Welcome to one of B.C.’s fastest-growing gas exports: hot air.
Much of it is produced by government, but a lot is also coming from under-informed activist groups.
Hot-air production lately has been generated over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the potential development of a liquefied natural gas export industry in the province.
As with most hot-air operations, it does not depend on economic realities or other facts. Speculation, emotion and groupthink are its raw materials.
Hot-air producers might be earnest in their belief that a B.C. natural gas industry has no place in a clean, green energy world, but they are wrong. It can play a significant part in it, not only as a valuable bridge source of energy to transport B.C. and the rest of the world to a place where renewables can play a more meaningful role in the global power grid, but also as a fundamental driver of economies in regions outside Metro Vancouver and Victoria.
Many northern B.C. First Nations and their leaders know that. Their communities and people cannot live and grow on green dreams.
As chronicled in “Haisla Chief to Andrew Weaver: Come to Kitimat” (Business in Vancouver issue 1483; April 3-9), northern First Nations leaders like Haisla Chief Coun. Crystal Smith are fed up with the rhetoric of politicians and others who aim to scuttle projects that can help northern communities build their economies and financial independence.
In the interests of delivering some front-line education to development opponents, she has invited them to come to her community to see how stalled economic development can suck the life out of a region and the people who live in it.
As she poignantly noted: “We are the ones that have to live here. We are the ones that have to live with our people’s social issues.”
A B.C. LNG industry, not political hot air, can provide those communities with jobs and economic enterprise, both of which are fundamental to improving social and natural environments.
