Monday 31 December 2012

Environmentalists - spinmasters of 2012


2012 Master of spin or Protector of Mother Earth........you decide 

Wildsight continues to stretch the truth and smear the facts. The coalition of Sierra Club, Y2Y, CPAWS and Wildsight use misleading statements to fire up the imagination of readers. Just about every issue these groups campaign against uses similar media hype and thinly veiled threats of doom and gloom. There is a place for environmentalism in BC but not in the way these groups do business. Their campaigns twist the truth and use sketchy details  to garner an audience.  The latest campaign on a new coal mine in the Elk Valley is typical of how they twist reality. It would be useful to the environmental assessment process if Wildsight and its partners used some credible statements in their opposition to new coal mines in the Elk Valley.

 

Here are the statements that Wildsight and their partners published as compared to the facts:

“jeopardize a crucial international wildlife corridor”  

The wildlife in the Elk valley range in the Elk Valley or Alberta depending on the summer and winter ranges.  There is always the off chance that a singular animal will migrate south 200+ kms to cross the US border. This is not an internationally crucial wildlife corridor, unless of course you are peddling the Y2Y project. 

 “Centermount Coal Ltd.’s Bingay project, which is 45 per cent Chinese-owned” 

Foreign investment is needed to build infrastructure so we as Canadians can reap the long term benefits. Two private Chinese citizens own 45% and Canadians own the other 55% majority shares which control the company. I hope Wildsight is not implying that non-Canadians can't invest in BC, if they did then Wildsight would stand to lose millions from US foundations. Wildsight is trying to get a free ride off public sentiment from the recent federal decision to allow foreign ownership of oil sand companies. Here’s the breakdown of ownership of Centermount taken from the project description submitted to the BC Environmental Assessment Office: 

The BingayMain Coal Project (the project) is wholly owned by Centermount, a private, Canadian company with its head office located in Vancouver, BC. Centermount is 55% owned by Centerpoint Resources Inc., also a private Canadian company, with the remaining 45% owned by two Chinese private shareholders.”
“The Elk is one of the last strongholds for genetically pure westslope cutthroat trout and endangered bull trout.”
Westslope cutthroat are abundant throughout the Kootenays including the Elk River which is not the last stronghold. Bull trout are found throughout BC and are not endangered. They are blue listed which means they are sensitive to human activities or natural events, but are not Extirpated, Endangered or Threatened.

 “This mine would be smack in the middle of a globally-significant wildlife corridor that UNESCO has asked B.C. to protect,” 

Just where is “smack in the middle”? According to the proponents application they put the location at: 80 kms north of Sparwood and 80 kms south of Banff National Park. UNESCO has never stated that the Elk Valley is a globally-significant wildlife corridor” nor have they ever asked the BC Government to protect that value.  UNESCO did however use similar references to the federal government for the Flathead valley which has no bearing on this project.  

“contravene a United Nations recommendation for a moratorium on new coal mines in the Elk” 

The United Nations never recommended a moratorium on new coal mines in the Elk Valley in fact they stated:
Urges the State Party of Canada not to permit any development or other resource extraction in the upper Flathead River basin until adequate baseline and comparative research has been completed and considered jointly with the State Party of the United States of America;  

“This could ultimately impact the whole corridor, including the nearby Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.” 

Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park is over 200 kms away as the crow flies in a different province across many mountain ranges with five other open pit coal mines in between. I doubt visitors to Waterton will notice any impact.
 

It’s time that people start to ask tough questions of Wildsight and their  environmental partners. They want the government and corporations to be accountable, responsible and open yet they don’t follow that creed. The untaxed millions that registered charities such as Wildsight, CPAWS and Sierra Club use are governed by strict rules from the Canada Revenue Agency.  Its time they started to act like a charity, do some good for the communities, rather than the oppose and protest with their junk science.  You can read the application submitted by the company online at http://a100.gov.bc.ca. 

