Season 2, Episode 2: The Harms of Coal Mining
with Dr. Norm Campbell, Dr. Brad Stelfox, and Dr. David Swann
In Episode 2, Season 2 of The Gravity Well podcast, you hear about the environmental and health impacts of coal mining with Dr. David Swan, Dr. Norm Campbell, and Dr. Brad Stelfox. The conversation highlights the significant health risks, including selenium toxicity, increased cancer rates, and respiratory issues, lifestyle degradation as well as the environmental damage caused by coal mining. The guests emphasize the need for a comprehensive (cumulative) assessment of energy and land use, prioritizing renewable sources and reducing overall consumption. They ask you to demand stronger political action to protect Alberta’s natural resources and ensure a sustainable future.
Introductions to Brad, David, and Norm
Alex:
Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast with Alex and Jenny. Here you break down heavy ideas with us to understand their complexities and connections. Our mission is to work through your dilemmas with you in conversation and process making our world a better place for all.
Jenny:
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Alex:
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Jenny:
Welcome. I am thrilled to have Dr. David Swann, Dr. Norm Campbell and Dr. Brad Stelfox here today to talk about coal mining; the harms of coal mining, both on our health and on the environment. I’m excited to know David Swann quite well. We have an opportunity almost every week to meet, we discuss as a group of, I was just saying we should change our name to Concerned Canadians on Climate Change. We meet weekly basically as a therapy session first and foremost, but then work through the things that we’re trying to help inform, educate, or take action in our community. I’m grateful for all that I’ve learned from you, David, and I appreciate you helping me co-host today. I’m going to go ahead and let you guys introduce yourselves, Norm and Brad. I’ve had the opportunity to meet with Norm through CAPE, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
We were in a meeting recently trying to work through this coal mining issue and also just trying to take action together in the environmental space, which is great. And I had the opportunity to hear Brad back in, geez, I want to say it was the summer of last year, down in Brag Creek talking about cumulative impacts on the landscape, which was really valuable to see and hear, to witness a large group of people learn how tremendous this problem is. I’m going to stop there and let you guys introduce yourselves properly. Norm, if you wouldn’t mind going first. Thank you.
Norm:
Sure. I’m Norm Campbell. I’m a retired professor of medicine from the University of Calgary. Relevant to this podcast, I drafted a report for the Alberta Medical Association on the adverse health effects of coal mining. Most of my work in my career was developing coalitions of health and scientific organizations around public health issues to create unified fronts. I’m a very keen outdoors person, love the Alpine in particular, and when I retired, one of my projects was to develop a coalition of Alberta Health professional organizations to address environmental health threats that are really important to the world and all life forms going forward. Thank you, I’ll end there.
Jenny:
Thank you Norm, so much for your work. I really appreciate it. Brad, you’re next please.
Brad:
Thanks Jenny, and good to learn a lot about Norm right away. My name is Brad Stelfox, like Norm I’m retired, a career wildlife ecologist that many decades ago started focusing on the issue of commutative effects of land use and looking how multiple overlapping land uses create not only benefits but they create liability. So that’s been my focus, been largely retired for several years, but got involved with a variety of stakeholder groups along the east Slopes Alberta that were very concerned about a broad variety of negative consequences of coal mining in our headwaters. So yeah, that’s the background I bring to this conversation.
Jenny:
Thank you, Brad. David, you’re next please.
David:
Yes, 20 years in medical practice, including public health and environmental issues, were very much to the fore in public health and 15 years in politics in the provincial government and the opposition related to a lot of the contention over both healthcare and environment. Glad to be here. Thanks Jenny.
Dr. Norm Campbell’s Medical Assessment of Coal Mining Harms
Jenny:
Thank you so much, David. Okay, well let’s get into it. Norm, if you wouldn’t mind leading us off, I’d appreciate you outlining. Spend some time outlining the concerns that you raised in your report that you did for the Alberta Medical Association with respect to coal mining. Thank you.
Norm:
Sure. Thank you so much. This is just a short summary. One of the main issues and the one with the greatest evidence is really selenium toxicity. Selenium is a byproduct of coal mining that gets into the water and from the water into the soil. Humans and animals and fish are exposed to it. The level at which it creates problems, health problems is not that much higher than what’s required for good health. If people are eating food that’s grown on soil that contains high amounts of selenium or drinking water with high amounts of selenium, they could be subject to toxicity and this includes diarrhea, nausea, feeling tired, achy muscles, hair loss and damage to their nails. This type of toxicity can actually result in death, although that’s usually when exposed to high amounts of selenium acutely. There’s also adverse health effects on fish that would be swimming in the waters high in selenium.
