There is a craziness afoot in British Columbia, and I’m not referring to the legions of homeless people who are camped out on our streets. I’m referring to the $3 billion of public money that is about to be spent on a transmission line to carry electricity from the Site C Dam to Prince Rupert. Are the good folks of Rupert planning to mine cryptocurrencies? Build a nuclear power plant? No. It’s a cryptocarbon-busting innovation they want to build, using a digital deception to transform fracked fossil gas into “the world’s cleanest LNG”. 

BC’s fracked fossil gas, branded as ‘natural’ as if it were a beautiful forest, is a climate timebomb. In Alberta, a third of Jasper has been destroyed by a monstrous wildfire. In 2016, 2,400 homes and buildings were burnt to the ground in Fort MacMurray. In 2021, most of Lytton was destroyed. In 2023, it was Kelowna’s turn. As I write this, Tampa in Florida is about to be destroyed.

53% of us are more worried about climate change than we were last year

People know what’s happening, and they are afraid. The UN Development Programme worked with Oxford University to conduct the The Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024, surveying 1.2 million people in 77 countries. Globally, 53% of us are more worried about climate change than we were last year. 80% of us want our governments to do more to tackle the crisis. 

In BC, however, both the NDP and the  Conservatives of BC  wants to pour fuel on the climate fire by throwing subsidies at fracked gas in an effort to persuade foreign corporations to convert it into LNG and ship it overseas. 

There’s a snag, however, because to do this you have to remove the impurities, and then cool it to -162°C to turn it into a liquid. Normally, a company would burn 10% of the fracked gas to generate the power to cool it, but that would release carbon, which BC’s government is trying so hard to reduce. 40% less climate pollution by 2030, and ‘net zero emissions’ for all LNG projects by 2030 – that’s the government’s stated goal. 

Electrify!

So electrify! That’s the proposed solution. Use electricity from the Site C dam and elsewhere to chill the gas. And that, for Premier Eby, is genius, since it will, as he said in an interview with Bloomberg on July 8^th, ensure that the carbon emissions “do not show up on BC’s books”.

It’s bad enough that when it does its environmental assessment of a proposed fracked well, the BC Energy Regulator pays no attention to its impact on the climate crisis. How can it be that a government that wants so much to reduce our province’s emissions does not even measure the climate pollution from its natural gas industry?  But to so blatently claim that it’s okay long as the climate pollution doesn’t show up on BC’s books, that is climate cynicism at its most shallow. 

Zero reduction in the LNG’s global climate pollution. Nada.

And here’s why. Since that 10% of the fracked gas can now be burned in China, or wherever, there will be zero reduction in the LNG’s global climate pollution. Nada. But the LNG companies, as well as having 10% more gas to sell, get to claim, by the wonders of public ignorance and self-deception, that their LNG is the cleanest in the world. It’s a lie. A recent peer -reviewed study by Rob Howarth showed that LNG is 33% worse than coal in its climate impact.

If that was all, it would be what it is. Just another careless firebrand tossed onto the climate fire, fuelling stronger hurricanes and more floods and droughts. But to electrify the cooling process BC Hydro needs to acquire a vast amount of renewable electricity, and build a $3 billion transmission line across contested unceded Indigenous land to Prince Rupert. For the five LNG plants, not counting the proposed Summit Lake project in Prince George, they need to find 43,000 GWh of electricity a year. That’s the equivalent of eight new Site C dams. 

People all across BC will be putting solar on their roofs, feeling good about their contribution to solving the climate crisis, when in reality the power they contribute will be used to liquefy yet more fracked gas. We need more wind and solar energy, but to displace fossil fuels, not to enable them. 

Does our government think we can’t see through this? Or have they deceived themselves, too? If electrification enables 10% of the gas not to be burnt in BC, to keep our books clean, it will be burnt elsewhere. It’s a conjurer’s climate trick. And meanwhile, towns like Jasper burn, and cities like Tampa drown.

Guy Dauncey is co-chair of the West Coast Climate Action Network

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Editors – feel free to republish.