https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Two Southern Alberta First Nations have filed for a judicial review of a federal decision rejecting a new open-pit coal mine in the Rocky Mountains, arguing that the government failed in its duty to consult them about the project.
Riversdale Resources Ltd., a subsidiary of Australian mining giant Hancock Prospecting, wanted to build its Grassy Mountain project in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass.
This month marks the 100th anniversary since the end of the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when as many as 20,000 coal miners in southern West Virginia waged armed combat against a private army of gun thugs hired by the coal operators.
The pitched battle lasted from August 25 to September 2, 1921, when US military forces deployed by President Warren Harding occupied the coalfields, disarming and arresting hundreds of miners under martial law.
First Nations are agnostic about coal — but are concerned about the implications for their right to self-determination
Carol Wildcat grew up in the shadow of Imperial Oil Ltd.’s Bonnie Glen oilfield operation on the Pigeon Lake reserve in Alberta.
In the roughly 40 years the site was in production, the company extracted billions of dollars worth of oil, and paid a fraction of that in royalties to the four Indigenous nations living near the operation. It’s something that didn’t sit right with Wildcat.
“We were passive royalty receivers. We never got the jobs, we never got small business developing here. Off reserve, other communities…build up when (resource projects are developed),” she said in an interview. “I’m not going to allow that to happen to us again.”
Corb Lund is not enjoying this interview. The lanky Juno-winning musician, known for his playful lyrical takes on rural life on the Prairies, is calling while on his way home to southern Alberta after a stint in studio in Edmonton working on some new music.
But he hasn’t phoned to talk about his latest project, or even the one before it, an album released to critical acclaim in the middle of a pandemic.
Instead, he’s stolen time from his primary gig to talk about a side project that has recently rebranded him as an emerging, albeit reluctant, advocate: stopping a controversial plan to open up the Rocky Mountains to coal mining.
https://ampvideo.bnnbloomberg.ca/
The Australian miner that’s looking to build a massive new metallurgical coal mine on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains is vowing it will not give up its fight after Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson reaffirmed a joint-panel decision that effectively struck down the proposed project.
In a statement Monday, Benga Mining Ltd. said it is reviewing Wilkinson’s Aug. 6 decision regarding the Grassy Mountain project with its legal counsel, after the feds upheld a decision from the Joint Review Panel (JRP) and the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) that determined the project would likely result in “significant adverse environmental effects” on water quality, the local trout population and vegetation.
In the release, Benga Mining Chief Executive Officer John Wallington said Wilkinson had made his determination in spite of the miner’s request he hold off action while the company pursued a legal appeal of the JRP decision, which halted development in June.
Heather Exner-Pirot is a research adviser to the Indigenous Resource Network and a fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Canada has adopted one-sided consultation processes that favour First Nations that oppose resource extraction at the expense of those that support such projects. That was the finding of a judge recently in a rebuke to the federal government for its treatment of the Ermineskin Cree Nation.
Their case makes explicit what many of us have observed over the years: Indigenous people who support resource development do not fall comfortably into mainstream Canada’s idealized version of what Indigenous people should and shouldn’t do, and they are therefore ignored.
This particular claim saw the Ermineskin Cree, one of the four Nations of Maskwacis in western Alberta, contest a designation order that the federal Minister of the Environment, Jonathan Wilkinson, had placed on the Phase II expansion of Vista coal mine in July 2020.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/
The proposed Grassy Mountain coal project in southwestern Alberta has been rejected by the federal government nearly two months after a review panel denied a provincial application for the project.
On Friday, federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said he had rejected the project in light of the review panel’s report and after a review of additional available information.
“The Government of Canada must make decisions based on the best available scientific evidence while balancing economic and environmental considerations,” Wilkinson said in a release.
Deb Haaland is the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
As I travel throughout America, I am filled with hope as I see businesses open and communities recovering. Thanks to President Joe Biden’s leadership in passing the American Rescue Plan and making progress in defeating COVID-19, economic growth is up and unemployment is down.
The nation’s ongoing economic recovery is opening opportunities to help stabilize and empower workers who have been facing economic instability since before the pandemic.