They can have death of the embryos and deformities of their embryos. There is a very high level of evidence that this is a significant health problem. In my review though, it’s not just the individuals who are exposed to high selenium that are a problem around coal mining. There’s a whole host of other issues that result in unhealthy communities and individuals. One of the things that’s observed particularly from high income United States where there’s good standards for coal mining is that there’s increased cancers, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease, congenital disease, chromosome abnormalities in the vicinity of coal mines, and this is, I believe, likely to increase exposure to environmental contaminants related to coal mining, heavy metals and other things. We do know the areas that are going to be mined. I know this because I go there; very high winds and the dust blow far. Some of the dust particles create something called silicosis or coal miners lung disease, and that can occur in the coal miners.
But people who are in the vicinity of the mine who already have underlying lung disease such as asthma or a chronic lung disease from smoking may also be exposed and have problems and it can also be associated with an increase of lung cancer. The other thing that’s overlooked is open pit coal mining is one of the highest risk professions of anything for death of the workers and injury. There’s about a sevenfold higher risk of death in open pit coal miners from the Southeast United States. Again, a place where there’s very high standards. Some of the other issues, and this may relate to the type of workers that are there, is there’s a marked increase in drug and alcohol abuse in the mining communities about one in five miners from Southeast United States report very heavy alcohol use in the past month, one in 20 illicit drug use within a month, and about one in 10 report it being alcohol dependent in the previous year.
This really speaks to the fact that there’ll be significant increases in disease risks and social unrest and disorder in the communities, not something any community would really want to wish upon itself. One thing that certainly has impacted me is just the psychological impact of this going on in our incredibly beautiful foothills. This is something that should be preserved for future generations forever. We’re one of the most beautiful places in the world and here we have people destroying it, destroying our environment, our waters or soil, and it hurts us and that makes us feel badly. That’s what got me involved and it’s what got 80% of Albertans against coal mining. And I will say it’s not just the foothills. I think we need to protect all Albertans and all Albertans communities from this sort of impending disaster. Lastly, one of the greatest threats to all life forms in the world, including our own, is climate change.
Coal is one of the dirtiest forms of energy. It’s accelerating climate change. Well, we’ve seen the disasters here and we experienced them annually here in Alberta. Air pollution is now the second leading risk for death in the world. Over 8 million people are dying in the world and we’re sending our coal somewhere else to be burned. But this is a global problem. That’s essentially a summary. The Alberta Medical Association called for an extensive review of all the evidence. Currently, a lot of the problem is they’ll assess the health impact on a single mine, whereas the real problem is the whole mining industry really causing this type of disruption in ill health. I’ll leave it at that and answer questions as we go on. Thank you.
Jenny:
Wonderful. Yeah, thank you so much. Norm. I think what’s interesting about what you bring forward is Selenium is something that Brad has spoken a lot about. Everyone speaks a lot about Selenium and the ongoing and growing problem I’ve even heard, and I’m curious what you know about this either of you, that the selenium problems in Elk Valley are now being seen elsewhere because of, I know Brad, in the conversation you just had with Alberta resistance, the discussion was around the coal mining, how there is evidence and information in the coal mining from coal mining dust in our glaciers and how those things aren’t being reported yet. I’ll let you speak about that a bit, Brad, but to think about cardiovascular disease beyond that and the other things that will be impacted to hear the amount of pollution that is the second leading cause of people passing in this world is I think part of the issue we spoke about before we went online, the misinformation that is out around these issues and how they are minimized to, oh, it’s just one project and oh, it’s just this tiny area and you’re just overreacting.
No, the sum of the parts is what matters. I think that’s why I appreciate both of your work so much because it’s not just selenium, it’s also dust and particles, it’s sound, it’s disturbance to patterns. A friend of mine I’ve made through this, Brenda Davidson, speaks about the continuity of Yellowstone to Yukon and how we need this continuity for species to be intact that tell us our ecosystems are functioning. This is the size of this issue. And how in the AER hearings, Lorne Fitch spoke to the fact that any activity is going to harm species at risk, let alone coal mining. This is the size and scale of it, and I also appreciate that you brought in the lifestyle that it brings not only to the campers, the workforce that’s there, but the community that’s around it. There was an example when in the last company I worked for in the oil and gas industry where an indigenous woman was doing her smudge in the camp and they made her get rid of her smudge system. She had a ceramic thing that was, and she was made to feel like she was doing something wrong in this camp rather than something that was meant to ground her and help her be in the right way for her community. Things that are really not healthy for a community to be exposed to beyond the actual activity. That’s what I took away from what you work Norm, did you want to reflect a little bit before I pass it on to Brad to offer some thoughts?
Norm:
I think one of the big issues is that communities when they’re considering this and we know there was a vote in favor in the Crowsnest Pass for the coal mining, I think they were completely unaware that that’s going to bring drugs, alcohol, violence, or they’re going to need enhanced healthcare services, ambulances and things to take the injured and people out. And when their relatives have premature cancers or strokes or heart attacks, is that worth it? If their kids are going to school and getting beaten up by some drugged out person or there’s a family abuse due to alcoholism in the community that wasn’t there before, was that really worth it? Is that the type of community you want to live in or do you want to live in a beautiful natural surrounding birds, fish, animals, and the great beauty that we have in Alberta? And I think if communities actually knew what they were getting into, I think they’ve been sold a bill of goods and misled.