Think twice about what is written and look further to make an informed decision on this and other environmental issues. You can view other informative articles at Kootenay Think twice. 

Paul Visentin
Member of the Kootenay Thinktwice group
 
Comments from article published in e-Know Jan 5 2013
 
Wildsight welcomes constructive critique of our work. We work with leading researchers in the field of conservation and ecology and invite feedback from scientists and the public. We regularly incorporate new information into our presentations. Wildsight’s agenda and finances are open to the public through our website, http://www.wildsight.ca The critique by Mr. Visetin is an opinion piece that is not based on the facts. It is written in the same vein as previous Think Twice attacks on the Canadian Cancer Society and Wildsight for our position on cosmetic pesticides. The writer denies the fact that UNESCO has acknowledged that the Elk Valley is a critical wildlife corridor, and that it has recommended a moratorium on mining in the Elk Valley.I would encourage readers to review UNESCO’s 2010 State of Conservation Report (http://whc.unesco.org/en/soc/539) which states,”steps should also be taken to minimise the barrier to wildlife connectivity due to mining, transportation and communication lines and associated developments in the Crowsnest Pass of British Columbia and to plan and implement relevant mitigation measures. The mission recommended a long-term moratorium be placed on any further mining developments in south eastern British Columbia in a corridor providing vital habitat connectivity and to the Rocky Mountains World Heritage property in Alberta. Other measures should include minimising future infrastructure development and removal of unnecessary structures, maintenance of core natural areas and rehabilitation of degraded areas, and development of a pro-active plan for enhancing connectivity in the area.”
 
Reply to John Bergenske
 
The original article published by Wildsight, Sierra Club and CPAWS contained numerous statements that were designed to illicit support for their cause. I doubt any “experts” would have signed off on those statements. I referenced 7 statements that had factual errors and only one is refuted where Mr. Bergenske errs again in stating that the elk valley is part of the 2010 UNESCO decision. It clearly makes no mention of the Elk Valley but does have concerns about the Crowsnest Pass and areas to the south, specifically areas south of the US border in the Flathead and the World Heritage Site at Waterton – Glacier National Park. My critique of Wildsight and the CCS stance on cosmetic pesticides is well known and is also based on the credible experts that have long standing careers studying pesticides and their effect on people and the environment. I have not seen any documentation of the “experts” they claim to use on any subject they campaign against least of all the pesticide campaign. Will Mr. Bergenske provide the names and CV’s of the “leading researchers in the field of conservation and ecology” that Wildsight uses? Kootenay Thinktwice uses facts to back up statements something that Wildsight and its partners need to incorporate into their messaging.
Paul Visentin Member of Kootenay Thinktwice

Thursday 20 December 2012

Back from the brink of extinction

Canadian oil sands development has long been vilified by radical environmentalist groups that have been raising millions of dollars a year, by attacking the project for a host of spurious reasons – including that it destroys the environment, endangers wildlife, and contributes more to “manmade catastrophic climate change” than even conventional oil.
A few weeks ago, Dennis Avery and I visited the oil sands project with several CFACT colleagues – and saw for ourselves how baseless these charges are. In this article, Dennis addresses several of the most common denunciations of oil sands operations, but focuses on the woods bison that happily graze amid the mining operation, and on the amazing reclamation work being done in this area, several hundred miles north of Edmonton, Alberta.
Thank you for posting his article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
(Editor: Dennis Avery can also be reached at 540-337-6354 or by email: cgfi@mgwnet.com)

Paul Driessen Senior policy advisor, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow  
 
Woods bison, muskeg swamps and Canadian oil sands prove energy and wildlife coexist
Dennis T. Avery

