BC Greenwash and Wear

Environmental activist Tzeporah Berman of Forest Ethics presents BC Premier Gordon Campbell with a "green award" at the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.

The previous month Campbell hired Berman on to his "Green Energy Advisory Task Force".

Last May Berman actively supported Campbell's re-election citing his "environmental leadership".

This is the same Gordon Campbell who supports the Grizzly bear hunt and open-cage fish farms, the Gateway Pacific and twin Enbridge pipelines running from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat, the proposed revoking of the moratorium on off-shore drilling, coalbed methane development, the gutting of the BC Environment ministry, and the privatization of BC rivers for run-of-river hydro projects.

Berman is executive director of Power Up Canada which promotes those privately owned run-of-river projects, which, under Gordon Campbell, forces the publicly-owned BC Hydro to buy power from them at exorbitant higher-than-market rates while being prohibited from developing its own green energy initiatives.

Today, 19 private power producers, including 14 run-of-river projects, were awarded agreements in BC, with 28 more expected by the month's end.

On February 13th, Greenpeace International announced it was hiring Tzeporah Berman as director of its global climate and energy campaign.

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Gordo's fluffer energy task forces

Gordo's four new "greenwash energy advisory task forces" will have just two months to come up with the goods to make running air-conditioners in California the "cornerstone" of BC's renewed green energy revolution.

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"If you can do it faster, great," he said from the the B.C. Independent Power Producers' annual conference.

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For the environmental perspective, we now go to environmentalist activist Tzeporah Berman, IPP lobbyist and executive director of Power Up Canada :

"The short timeline shows that they are committed to sending the right signals to the investment community, which is incredibly important because other jurisdictions are beating us to the punch."

Tzeporah Berman, economist Mark Jaccard, and David Suzuki worked really hard to support Gordo's re-election this year, presumably because Gordo's environmental policies of gutting the BC Environment Ministry, supporting fish farms, building the Gateway Pacific and twin Enbridge pipelines from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat, exporting BC coal to China, expanding the oil and gas industry in the north, building more roads and bridges instead of light rail and public transit, and passing a bill to prevent municipalities from having any say in local run-of-river projects ... is but a small price to pay in exchange for forcing the publicly-owned BC Hydro to buy electricity at above-market rates from the private IPP run-of-river schemes stocked with former Liberal officials and advisors, in order to export that power to the US.

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No word yet as to whether they will be on Gordo's new energy task forces, but we do know that David Emerson of Project North America will be on the committee receiving their submissions.

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Why the rush to PowerUp?

A map of proposed and existing run-of-river licences via IPP Watch:
Blue - generating; green - granted; red - application
Large Google map of sites here.
I wonder what the salmon think of it?

So given that we generally generate more power than we need in BC, what are all these for again?
Oh yeah - exporting power to the US :

"A key adviser to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said yesterday that B.C. run-of-river power may yet qualify as green power.
Utilities in California are nearly all struggling to meet a requirement that 20% of their electricity come from renewable sources by 2010.
They have only months to meet the target or face financial penalties, and private-sector power producers in B.C., along with the provincial government, are urging California to expand its definition of renewable power to encompass run-of-river projects with up to 50 megawatts of capacity as part of the solution."

Which is interesting because projects of less than 50 megawatts do not require environmental reviews.

Over at Plutonic Power, home of the $4-billion Bute Inlet run-of-17-rivers Project in partnership with US General Electric, environmentalist and executive director of PowerUp Canada "citizens initiative" Tzeporah Berman gave us another reason :

"We're in a recession and calling for a moratorium of the private sector of renewable energy companies would send the signal to the business community that this is not a place for them to invest in."

Certainly Gordo is invested in IPPs. In response to Squamish’s strenuous objections to a run-of-river development on Ashlu River, Gordo passed Bill 30, retroactively removing the right of local municipalities to stop such developments.

And Plutonic Power has in turn invested in Gordo's Liberals :

"CEO Donald McInnes said his company did not donate to the Liberal Party, in response to a caller on CKNW's Bill Good show this morning, but Elections BC records prove otherwise.
When asked why he made that claim, McInnes responded, "I don't consider that to be donations, that's buying a seat at a table."

Quite.

In comments in the post below - BC's Watershed Election - commenter Racheal11 left some handy info and links to Liberal party insiders and BC Hydro execs who have recently shifted over to the extremely lucrative IPP industy : Insiders move to IPP industry

So we're good with all this, are we?
Gordo's government, former BC Hydro execs, private industry, and prominent environmentalists all pulling together ... to export power to California.
The mind boggles.
And if we decide we want our rivers back before the 25 to 50 year leases are up, are we looking at a NAFTA Chapter 11 challenge?
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