Jenny:
Agreed. Yeah. And it’s really hard, as you said, that’s the last thing is the psychological impact of how hard it is to know the misinformation that’s being put out for people to support this rather than the real dangers. And we can’t reverse this bus. This is a mistake that we can’t make. Okay. Brad, please offer some thoughts on norm’s work. Thank you.
Brad:
Well, I really enjoyed that synopsis and one of the key themes that I hear in Norm is scaling it up from an issue of, hey, it’s a coal mine that’s going to bring some jobs and royalties and rents. And if you look at it, yeah, it’ll do that. And I think most Albertans would be amazed at how little and few jobs and the royalties and rents, but most of us dealing with government industry are hearing about the benefits and there is a broad suite of liabilities. Like Norm said, it’s a system and if you scale up and look at the full suite of benefits and liabilities, it just doesn’t make sense. Yeah, I guess the world wants to produce a lot of steel and historically coal has been a dominant thing to do, but I think what Norm is reminding us is that there’s no way we can have it all.
There’s a trade off, and I’ll get into it when I chat a little bit, is these areas that Norm and I so much enjoy hiking in are doing a spectacular job of providing an amazing aesthetic. I mean, they’re the iconic landscapes that Albertans are forever telling the world to come and visit, but more in a functional sense, these systems depend on water both in quality and quantity and that’s what we get. And there is no way with current technology to extract coal and not compromise those things. And just like I think Alberta can turn to the Elk Valley to look at a whole bunch of ecological effects, Norm is reminding us that a good chunk of Appalachia has a very long coal mining history. And anyone that wants to do a deep dive on the social and health benefits of it should be stunned at the imbalance between the benefits and the liabilities.
And the liabilities are intergenerational and they’re social, they’re related to health, and most people seem to be just too busy to want to understand the liability side. And that really saddens me. Yeah, what I got from Norm is it’s a big picture we need to look at and don’t count on the government and industry to tell us about both the benefits and liabilities. They’re in the business of telling us the benefits and they’re often short term and they feed very well into people that have a mindset of “me”. “It’s about here and it’s about now” and there are better criteria to think about.
Dr. Brad Stelfox’s Analysis on the Environmental Liabilities of Coal Mining
Jenny:
I could not agree more as one that was working in liability for the oil and gas industry, I learned that the first rule of liability is we don’t talk about liability. It’s just like Fight Club. To me, that’s the key is that we have to start talking about liability first and foremost before we make any more decisions. And that’s what I really appreciate about the work you’re doing, Brad, and I’ll let you start discussing that right away here. But just to tee it up a little bit, what I was left with in the industry is that we have this massive imbalance in our ecosystems where we have taken too much from the landscape and now we’re in this deficit that we have to start restoring. That’s my mindset, that we need to actually be doing a net restoration effort rather than taking more from the landscape. To me, this is moving completely in the wrong direction when we’re talking about extracting minerals for steel. We should have enough minerals on the surface to be able to do what we need to do these days. But anyway, I’m going to stop there and just say you’ve brought me to a place that is very near and dear to my heart, thank you for that. Okay, Brad, if you wouldn’t mind walking through some of the work that you’ve done, as well.
Brad:
Yeah, your comments have got me thinking about, I mean maybe some other time, but we should talk about the bigger, broader story of energy. We’re a species that seems to consume an unbelievable amount of energy in it and somehow it needs to grow each and every year. Yeah, central to the work that I did with colleague Dr. Bill Donahue, it was some work, Jenny, that was commissioned by the Livingston Landowner Group. They’re an organization that graze cattle in the headwaters of southwest Alberta. And it’s not like their land use is without an environmental consequence too, but it’s an extensive land use that works pretty hard to maintain water quality and quantity. And I’ve visited enough of those families to know that they do a reasonably good job, and Norm talked about this. This is not an issue of Grassy Mountain specifically.
It’s a much broader issue. I mean there’s over a hundred million metric tons of coal that can be extracted from the headwaters of the old man and the government rather than wanting to talk about, Hey, the Mist Mountain coal formation is this much coal underground, we can get it out. We can generate these numbers of jobs and royalties. They’ve heard from Albertans that they think that’s not a wise trade-off relative to water quality, landscape continuity, selenium toxicity that Norm talked about. The government’s having this very narrow conversation and the recent hearing, it wasn’t even about Grassy Mountain coal mining, it was about exploration. They’re trying to make this a very, very small discussion to try and convince Albertans that there’s really nothing going on here. But the work that the Livingston Landowner group commissioned Bill and I to do, we looked at the entire old man river drainage basin and particularly the headwaters and it has the same coal deposits that we found in just a few kilometers west on the west side of the Continental Divide, in BC’s Elk Valley.