The last woods bison in the United States was apparently shot by a hunter in West Virginia around 1835. For many decades, the woods bison was presumed extinct – until an airplane spotted an isolated herd in the muskeg swamps north of Alberta, Canada.
My farm is near a Virginia village called Buffalo Gap, documenting the existence of these ”buffalos” long ago and this far south.  These cousins of the Great Plains bison prefer wooded areas and they’re much larger than the species hunted by the Sioux Indians and Buffalo Bill.
So I was delighted to actually see another herd of the nearly extinct animals calmly munching on hay – right in the middle of the oil sands mining project in northern Alberta, which I visited a few weeks ago. Much of this oil is destined for the USA, to reduce imports from dictatorships, and more will come in the Keystone XL Pipeline, if President Obama ever approves it.
The bison living at the oil sands recovery site are direct descendents of the remnant herd found in 1957. They were busily browsing about 300 yards from a huge diesel shovel that loads 400 tons of oily sand at a time into a lineup of huge trucks. The trucks carry the sand toward a giant “cooker” where the oil is steamed out.
Then they haul the now-clean sand to an enormous pile where it is reserved for later reclamation work. Even the topsoil that covered the sand is set aside to recreate the hillocks, ponds and swamps much as they were before mining.
Once a sizable area of the enormous oil sands deposit has been cooked, and the oil has been further processed for shipment via pipeline, the sand and topsoil are put back into the mined area.  The Canadian government resumes title to the land when its habitat and wildlife experts have ensured that each wilderness recovery is complete and sustainable.
The only thing missing is the smell, taste and ooze of oil, which has always permeated the local soils and often seeped into local streams. There was absolutely no noticeable oil or diesel smell anywhere at the mine, except inside one of the wellhead control buildings we visited.  That’s where you would certainly expect to find it, but even there it was minimal.
The bison seem willing to “loan” this moving five-square-mile of surface mine (what some environmental activists prefer to call an “open wound”) in the midst of their vast muskeg swamp. They certainly don’t let it spoil their lunch or breeding.  They may even sense that the intrusion is only temporary.
This part of Alberta features spindly black spruce and tamarack trees, intermingled with the muskeg--sphagnum moss and sedge grasses. It’s actually about 40 percent water, when you add up the ponds, lakes, streams and marshy areas.  It isn’t much to look at, but it harbors lots of beaver, wolves that prey on the beaver and, hopefully soon, wild herds of woods bison that will continue to grow in number.
The open pit mining cycle travels slowly, with about 25 years of mining followed by another 25 years for complete site restoration. The miners and drillers bring up their own processing water from deep brackish groundwater formations, and they’re increasingly reusing the water.
The tar sands are a geological marvel: an 84,000 square miles deposit – an area the size of Kansas – but the sand is soaked with 5–25 percent heavy petroleum. In total, the Alberta sands are estimated to contain 169 billion barrels of oil, making it one of the largest petroleum deposits in the world. Experts say the oil sands’ operations could produce 465,000 U.S. jobs in construction, refining, petrochemicals and other sectors by 2035, if President Obama finally lets the Keystone XL pipeline go forward.
Where the sand is near the surface, as in the woods bison area, it’s mined with huge shovels and trucks. However, 98 percent of the oil sands lie in a thick bed 200 to 400 feet below the surface. That oil is recovered via drilling and steam injection.
Crews drill a pair of wells a precise five feet apart – one above the other. Each well goes straight down about 150 feet, and then turns to run horizontally for about a mile! Steam is pumped into the upper line. It escapes through perforations in the pipe, then heats and liquefies the oil. The hot liquid oil drips down to the lower pipeline, where more perforations collect the petroleum and pump it to the surface.
The steam recovery units occupy clearings in the muskeg forest, each several miles apart, and covering only about two football fields’ worth of land. These “wounds” also move slowly over the years. As each section of oil sands is steam-cleaned of about 75 percent of its petroleum, the drilling, steam and processing pad is vacated.  Then it’s turned back into muskeg and forest.
Eco-activists loudly decry the oil sands, but it’s hard to understand why. If 84,000 square miles of wildlife habitat was being permanently converted to fields of corn and switchgrass for biofuels, I’d understand their concern about lost habitat. Taking that much land out of food crops has radically raised the price of corn, and thus of all the world’s meats, dairy products, corn syrup, tortillas. Even bread.
Instead of high-cost biofuels, the tar sands produce enormous quantities of petroleum for transportation, petrochemicals – and for the fertilizers and diesel fuel needed to produce high-yield crops on the world’s prime soils.
This modern farming method has saved nearly 7 million square miles of wildlife habitat (nearly twice the area of the entire United States) over the past 50 years.  The high-tech farmers do this by raising far more food per acre than any other farmers in all history. To cap it all off, the tar sands’ pipeline product has a greenhouse gas profile much like that of Arab Medium, one of the oil market mainstays: in other words, not many greenhouse gases.
The activists have made a big mistake in offering the public only solar and wind energy.  Both are costly, land-intensive, erratic and unreliable – and incapable of supporting our cities and farms. Biofuels are even worse. They use enormous quantities of water and sharply increase food costs for the world’s poor.
If the Greens had supported nuclear power, which emits no CO2 at all, they might have already won their battle over using coal and natural gas to generate electricity.
As it is, the activists risk losing their credibility on energy and other issues, by opposing virtually every technology that has been developed to benefit humans, wildlife and the environment.
_____________

Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 2442; email to cgfi@mgwnet.com; and visit his website at www.cgfi.org

Sunday 16 December 2012

Carbon Offsets - the price of climate alarmism

Green money laundering  - the business of Carbon offsets

Recent announcements by Kimberley council and the RDEK highlight an issue that few people, even the councilors, understand enough to make well informed decisions. The price for our municipalities, hospitals and school boards to become carbon neutral is likely in the hundereds of thousands of dollars and will continue to erode the budgets for years to come.  So why are local governments, school boards and other companies having to spend precious funds on such a controversial issue? In 2007 then Premier Gordon Campbell took us down the Al Gore school of climate change with the British Columbia Climate Action Charter.  The idea behind the charter was sound to reduce the emissions and look for ways to be greener in how governments operate. Had they stopped there and looked at ways to reduce emissions as opposed to set unrealistic carbon neutral deadlines it would have gained public favour. They set in place a bureaucracy that feeds off money those schools, hospitals and municipalities can ill afford to spend. Elected officials can buy offsets, at an inflated price, from Pacific Carbon Trust, a crown corporation to keep their commitment to be carbon neutral by 2012. The PCT has a list of approved projects that they invest in at a devalued price. The Darkwoods project in Creston is the only project in the Kootenays on the PCT list hence the RDEK funding to Darkwoods.  Kimberley made the right decision and held back the $38,000 that they committed to spending on carbon offsets yet the RDEK cut a cheque to Darkwoods for $18,000. The RDEK board could have refused to pay with no consequence but fely committed. Had they looked a little deeper into the Darkwoods project they would may have made a different decision. In my mind and many others, carbon offsets are hurting our economy at a level that is not sustainable. The funds that are given to Pacific Carbon Trust are in essence green money laundering of funds that could be better spent locally. Our local councils and boards need to pull their “commitment” from the Climate Action Charter” and use the funds for local projects like Kimberley has done, it just makes common sense.
 
One does not have to search too deeply into the internet to see that others feel the same about the PCT and carbon offsets.
Below is an article on the carbon offsets and why the RDEK should have thought twice  before giving giving the funds to the PCT and subsequently to Darkwoods. Thank you for reading the article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues – to help educate people in the Kootenays about the other side of issues.