During my trip to Schuylkill County earlier this month, I saw firsthand how hardworking coal communities here in Pennsylvania helped power our country, but are now facing significant challenges in restoring their community environments and retooling toward developing a robust and sustainable clean energy future.
In 2019, China for the first time generated more emissions than the entire developed world combined
Whenever human-induced climate change is discussed during Canada’s upcoming federal election, keep in mind the country that matters most on this issue is China and the fossil fuel that matters most in China is coal.
The reason is that whatever China does makes whatever Canada does irrelevant in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s because coal — not oil — is the most carbon intensive fossil fuel and the main contributor to global emissions. In China, coal-fired electricity supplies 57% of its energy needs. In Canada it’s 7.4%.
While we’ve been busy beating up on Albertans and their oil, Beijing has been laughing at us
After having ransacked the economies of the world’s liberal democracies and wrecked what is still quaintly called the “rules-based international order,” Xi Jinping’s police state in Beijing has now made it abundantly clear that under Xi’s supreme-leader command, the People’s Republic is determined to seize the global agenda on climate change.
And if the world responds with Canadian-style accommodation and capitulation, Beijing will persist in its ambitions — even to the point of taking the global climate hostage while the rest of us, as well as the Chinese people, suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate change.
More heat domes, more apocalyptic floods, more ruinous ecological collapse.
Eric Lowther was a member of Parliament, representing Calgary Centre in the House of Commons, as well as a municipal councillor for Rocky View County.
It is just not right. After nearly five years engaged in a rigorous government process, successfully meeting an ever-increasing number of regulatory requirements, bolstered by the support of First Nations communities and affected residents, after doing everything right and being willing to do even more, the company proposing the Grassy Mountain coal mine was effectively told to go away.
It’s like applying for a position, writing the tests, going through numerous personal evaluations — passing every single one — and being encouraged along the way, only to be told at the end of process that the position never really existed. That’s nasty, that’s wrong and that is what happened to Benga Mining.
And it is also what happened to the hardworking people in the municipality of Crowsnest Pass.
More than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists began working Monday on an updated version of a key report summarizing how Earth’s climate has already changed, and what humans can expect for the rest of the century.
The last time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body that coordinates research about global warming, published this report was in 2013.
At the time, the experts said humans were the “dominant cause” of global warming since the 1950s. The document paved the way for the Paris climate agreement signed in 2015.
Comes just weeks after a federal policy statement on thermal coal all but sent Coalspur’s Vista expansion up in smoke
Coalspur Mines Ltd.’s controversial Vista mine expansion project is no longer subject to the federal impact assessment process, a federal judge ruled this week.
The Federal Court ruling quashed a June 2020 designation order from Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson that subjected both Vista’s proposed open-pit expansion and underground test mine to review by the federal impact assessment agency.
It found the minister had failed to consult the Ermineskin Cree Nation, which has an impact benefit agreement with Coalspur, and instead only consulted Indigenous communities who sought the designation order before issuing his decision.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Environmental groups are asking Canada’s parliamentary environment watchdog and the federal auditor-general to investigate what they say is Ottawa’s failure to apply laws and prevent serious water pollution from coal mines in British Columbia’s Elk Valley.
The University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre, along with Wildsight, is asking the agencies to investigate the “long-standing failure” to stop the contamination of waterways with unacceptably high levels of selenium, a decades-old problem.
Selenium is a naturally occurring element that washes out of piles of waste rock, but in concentrated levels, it moves through the food chain and can cause deformities in fish and ruin their ability to reproduce.
While the rest of the world is trying to com to grips with the European Union’s proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) – which calls for the levying of charges on non-E.U. products in relation to their embedded carbon footprint — China, on the other hand, is currently grappling with a slightly different energy-related issue.
A massive heat wave in some parts of the country coupled with a shortage of coal because of China’s spat with chief supplier Australia has sent coal prices soaring.
Now, China, the world’s biggest consumer of coal, plans to add almost 110 million tons (MT) per year of advanced production capacity in the second half of this year to meet the rising demand of coal.