And of course coal mining has been conducted for the last several decades by a variety of different companies like Tech and more recently by Glencore. And it tells us about what are the benefits and it tells us about what are the liabilities we don’t have to make this up. The total amount of ore that these eight mine sites have projected that they think they can recover over a five decade period is very comparable and Norm made a reference to it’s kind of windy on our side, a lot windier than it is in the Elk Valley. I think aeolian dust or wind-driven dust dynamics are going to be much worse. And we already have significant toxicity issues caused by dust that has been carried over the continental divide into some of these tarn lakes that we’re finding in the headwaters. The old man river drainage basin, what is it?
I think 160,000 square kilometers. It’s got a couple hundred thousand people, but it flows, comes to south Saskatchewan and goes through Saskatchewan, goes all the way to Lake Winnipeg. If you look at that entire basin, we’re dealing with about 3 million people and Alberta has a commitment to deliver good water quality and quantity to Saskatchewan too. We need to remind ourselves of that. What we did is we looked at the headwaters, we said, okay, who’s got leases? Who’s ready to go, who’s got the money and has identified the amount of volume and we simulated it and we looked at a broad suite of social economic benefits and also liabilities. And then one of the things that reminded us is that, and I’m going to go from west to east, the headwaters obviously are the mountains, they’re beautiful, they’re high, they’re cold.
It’s where we get almost all of our precipitation. It’s not like we don’t get rain and snow in the eastern part of the basin, but evaporation is so high there because of wind and because of temperature that if you see water flowing through the river like the old man South Saskatchewan, almost all of it is coming from those headwaters and it accumulates in the winter as snow. And when it warms up in the spring, those snows melt and we get this flush, we call it a vernal discharge that travels downstream. And Albertans have worked very hard to slow it down with a network of reservoirs that is critical to all of the downstream land uses. We’ve got agriculture and settlements, they need water, we’ve got agriculture in both crops and livestock and particularly on the crop side and particularly with irrigation, they are by far the biggest user of water and it’s several billion dollars of GDP per year.
It’s not like it doesn’t have its liabilities, but it’s been existing for several decades. It requires water and not only in terms of quality, but as Norm mentioned, not only quantity, but quality is really important. I mean if I recall correctly, in this basin you get about 12 billion cubic meters of water of precipitation a year. Every cubic meter is basically a metric ton and the amount of water that will actually get into the rivers is about one quarter of that. It’s about 3.2 billion cubic meters. Now we owe half of that to Saskatchewan every year leaving us with about 1.6 billion cubic meters, but our landscapes are not average. We might average 12 billion cubic meters of precipitation a year, but some years it’s as high as 17 some years maybe as low as six. And those land uses require constant water. They need the same amount every year.
We’re already over allocated in the Old Man, and I think the old man is, it’s very similar to the conversation that we’re having in Colorado four or five, six decades ago. Everyone can do everything everywhere. We’re really smart. Technology will solve the problems. There’s engineers that’ll fix all of this, and billions and billions of dollars of risk capital get spent. All these land uses grow, whether they be mining or agriculture or people. And then you end up exhausting these systems, they collapse and now you’re not dealing with billion dollar problems, you’re dealing with trillion dollar problems and how do you undo that? That’s one of the things that really concerns me. Norm talked a little bit about climate change. I mean if you go back and look at the historical record in the old man, and we’re talking about being in droughts right now, I would suggest the last 15, 20 years, the precipitation has been relatively constant.
We haven’t experienced the kind of magnitude and frequency of droughts that has characterized this landscape since glacial IC retreated like 8,000 years ago. And they’re going to come back and with climate change, they’re going to be worse and we no longer have the glaciers and the headwaters that can help us. They’ve melted out, they’re not there. While we should be trying to figure out how to conserve the land uses we have and encourage them to use less water, we seem to have a government that thinks that we can add and add and add and add. And really what this is about is we’ve got to move from this mentality that everyone can do everything everywhere all the time. It makes some tough decisions. Say, “Okay, do we need food? Okay, yes we do. Well, we don’t want to be producing food everywhere, where should we and how much of that should be livestock versus vegetation?
Are we going to have people, okay, how are we going to position ’em on the landscape? I see Alberta as a house with a bunch of rooms and right now I think we know what we do in a bathroom and we don’t do that everywhere throughout the house. And kitchens have a purpose, bedrooms have a purpose, living rooms have a purpose. The east slopes the primary purpose is water quality and quantity. And this conversation goes back to before even Alberta was a province, we had the federal government and like 1840 saying, you know what that place, its primary purpose is water quality and quantity. Lougheed reminded us when The Feds passed the National Resource Act over to the province, they said, “Take care of Alberta’s water”, those Eastern Slopes, that’s its primary purpose. We simulated all these eight mines. Yeah, they can produce a lot of coal.
