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Rex Murphy: Canada so ripe with green activism old-fashioned employment has gone out of fashion

It’s more than a touch odd or distressing how a project with an overall budget of some $36 billion — billion! — can get cancelled these days, and not kick up as much interest or internet play as, say, Justin Trudeau showing up on the cover of (the much diminished of late) Rolling Stone. Yet this appears the case with the Pacific Northwest liquified natural gas (LNG) plant in British Columbia, undertaken by the Malaysian company Petronas some years back, and now, despite early expenditures of some billions, cancelled for good.

I don’t suppose there’s any need to point out that all the jobs, technical resources, local development and industry that would naturally follow from an expenditure of this magnitude are good things. Or that Canada hasn’t become so new-age, so ripe with green virtue-signalling as a surrogate for policy, so prideful of its climate change sanctimoniousness, that jobs, employment, old fashioned working for a living has gone utterly out of fashion.

Yet there we are. A great energy project, with the promise to put B.C. and Canada into a renewed natural gas market, having won support even from Indigenous supporters, has the plug pulled a bare week after the arrival of the Horgan-Weaver government. An absolutely huge and necessary industrial project gets cancelled and more people are talking about Justin’s fanpics in the Rolling Stone, or Justin and his absurd worship of the West Wing, than the massive loss of jobs and industry.

Now, incidentally, I am not one of those who believe the new John Horgan-led NDP government, and its life-support alliance with the three-person Green party caucus of Andrew Weaver, is the reason Petronas washed its hands of British Columbia and fled the green-frenzies of its leading politicians. After all, the NDP-Greens had only had a week in government when Petronas blew the whistle. But I do think we can blame the continuous agitation against all energy projects that has been a hallmark of B.C. and particularly Vancouver politics for over a decade.

Every green and pseudo-green organization that has any standing flourishes in B.C. Protest against energy provides fundraising and a livelihood for some. It is, no pun intended, an industry unto itself.

Politicians, even at the municipal level, pledge themselves religiously to every green idea and aspiration. Has there ever been a single energy project — just one — in British Columbia that has not faced protest and demonization? Every company that has ever tried to bring a large project to certain parts of B.C. has had to quickly learn the first truth: how great a favour it will be if they are, ultimately, after much genuflection and self-reproach, allowed to bring jobs and work to some some proposed area.

B.C. politicians pledge themselves religiously to every green idea and aspiration

So no, Petronas didn’t close down and flee because a new government — Greens and NDP — was now in charge. Rather they saw the official installation of an anti-energy NDP, partnered with the totally anti-oil, anti-pipeline, anti-LNG Greens, as the perfect capstone to British Columbia’s embrace of pure hard-left environmentalism.

Of course, everyone is now politely insisting that Petronas just looked at the market conditions and made a purely economic decision. We’re supposed to accept that the decision had nothing to do with the various stalls and reviews enacted over the years, the indecisiveness of the previous government, the declared hostility of the NDP and Greens when in opposition, the protests and lawsuits that have hampered every other project — all these in combination over time surely in no way led the Malaysian authorities to conclude there had to be better, more favourable jurisdictions other than British Columbia.

So celebrate, Greens. You’ve stopped another project, eliminated great numbers of jobs, held back once again the development of Canada’s energy resources, and access to markets other than the U.S. Petronas is a real feather in the green cap.

National Post

http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-mur ... 0137a98e82

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[quote]Opinion: Why Petronas’ LNG cancellation is a blessing for B.C.

Published on: August 1, 2017 | Last Updated: August 1, 2017 10:00 PM PDT

Opinion: Why Petronas’ LNG cancellation is a blessing for B.C.

Published on: August 1, 2017 | Last Updated: August 1, 2017 10:00 PM PDT
UNDATED -- Flora Bank, off of Lelu Island, where the $12-billion Pacific Northwest LNG project was proposed to be built. Flora Bank is home to eel grass beds, important rearing habitat for juvenile salmon. The project's potential effects on the eel grass beds were a major concerns of environmentalists and some First Nations. The project's cancellation over natural gas market concerns was announced Tuesday, July 25, by the lead proponent, Malaysian state-controlled Petronas (Petroliam Nasional Berhad). (Skeena Wild Conservation photo) (For story by Gord Hoekstra and Nick Eagland) [PNG Merlin Archive]
PNGBritish Columbians should not be lamenting Petronas’ decision to pull its Pacific Northwest Liquified Natural Gas proposal. Instead, they should be celebrating the demise of a project built on bad economics, climate change denial and wishful thinking.
A few pundits have told the Petronas story as a tragedy. Some are blaming the new NDP government, others their B.C. Liberal predecessors for not moving faster to land a deal.

The real culprit is the abysmal economics of LNG — the need for expensive new pipelines and terminals and the high costs to liquefy gas and transport it across the Pacific. These investments would only make sense if prices were way higher than they currently are.

Optimistic predictions for LNG were made based on abnormally high prices from 2011 to 2014. It is very unlikely that gas prices will return to those highs as global LNG export capacity is poised to grow by a third by 2020.

So what if B.C. had managed to stake out some LNG turf? Let’s turn to Australia, where success turned into a political crisis earlier this year.
Just as the taps were turned on for three massive new export projects on the country’s east coast near Gladstone, gas prices shot up for Aussie households and businesses in major urban areas like Sydney. Local prices for gas at one point cost more than Australia’s exported gas in Japan.

In April, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the government would begin imposing restrictions on LNG exporters.

Moreover, major new conflicts have emerged in Australia between the gas industry, now aiming to supply huge export volumes, and farmers whose land would have to be fracked to access the gas.

As the Australian government tilted its tax and royalty regime toward encouraging new LNG investment, the return to the Treasury — for the development of the publicly owned gas resource — has been meager. A recent report from Australia’s McKell Institute found “the industry will need to record at least $238 billion in profits before a cent in royalties is paid to the Australian people.”

The Australian government ordered a comprehensive review of the tax and royalty regime in late 2016, however, there are doubts for meaningful changes.

This is what “competitiveness” looks like. Ultimately, such deals shortchange the public and represent a transfer of risk from the private to the public sector.

What about jobs? The Australian experience shows the vast majority of jobs occur in the construction stage and completed facilities employ few permanent workers.

Gladstone, Queensland has seen boom and bust due to a temporary surge of workers to build three LNG plants in the area. In this city of 60,000 people, there were 14,500 construction jobs for a few years and now only 500 permanent jobs in the completed LNG terminals. During the boom, housing became unaffordable for locals, and seniors and professionals were forced to move away.
It is understandable that economically challenged regions of BC would want high-paying LNG jobs, but the reality is there are few to go around.

Finally, it’s worth recalling that the world is trying to get its climate change act together by transitioning away from fossil fuels. Thanks to new LNG capacity, Australian greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise and the country will miss its 2020 emissions target by a large margin.

The B.C. government spent millions in public funds and built up the hopes of workers and rural communities on an LNG dream. It wasted political capital, time and money on LNG instead of developing renewables and investing in energy efficiency and climate-friendly infrastructure.

Natural gas is a finite resource. British Columbians should be thankful that government efforts to quickly liquidate it for export have come to naught. Forget the laments: Petronas’ decision to pull out of B.C. is a blessing.

Marc Lee is a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, B.C. office.[/quote

]http://vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/opinion-why-petronas-lng-cancellation-is-a-blessing-for-b-c