‘He kept us in the dark’: Activists attack Carney’s power strategy and LeBlanc’s silence

New Brunswick environmental activists are reacting with alarm to Prime Minister Carney’s announcement of a National Electricity Strategy that promotes the burning of natural gas to help double Canada’s supply of electrical power by 2050.

“A national electricity grid should be designed to move Canada beyond fossil fuels, not deepen our dependence on them,” says Moe Qureshi, director of Climate Research and Policy at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick.

“Expanding gas generation under the guise of affordability or reliability ignores the rapidly falling costs of renewables and battery storage,” he adds, referring to Carney’s claim that using a wide range of energy sources including natural gas to double grid capacity would “supply clean, reliable and affordable power across the country.”

Qureshi says the new strategy would risk saddling Canadians with costly, outmoded fossil fuel plants and rising climate costs for decades to come.

‘No demonstrated need’

“Regardless of how many renewables are added to the grid, continued or increased use of gas (and diesel in Tantramar’s case) does nothing to diminish greenhouse gas emissions,” Jim Emberger, spokesperson for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance writes in an email to Warktimes.

“Recently, both experts and real experience have indicated that renewables, plus batteries (or other storage) can respond instantly, provide 24-hour delivery of electricity without fossil fuel usage — and do so much more cheaply,” he adds. “There is no demonstrated need for new gas.”

Emberger refers to last month’s conference in Santa Marta, Colombia, where representatives from nearly 60 countries discussed how to “transition away” from fossil fuels.

“They met on the premise that the era of fossil fuels must end, and that the energy transition must be fast, fair, full and funded,” he writes.

“In this context, Canada’s national grid plan could have been an historic event of global importance, if powered by renewables, batteries, storage, and demand management technologies.”

‘He kept us in the dark’

Barry Rothfuss of the Protect the Chignecto Isthmus Coalition calls the national electricity strategy’s promotion of burning natural gas a big step backward.

“Why do we have to do this?” he asked in a telephone interview from the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, which would be only about 4.5 kilometres from NB Power’s proposed 500 MW gas/diesel “peaker plant” near Centre Village.

Rothfuss argues that while the gas plant would generate profits for the fossil fuel industry, its health and environmental effects would devastate local communities.

“They say burning gas would help in the transition to more renewables and energy security, but that’s only a marketing strategy,” he says, referring to a detailed submission he wrote to Beauséjour member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc last month.

“A grid that keeps the lights on while filling the lungs of its neighbours with nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and combustion byproducts is not energy security — it is a trade of one crisis for another. A fatal remedy, by definition, kills what it claims to cure,” his submission says.

“All along Dominic has told us he can’t get involved in addressing the gas plant because it’s a provincial issue,” Rothfuss says.

“Yet, as a senior federal cabinet minister, he had to have known all along that the national electricity strategy would promote burning natural gas. He knew this was coming, but chose to keep us in the dark.

“I’m really upset with him, handling this the way he did. It bothers me a lot.”

To read the Rothfuss submission, click here.

To read Carney’s announcement of the national electricity strategy and a background paper that accompanied it, click here and here.