It’s not particularly good coal, but can companies make billions of dollars on it? Sure they can. I mean it falls into meteorological coal, but you are going to produce a lot of selenium and like Norm said, we all need selenium, but it’s very easy to be overdosed. And in fact, humans are much more tolerant of selenium than many other species of plants and animals. And Norman’s right about various cell mons like west slope cuts road trout, you can easily have too much selenium. You can’t get the coal out without removing the overburden. You have to literally blast these mountains. Now many people that hiked down in that part of the world or in the BC side have seen crow’s nests mountain. Just imagine it in your mind. You need 6.7 times the total volume of Crowsnest Mountain blown up and turned into rubble to remove the overburden to get at those coal seams.
And once you do that, you increase the surface area of all this mountain. You used to be largely like a monolith and now it’s fragmented into billions of pieces and you subject it to air and water. Now you’re mobilizing selenium and billions and billions of dollars have been spent to try and figure out how to contain it, how to extract it. Some of these techniques kind of work well in lab scales, but none of them seem to perform well at large scales and for the kinds of volumes that we’re talking about. It’s important that people understand that if all these eight mines go forward, we’re talking about almost a hundred square kilometers of direct disturbance. And Jenny, you mentioned the wide to wide, we have some protected areas south, the headwaters, we’ll call that Waterton National Park. We have some protected areas North of Kananaskis, but we’ve got this amazing landscape that’s moving natural capital wildlife up and down this spectacular area.
And these are charismatic megafauna that we all love to see. And there is some continuity. That continuity is probably 90% gone relative to where it was 200 years ago, but there still is enough there to maintain some of these systems. And just in the headwaters, the old man, there’d be a direct footprint of about a hundred square kilometres. We would destroy much of that riparian habitat that is so important to West Slope Cutthroat Trout. We would see probably about 24 million metric ton of coal per year. That’d take us to about 700 million metric ton of coal produced over five decades, which would require us to remove 6 billion metric ton of overburden. We’re talking about five or six times the size of Crow’s Mountain and it would reduce, it would produce about 2 billion metric tonne of CO2 E. I can’t understand how Canada could meet its current international commitments if Alberta goes after coal at that scale.
I think it’d just make it mathematically impossible. Our current government seems to think that Alberta can still be a dominant leader in production of energy, like we can coal and oil and gas and bitumen and renewables and all we do is get benefits out of it. No, these systems can be productive. I mean the great work done by Bill Reese and others has shown that we’re using about two and a half to three total earths right now in terms of resource extraction relative to the capacity of our globe to rehab our waste streams and continue producing these energy streams at any sort of sustainable level. We’re grossly overusing it. I think the people in southwest Alberta are understanding that it’s a very busy landscape downstream and their land uses are going to be in jeopardy and that we’ve got to start thinking as Norm was talking about a more holistic system. David has been preaching this well, he’s one of the few politicians that talked in this way going back to when I was a younger man. I think I’ve gone way over my 10 minutes though. Sorry for that.
Jenny:
Not at all.
Brad:
That’s what comes to mind.
Jenny:
No, that was fantastic, Brad. Thank you. I’ll tee off for you, David, since you had a little bit of internet issues there. What I heard from you is this is a similar scale to what Tech is doing in BC. We cannot look at that differently. Plus we’re going to have more winds, more ability for the selenium to move. There is no way to coal mine without removing the overburden, which is where the selenium is, and that over. This is something that our politicians are currently saying, we have technology to do this somehow magically next year we’ll present it to you and in the meantime. This is the real life issue that we have that we’re now watching for potential applications to come through the AER as they’ve mishandled this politically. The other thing I wanted to touch on is what you talked about in your conversation with Alberta Resistance, Bill Donahue shared that there are some papers that aren’t being shared, some papers that have been written and have been held back.
I remember there being talk about snowpack and coal dust and then that data just somehow never surfaced. I’m assuming that that’s related to that work. We know that there’s impacts from the existing coal mines, to add is insane. The other thing that norm brought into this that you’ve touched on is the amount of CO2 that we’re adding, as you said, in addition to where Canada is supposed to be meeting, but we’re exporting this. That’s what Norm added, that exporting emissions is also happening that we’re somehow not able not accounting for. And the other thing I wanted to say is methane itself, methane will be exposed from this. There’s an opportunity for more forest fires with this being opened up in lots of ways that will devastate Canada’s targets and ability to adapt from climate change. That’s my thoughts from what you’ve offered. Maybe David, you could go next and if you have some stuff from Norm you’d like to say before you dropped out, please do.
David:
Thanks very much. I heard most of Norm’s and half of Brad’s and was so impressed with what they’re both communicating. I guess in my few minutes I would like to tell Albertans just how much difference they can make by connecting with their elected representative provincially if they haven’t met the representative they need to. It’s hard to influence somebody if you don’t have a relationship with them, and that’s what we pay these representatives to do is to represent us and meet with us and hear our concerns. It’s very clear that we as part of the global community are not doing our part to move towards a much, much reduced emissions scenario. That means the people who are representing us are not doing their job for us. If majority of Albertans, and I believe they do want significant reductions in CO2, including methane, and if the majority of Albertans don’t want to see coal developed as a very dirty form of energy and with many alternatives that should be prioritized, including the clean energy we’ve all heard about, Alberta has fallen way behind in terms of renewable energy as a result of the Premier’s failure to really promote it appropriately and in fact interfere with the development of renewables here.