Paul Visentin
Member of the Thinktwice group


BC's Strange Business of Carbon Offsets

Hospitals and schools must pay the Pacific Carbon Trust, but what are they really buying?
By Ben Parfitt, 22 Jul 2011, TheTyee.ca 
It is spun in government press releases as a "first" for any jurisdiction in North America, an achievement that places British Columbia "on the leading edge" of efforts to combat climate change. But scratch the surface just a little, and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake's recent claim that "from this point forward, every government building in our province will be carbon neutral." Since it is almost impossible for government buildings -- cash-strapped schools and hospitals among them -- to not be net consumers of energy and therefore net greenhouse gas emitters, purchasing carbon credits to allegedly counteract those emissions is essential to the province's claim to carbon neutrality and its self-anointed status as continental environmental leader. By law, the provincial government requires institutions to buy those credits from just one entity -- the Pacific Carbon Trust or PCT, a Crown corporation set up for specifically that purpose. This gives the PCT a monopoly position for a segment of the carbon market, which at present is largely a voluntary market dominated by private sector carbon sellers and buyers.Bob Simpson, Independent MLA for Cariboo North, says not only is the PCT's monopoly position hurting cash-strapped school districts and health authorities that are forced to pay the PCT as much as four times more money than they would otherwise pay for the same credits from a private credit marketer, but the legitimacy of a good number of the credits that the PCT has bought and sold may be of questionable merit as well.
'Money from kids and patients': MLA Simpson
An examination of the PCT's "2010 Carbon Neutral Government Portfolio" published in June of this year reveals that fully 55 per cent of the 729,782 tonnes worth of carbon offsets that it has purchased and marketed to meet the provincial government's "carbon neutral" goal for 2010, came from just one project known as Darkwoods, a chunk of privately owned forest land purchased three years ago by the Nature Conservancy of Canada when, Simpson says, the PCT "was nothing more than a just fledgling organization." Simpson also says that the project does not appear to meet the PCT's own standards for qualifying carbon offset projects. That standard is known as additionally. Part of the additionally test is that any project supported by the PCT must face "economic, investment or technological barriers to implementation that are overcome or partially overcome by the money from the sale of offsets." "The trust must prove that without its money this purchase would not have happened and therefore the credits would not have been generated. I don't buy that in this case," Simpson says. "And we're talking money from kids and patients to make this happen?"
Mark-up is not transparent
As a matter of policy, PCT does not disclose what it pays for its carbon credit purchases, says its managing director of business development, David Moffat. However, enough facts are known about the Darkwoods project to give a good idea. The sale of the credits was announced June 8 in a jointly issued press release that included the NCC and PCT. The press release notes that the NCC as "Canada's leading private land conservation organization", had just completed the largest ever forest carbon project to date in North America, with the successful marketing of 700,000 tonnes of carbon credits. The sale of the credits not only raised the bar for conservation in Canada, the press release claims, but it "contributes in excess of $4 million for NCC's conservation work." Based on the number of credits sold and the selling price, the sale worked out to roughly $5.70 a tonne. While PCT will not disclose what it paid for the 403,112 tonnes of credits it purchased from the NCC, the price that PCT's captive public sector "clients" are required to pay is known. That price is $25 a tonne, or more than four times the average price generated from the Darkwoods carbon credit sale, meaning that public sector entities including school districts and health authorities will fork out $10.07 million to help meet the government's carbon neutrality goals.And that's just the beginning of where things get murky from a public policy perspective.
Darkwoods billed as 'immense carbon sink'
Just how much additional carbon has actually been stored at Darkwoods since the NCC stepped in to purchase them in 2008?
click here to read the full article


 

Sunday 9 December 2012

Saving the planet - or protecting power grabs and cash cows?



cashcowDoha sets stage for another environmental power grab to “prevent dangerous global warming”

David Rothbard and Craig Rucker

Waning interest and credibility forced organizers to replace climate change with sustainable development as “the world’s most urgent problem” during the UN’s June 2012 Rio+20 Conference. However, climate alarmism is again taking center stage this week at the COP-18 confab in Doha, Qatar.

The agenda remains the same: slash or end hydrocarbon use, transfer wealth, and control energy use, economic growth and lives. The strategies likewise remain unchanged: treaties, laws, regulations and higher taxes for hydrocarbon energy – with control placed in the hands of unelected, unaccountable elites who claim they are saving Planet Earth from ecological collapse.

