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November 19, 2007

You think U.S. environmental enforcement is lax at times? BC sucks up to BP

Try living in British Columbia, where the provincial government is set to sign off on a coal-mining and natural gas exploration project next to both U.S. Glacier National Park and Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park.
Together, they comprise the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, which is listed by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as one of its world heritage site.

Both the Canadian and US parks also have been declared by UNESCO to be Biosphere Reserves. World heritage sites are said to have outstanding cultural or natural importance to the common heritage of all humankind.

Critics also say the mining project runs the risk of spoiling the pristine waters and fragile ecosystem of parks on both the Canadian and US sides of the Rocky Mountains, which have come to symbolize peace and friendship between the two countries.

Chief among environmentalists' concerns are the impact on the area's abundant wildlife, including lynx, wolves and especially grizzly bears, whose mating habits could be adversely impacted by the noisy and intrusive mining equipment.

The company involved? British Beyond Petroleum; obviously moving so greenly beyond petroleum into dirty coal mining.

The natural gas will come from the same coal-bed methane that has dirtied up Wyoming’s Powder River country.

Despite the provincial government’s claims that neither national park has anything to worry about, an international commission recommended against a similar project back in 1988.

3 comments:

  1. Nice Post Mr. Gadfly,

    Just for accuracy sake I would like to point out the BP is not interested in the mining of coal just the extraction of coalbed methane. The company with the proposed mine is very junior company called Cline Mining. They have no operating mines right now and they seem to have stalled out on their proposed Lodgepole mine in the headwaters of the Flathead River in B.C. which forms the western border of Glacier National Park in Montana.

    BP wants to clear well sites, drill thousands of wells and pump millions of gallons of water across more than two hundred square miles of Rocky Mountain wilderness.

    check out
    www.cccbm.org, www.wildsight.ca and www.flathead.ca for more information

    Cheers,
    Casey

    ReplyDelete
  2. Casey, thanks; the Yahoo story wasn't clear about the mine itself.

    Anyway, BP is the big player, and given their PR-type ads, deserve a big skewering.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh, thanks for the links. And I agree that, at the state-provincial level, Schweitzer may not have a lot to talk about.

    ReplyDelete

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