Those are all political decisions and I don’t think we can expect them to make changes if all they’re hearing from is the lobbyists and the corporate interests. Kevin Taft wrote an excellent book in which he identified the capture of our governments by the oil and gas and energy industries. And unless we counter that with significant input from citizens, it’s not going to change. We owe it to our children, we owe it to future generations and we owe it to our own sustainable economy, not to mention our environment that we make these kinds of changes that are needed. Thanks.
Jenny:
Thank you, David. That’s wonderful. Norm, do you have some comments with respect to Brad’s work? Thanks.
Norm:
Sure. And just a little further along the lines of climate change. Canada’s the 11th top emitter of gases that cause climate change. On a per person basis, we’re amongst the top three in the world and in Canada, Alberta is the second worst province. We are amongst the worst off, the worst in the world. One of the things that has struck me when I’m talking to people much younger than me, they don’t want to have children because they don’t see a future for the world. I love hiking in the Alpine but have been choking in smoke for the last five years and never before that. And yet while we educate the public and others about climate change, they see our governments and industry doing exactly what is wrong and how do you rationalize that to children who they see the news, they see the devastation, the adverse climate events, they understand that and then they see our politicians and our leaders do exactly what is wrong.
I think it’s disenfranchised. Many, many people certainly have experienced a lot of disinformation. One can just turn on the TV and listen to the government of Saskatchewan tell about their clean, sustainable energy based on oil and gas. And not to say that they’re still going ahead with their coal-fired power for the foreseeable future. I usually call myself a pathological optimist. I’ve become a pessimist and I think we’re killing the world and we’re doing it fast. It is going to be more expensive and more devastating, and I just hope we get some reasonable politicians and economic leaders in time so that we can save some of the world.
Jenny:
Thank you, Norm. I think the feeling of urgency and the pace at which we’re moving in the wrong direction is a lot to take. And like you said, the constant misinformation that we see in our mainstream media working against us from the Calgary Herald to the Crowsnest Pass. There’s a newspaper entity in the Crowsnest Pass that is from a longstanding coal family. There’s some serious misinformation from the community itself there. Anyway, Brad, do you have some comments back from what we offered or anything more that you wanted to add before we go into a round of summary?
Brad:
Yeah, I keep coming back to energy and we humans use energy at just a stunning level. There’s never been an organism on earth that uses the kind of energy we do and would’ve said there’s on a per capita basis, there’s no country on earth that uses more energy per capita than Canada, maybe UAE. And there’s no province in Canada that uses more energy than Alberta from my analysis anyway. And there’s no city in Alberta that uses more energy than Calgary. We are the worst of the worst, the worst. And everyone is focused on short-term economic outcomes, which is primarily GDP or my own individual income. And that whole economic model is based on continuous growth of our economy. And you cannot grow an economy historically without pumping more energy into it. We’re on this unbelievable treadmill of the only thing that’s important is economic outcomes and I have no problem with economic metrics.
Do a good job of incorporating natural capital. It’s a really shitty system that we have that’s very narrow. We need to integrate things like personal health and community health and natural goods and services. And if we did that, we’d see we’re being shortchanged. But if you back up, I mean once coal came, it was followed by oil and the idea was, okay, well we’re getting past coal. Well, coal has done nothing but just continued to increase through time. It’s never declined globally. Along comes oil and it grows and okay, and then it’s followed by natural gas. Well, that’s going to reduce our conventional oil. No, it just continues to grow. Whether it’s biomass, we use more biomass even, we’re talking about more trees now then we did 300 years ago, biomass has done nothing but grow. Coal has done nothing but grow.
Oil grows, natural gas grows, bitumen grows, and now we’re into renewables. It’s just like we’ve got to get off this treadmill that we need to find more and more and more energy and seek some sort of lifestyle that has an energy input that the earth has some ability to deal with. Failing that, we’re going to have much greater frequency and magnitudes of these natural perturbations, whether it be fires or floods or insect outbreaks. And evidence seems to be suggesting that some people, it’s really hard when your house burns down, you kind of think about that. People are beginning to see, and the insurance sector, which is way bigger than a banking sector is going, Hey, you know what? We’ve become a massive liability. People are beginning to realize that mother nature is damaging these quadrillions of dollars of infrastructure we have. Hopefully people wake up to that. We cannot continue to ride this trajectory of exponential growth in people and at their per energy use. It is a completely unsustainable equation. Might be 2 cents anyway.