Previous events in Bali, Copenhagen, Durban and Rio de Janeiro lavished billions of dollars on proposals and discussions that led mostly to promises of more meetings in five-star venues like Doha. With the Kyoto Protocol set to expire, Qatar’s atmosphere is rife with grim determination to forge new international agreements, in the face of hard realities that portend still more failure for global governance stalwarts.

The United States never ratified Kyoto, isn’t bound by its dictates, and has limited economic and political stature to play a lead role in forging a new agreement, regardless of what President Obama might want. Canada, Japan and New Zealand have rejected participation in a new treaty. The European Union is drowning in debt, struggling under soaring renewable energy costs that threaten families, jobs, companies and entire industries, and little inclined to shackle its economy further.

China, Brazil, India, Indonesia and other emerging markets are loathe to sign any treaty that would limit the fossil fuels they need to grow their economies and lift more millions out of poverty. They say industrialized nations must agree to further greenhouse gas reductions, before they will consider doing so, and insist that holding developing countries to developed nation standards would be inequitable.

Poor countries increasingly understand that CO2 emission restrictions will prevent them from developing and subject them to control by environmental zealots and UN regulators. People in those countries are beginning to realize that massive wealth transfers from Formerly Rich Countries – for climate change mitigation, reparation and adaptation – are increasingly unlikely. If “Green Climate Fund” pledges ever do materialize, they will mostly end up in another unaccountable UN slush fund for bureaucrats, autocrats and kleptocrats, with only pennies trickling down to ordinary people.

On the scientific front, contrary to incessant claims that Earth is warming uncontrollably, average planetary temperatures have not risen in 16 years, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have crept upward to 391 parts per million (0.0391 percent). Temperatures may “remain well above the long-term average,” as some insist – but humanity also suffered through a 500-year Little Ice Age and a “coming ice age scare” during the 1940-1975 cooling period.

And while global warming alarmists continue to say 2010 or the U.S. summer of 2012 was “the hottest on record,” actual data reveal that there is only a few hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit difference between these and other alleged “hottest years,” such as 2005. The 1930s still reign supreme as the hottest in American history.

Arctic sea ice reductions during 2012 were caused by many factors, including ocean currents and enormous long-lasting storms that NASA finally conceded broke up huge sections of the polar ice cap, during a very cold summer. Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice continues to expand, setting new records. The rate of sea level rise has not been accelerating and may actually be decreasing, according to recent studies.

Even with Hurricane Sandy, November 2012 marks the quietest long-term hurricane period since the Civil War, with only one major hurricane strike on the U.S. mainland in seven years. Large tornadoes have also fallen in frequency since the 1950s, and the 2012 season was the quietest on record; only twelve tornadoes touched down in the United States in July 2012, says NOAA, shattering the July 1960 record low of 42.

Climate change computer models predict every imaginable scenario – warmer and colder, wetter and drier, more snow or less snow in winter – so that human-caused disaster believers can always claim to be right. And almost nothing stops politicians and climate alarmists from saying Sandy was “unprecedented” and “proof that climate change is real,” no matter what history actually shows us.

Devastating hurricanes have struck New York, New Jersey and Canada’s Maritime Provinces many times over the centuries. Newfoundland’s deadliest hurricane killed 4,000 people in 1775, while category 1 to 3 ‘canes hit the provinces in 1866, 1873, 1886, 1893, 1939, 1959, 1963 and 2003. New York City was hammered by major storms in 1693, 1788, 1821, 1893, 1938 (the “Long Island Express”), 1944 and 1954.

Climate change is natural, normal, cyclical, frequent, unpredictable, and sometimes catastrophic – as the Little Ice Age certainly was for European agriculture and civilization.

