Opinion on shale gas extraction in New Brunswick

South Western Energy

Here are my reflections on the visit by an energy corporation based in Texas (Southwestern Energy) to the UNB campus on Thursday 20 January to discuss, in essence, the technicalities of “safe” fracking, and the other, related to it, has to do with the responsibilities of the Environment Ministry.

Senior representatives from the Environmental Defense Fund (Arkansas) and Southwestern Energy (Texas) came to the UNB campus last Thursday, and argued that there was room for “working collaboratively to ensure that the environment is protected while resource development takes place.”  To be sure, we should be cautious in our general assumption that having “environmental” or “environment” in one’s name necessarily implies that the organisation works towards the protection of the environment.  There was not even pretense of good cop, bad cop last Thursday.  From the reported “sue the bastards” approach of its early years, EDF has now moved to “working towards a common goal.”

What I find remarkable about the ostensible pursuit of compromise when dealing with industries involved in the business of extracting natural resources - as shale gas - is the placatory impact it has on public opinion.  This strategy worked well at the UNB presentation, as the speakers of the Environmental Defense Fund and Southwestern Energy spoke in turn about the potential dangers and about the fail-safe safety measures they have developed.  Insidiously, the industry and this pursuit of compromise have managed to confine the debate to the technical aspects of the issue: Which chemicals are toxic?  In what quantities?  Can they be replaced by other, more benign chemicals?  Would it be possible to place a tracer in the fluids used?  How thick must the casing be in order to be perfectly safe?  The experts of the industry relished these questions and answered them with great ease.  Who was going to challenge them on their turf?  A historian?  Or a local farmer?  But these made up the bulk of the questions asked last week.  At some point, someone asked them to walk the audience through what would happen in an - unimaginable - Deepwater Horizon-like event.  For once, our experts were at a loss, like those in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.  For the rest of the Q&A, however, it was a walk in the park for our experts, who emphasised “the role that regulations can play to ensure best practices in natural gas drilling.”  This will sound inviting to government officials, but it, again, restricts the issue to its technical aspects, on which the industry will consistently have the upper hand.

Environment Ministries have gotten into the habit of expressing their obligation to take business  considerations into account as they map out environmental policies.  If the Environment Ministry of NB opens that door, then it is obligated to reckon with other considerations, such as the long-term health risks, the long-term socio-economic implications of this type of exploitation of natural resources by a foreign corporation. 
The key word for this Ministry should be “long-term.” 
Of course, it is tempting to want to harvest immediate benefits of any development in an economically devastated province.  But we shouldn’t be naive: there are enough examples of third-world peoples who have seen their natural resources being plundered by multinational corporations and who experienced no improvement in their lives, while their élites were becoming obscenely wealthy. 

New Brunswick doesn’t NEED this natural gas for its own use at this point.  If it were extracted now, the gas would go straight to the U.S. where the appetite for energy adjusts itself to whatever size the supply is.  It seems cynical that the NB government would let an American corporation come and make profits extracting a NB natural resource for immediate consumption by Americans.  No doubt that the revenue made by “NB” (and who in NB?) in this entreprise would be modest compared to the value of that natural gas when New Brunswickers will find that energy sources abroad have become scarce and extremely expensive.  Therefore, it is the Environment Ministry’s responsibility to plan for the long term: extracting and exporting NB gas now clearly goes against the long-term interests of the people of New Brunswick, if not its environment. 

Instead of negotiating a regulation framework with the industry, the NB government should establish a sine die moratorium on shale gas extraction.