Key Takeaways and Calls to Action
Jenny:
Agreed. Okay. I think this is a great time for us to talk about what we’re doing with some takeaways. I’m going to lead off and offer the things that I’m working on in this space so that we feel like we’re getting off this treadmill. I could not agree more, Brad. We have to put water and ecology at the centre of our mindset and let this energy growth model go. First and foremost. There is another AER hearing where we’re going to hear the outcome of the Grassy Mountain decision, I guess on March 4th. It’ll be at the AER office, which is at 250 5th Street Southwest Calgary. I plan on being there to hear the whole hearing and there will be a protest. Please bring a sign and come at 11 or 1115. We’re hoping to have a big group. We need to show, as David said, our leaders, that we stand against this action and that we do not support coal mining in our headwaters whatsoever.
And on March 3rd at five, I guess the Monday of that same week, I’m meeting with Chris Spearman on this show and we’re going to talk about the questions that he’s put out to the premier. I’m looking to hear a status report on what happened with his questions in the world of trying to get off this treadmill of energy development. I’m working with gentlemen Colin Smith. He runs the Land led Lovers Network and we’re doing bioregional organizing sessions. We’re trying to get people to start talking about landscape organizing and how to get back into this sense of community governance. With that, I’m doing some courses throughout the year, anybody is welcome. If you go to my website, thegravitywell.net and look up courses, you can see which ones are underway. We’ve got two underway right now and then one throughout the rest of the year, six of them in total.
But that is a way to build this self-governance, community governance, land governance, and finally spiritual governance is the goal of that work. That’s what I’m doing and hoping to bring people together in community and move us in a way that is towards healthy living. And like you said, Brad, we have to make those decisions about what stays on the landscape and what we are allowing to go back to something, to a state where we can all benefit. I’ll stop there. Norm, I know you have a letter that you guys are working on. Maybe you could start there and then I’ll offer anything else, please.
Norm:
Sure. My retirement project was really forming the Alberta Health Professionals for the Environment, which is a working group of the Alberta Environment Network. We were able to get the major health organizations in Alberta to join, except interestingly the Alberta Medical Association, but nationally, the Canadian Medical Association is very involved in climate change, as is the World Medical Association. But we did gain the Alberta Association of Nurses, the Alberta College of Family Practice, the Alberta Council for Environmental Education, the Alberta Public Health Association, Alberta Pharmacists Association, the National Group for Canadian Physicians, Association of Physicians for the Environment, Nurses for the Environment, Pharmacists for the Environment, Heart Stroke Foundation, Alberta Branch, and a variety of student groups from nursing medicine and pharmacy to join us. The premise was that as we asked these groups to join us, we had a fact sheet which outlined the health issues and scientific issues.
We had a call to action which indicated what needed to be done and our terms of reference. Every executive and board, whether they joined us or not, had to read all this material. One of the goals was to educate the hierarchy of these various different health organizations. That was fairly successful. The next thing we wanted to do was to get these organizations to educate their membership and for whatever reason, the public seems to value the advice of health professionals over those of other people as being more likely to be truthful. That did not work so well. A lot of these organizations are protecting their membership, but we encourage them to do what they need to do as organizations in terms of giving education sessions, sending out materials and those types of things. But we’ve got a lot of work to do to get these organizations to actually get more on board and educate their own membership.
The third thing, if you look at Alberta adults, they will visit a physician about 80% of them every year. We saw these visits as opportunities to educate the public by having things like posters and some of those scrolling videos that would provide education. Again, that needs a lot more traction. We thought if we had the health profession educated and the public educated, we could then move on to public policy and use an educated public and health profession to forward, we’ll say public policy to protect our environment. We moved rapidly to that stage. We have two policies. We’ve just released one complete ban on coal exploration and mining, which aligns a hundred percent with the coal policy committee report. We also, Brad may like this or not, but a need to markedly expand the green energy grid. And here, I don’t disagree with you Brad. We need to use a lot less energy. We need to move in direction, but we need to replace some of the energy sources we’re using that are killing our world. That’s where we are. Now, I gave you a rosy picture. I wish it was as rosy as that sounds, but we’re having capacity issues. We don’t have enough administration of support or other things like that, and so I’m hoping we can sustain ourselves.
Jenny:
Thank you for all the work you do, and I do agree, Norm, there is something to be said about being a physician and having the opportunity for people to follow your direction. I really appreciate that you’re using that ability to help educate people and help take action for positive change. Thank you for that. Brad, if you wouldn’t mind going next, please. Thank you.
Brad:
Yeah, what am I trying to do. To me, the science is pretty clear. Those people that want to learn about health effects, the data’s there. If they want to look at environmental effects, the data’s there now. Yeah, maybe 80% of Albertans are not in favor of coal mining, but very few of them seem to actually understand the issues and they may say they’re opposed to it, but when they have to make a concrete trade off between option A and option B, particularly if it’s about electing a government, they elect their behaviour, their actions are different than their words. Yeah. I’m a scientist that looks at land use and I think I’ve learned a bit about coal and very few of us, certainly including me, have limited ability to know how to convey these issues in a way that resonates with Albertans. I’m an Albertan so I can say it.
