E&P executives across North America should also be nervous. While some speculate Canadian-resource nationalism has spread from potash to energy, there is little evidence of this, given other similar deals haven’t been blocked. The alternative explanation is that foreign buyers of North American gas assets may actually care about such quaint notions as return on investment.

That isn’t good news for an E&P sector that consistently lives beyond its means.

London’s Financial Times says

Although China has gained a reputation for buying up resources around the world at any cost, a string of recent failed deals suggests the country’s resources companies are starting to drive harder bargains and are becoming more selective. In April, China’s Minmetals withdrew a $6.5bn offer for Equinox, an Australian-Canadian copper miner, rather than raise its bid after a higher offer emerged from Barrick Gold.

Chinese oil companies have also recently walked away from, or missed out on, prized oil and gas assets in Brazil …

The failure of the Encana-PetroChina deal is a surprise to the industry because Chinese companies have recently been investing aggressively in shale gas assets to gain the expertise needed to develop China’s own reserves.

Reuters reported from Edmonton that it was Encana who walked away from the deal:

Encana, Canada’s No. 1 natural gas producer, said the two companies could not find common ground, despite a year of negotiations, and walked away from a deal that would have seen PetroChina take a one-half stake in Encana’s massive Cutbank Ridge field in northern British Columbia.

“We just reached the point where we determined we just couldn’t go forward” said Alan Boras, a spokesman for Encana.

The deal would have been the largest in a string of investments by Asian companies in North America’s prolific shale gas discoveries, while Encana investors were counting on the cash to shore up a balance sheet battered by more than two years of weak natural gas prices…

The CBC report had analysts disagreeing on Encana’s role:

John Stephenson, portfolio manager with First Asset Investment Management in Toronto, called the scuttled deal “a complete and utter failure.”

“I think they just couldn’t agree on anything and I think they were premature maybe in announcing this before they had an operating agreement in place,” he said….

But Lanny Pendill, an energy analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis, commended Encana for its discipline….Its willingness to walk away from a deal after a year of work shows “if push comes to shove, they’re going to make the decision that’s in the best interest of Encana and Encana shareholders.

The Globe and Mail says Encana has plenty of assets in shale gas, especially the Horn River developments which were often mentioned as the main source for shale based natural gas that could be shipped through Kitimat:

With the PetroChina joint venture out of the picture, Encana still has lots of potential. For starters, back in April, the company said it was looking to start discussions on joint venture proposals for its Horn River and Greater Sierra assets. On the heels of Tuesday’s announcement, Encana said that the prospects for these projects are looking up, and raised its 2011 expected proceeds from them to between $1-billion and $2-billion, up from $500-million and $1-billion

Encana news release (on Encana site)

Encana news release 0621-petrochina-jv-negoiations-end.pdf