Nor are we “running out” of oil and gas – the other rationale for irrational attacks on hydrocarbons. Thanks to new discoveries, technologies and techniques (like hydraulic fracturing), the world still has many decades of traditional energy. We need to develop it, not lock it up, to help people realize their dreams for a better tomorrow, and bring prosperity to families, communities and nations the world over.

These realities won’t stop the alarmists. There is simply too much money and power at stake. Tens of billions of dollars are transferred annually from taxpayers and energy users to activists, Mann-made global warming scientists, regulators, carbon tax “investors,” and renewable energy and carbon capture subsidy seekers – all of whom have every reason to promote climate scares and attack anyone who voices skepticism about CO2-driven climate change catastrophes.

Nor will scientific or economic reality stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is poised to impose a raft of economy-strangling, job-killing carbon dioxide regulations – or a Congress and White House that are desperate for new sources of revenue, to pay for stimulus and entitlement programs.

The real danger is not climate change. If we have the economic and technological resources, we can adapt to almost any changes Mother Nature might throw at us – short of another glacial period that buries much of the world under a mile of ice.

The real danger is policies, laws, regulations, restrictions and taxes imposed in the name of preventing global warming cataclysms that exist only in computer models, Hollywood horror movies, and UN and environmentalist press releases. Those political reactions will perpetuate and exacerbate poverty, disease, unemployment, and economic stagnation.

They will subsidize renewable energy programs that turn precious food into expensive fuel for cars, destroy wildlife and habitats, and leave the pursuit of happiness and human rights progress in the hands of pressure groups, politicians and bureaucrats who are convinced that mankind is a “cancer on the Earth.”

That is neither just nor sustainable. It is the reason the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow is in Doha. We want the United Nations to return to its founding principles, get serious about poverty alleviation and economic betterment for people everywhere – and implement constructive and sustained solutions to the real problems that continue to confront civilization, wildlife and the environment

David Rothbard serves as president of the Washington, DC-based Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org and www.CFACT.tv). Craig Rucker is CFACT’s executive director.

December 6, 2012

Monday 3 December 2012

Before Qat'muk - The Facts about Jumbo Glacier Resort and the Qat'muk Declaration

Qat’muk Declaration Not Credible

Aerial-view-of-Jumbo-Mt-and-Jumbo-Valley---November-Reduced

The Jumbo Glacier Resort project team extends open arms to all First Nations and values the long-standing support of the Shuswap Indian Band, the closest First Nation to the project site. The team continues to seek common ground with all First Nations, including the Ktunaxa, and it has a strong desire to maintain amity and to continue working towards a benefits agreement, but it has an equally strong desire for the truth be told and that history not be ignored or misrepresented.
In November, 2010, twenty years after the comprehensive land use, environmental assessment and master planning reviews for Jumbo Glacier Resort had begun, the Ktunaxa Nation declared the entire Toby-Jumbo watershed, “home of the Grizzly Bear Spirit.” The Toby-Jumbo watershed includes Panorama Mountain Village and the Jumbo Glacier Resort project site. The upper Jumbo Valley, where the Jumbo Glacier Resort base will be situated, was singled out as a refuge area and a “most sacred core”.
Never before in the project’s then-Twenty year history had Qat’muk or the existence of a “Sacred” refuge area for the Grizzly Bear Spirit been mentioned.
The Ktunaxa had participated extensively in the CORE land use review process, the environmental assessment project specifications and review process, the master planning process and had begun negotiating an impact management and benefits agreement with the proponent. Never before in the project’s then-20 year history had Qat’muk or the existence of a refuge area for the Grizzly Bear Spirit been mentioned. The claim, accompanied by large public relations efforts complete with mal-informed celebrities, strained credibility and was met with offense and indignation from other First Nations and stakeholders.
As the resort enters the construction phase, the project team remains positive and is looking forward to the moment when it will be possible to work cooperatively and conclude an Impact Management and Benefits Agreement with the Ktunaxa.