We are a stereotype. We epitomize the me here now type of homosapien. I mean it’s all about me. It ain’t about you guys and it’s all about today. I’m not worried about tomorrow and I’m only worried about where I’m sitting or standing and I don’t really care about you over there. And until we find a way of breaking through and helping Albertans understand that we’re living in systems, all these things have benefits and they all have liabilities and we need to start thinking about our kids and our grandkids and we need to start thinking about international commitments and that having more and more consumables and more and more money doesn’t make us happier. I mean, we’ve got lifespan growing in one direction and we’ve got health span going in the other, right? It’s making too many bad decisions and poor David, and I’ve monopolized his time trying to figure out how people like me can figure out ways of conveying stories to the severely normal Albertan who just all they want to do is look at their iPhone for eight hours a day and figure out whether the flames or oilers are going to win the game that night and shit.
What kind of pizza topping do I need to put on my pizza? The really important things in life, right? They’re just overwhelmed by these things and how do you wake ’em up and realize that they’re trading off something so much more important? And we scientists absolutely suck at conveying those messages. And I guess I’m one of those guys trying to figure out how to maybe find some other way of doing it. Maybe it’s these podcasts, but man, the severely normal Albertan is pretty bizarre mammal keeping me busy.
Jenny:
Thank you.
Norm:
Could I make some comments, Jenny?
Jenny:
Yeah, please.
Norm:
Because I really come from a different area of health. It was prevention and control of increased blood pressure, which is the leading risk for death in the world. And the groups there are highly collaborative working with each other, trying to get unified fronts. And this seems to have worked when you have a conducive government, something called a policy window. What these groups have done is really developed strategic plans and then under the strategic plans, various different policy tactics, and then get all the major health organizations to sign on. You have your whole sector saying this is what needs to be done. I dreamed that that would happen in the environmental sector. I would say when I’m contacting environmental groups, 70% of ’em won’t even respond back. I may have 10% that will agree to do something and they rarely do. There seems to be no strategic plan of what needs to be done by these groups.
No alignment in Alberta and Brad. I think what I’m attempting to do in the health sector, we really need to do right across Alberta sectors, get the bigger groups, identify the conducive groups, develop an overarching strategy, try to figure out where everyone fits in the strategy and then what the actual tactics need to be. That’s sort of my vision of the world and it worked in hypertension, but it seems to be not working in the environment, but somehow getting these people to understand that they’re a part of a solution, but that needs to be under a strategy and we need to all work together and figure out what we need to do. Sorry, my own dream and vision. Sorry.
Jenny:
Love it. David, are you free to offer some comments? Thank you very much. Norm. I see the same issue. I agree with both of you that we’re having this challenge of trying to…
David:
Can you hear me all right?
Jenny:
Yes.
David:
The key message that I want to give is that Albertans need to use, they need to tell their representative two things. Number one, I’m going to support you because you are standing up for what I believe or number two, I will not be giving you my time, my money or my vote because you’re not going in the direction that this province needs to go. We need to get and tell our politicians what we think about what they’re doing and where our resources and our time and money.
Jenny:
I got most of that. We have to make sure that we use our voice and use our dollars. And I think that’s really big. I saw on Protect Alberta Parks Facebook feed that somebody announced that they’ve donated to the NDP for the first time and they’re revoking their conservative party membership at the end of the day, money talks in this with this group, and I think that is a massive message. Thank you very much for putting that out there. David, with respect to the organizing piece, I could not agree more. This is a real struggle to try and help the average person get out from under the busyness of this world and realize that we need to try and get people to realize that this is up to us. We need enough of us saying, no, this can’t proceed. That’s the only way it’s going to change.
There are social scientists that can tell us this has happened 200 times over in history. That is the only way that regime change happens is when we as a people come together and say No more. This is making friends with our conservative friends, it’s making friends with our NDP friends and it’s coming together and saying, this is wrong. I love that core blend uses that expression when he is talking about this issue. There’s a difference. This isn’t left or right, this is right and wrong, and we’re moving in the wrong direction. Brad, I love that you spoke about Alberta being the worst of the worst and Calgary being the worst within that. I think this is a real thing that people need to understand is that Alberta is the center of this issue for North America, and we do need to take responsibility and start moving this bus in the other direction. The one thing I did want to add, and I put it in the chat, if you go to saveourslopes.ca/directmessage, we’ve got an updated action, which is to send a direct message to your MLA. So thank you, David. It includes that and it also includes the energy minister. I added Jonathan Wilkinson. Maybe quickly, Brad, I know we’ve gone a little bit over time, but can you speak a little bit about the federal government and their lack of action in this before we close? Thank you.
Brad:
Yeah. I mean the proper way of going about this is what we call a robust Camille of effects assessment. Look at the appropriate size, appropriate basins. Look at all players, forestry, energy, agriculture, transportation, tourism, residential, understand our climate and where we think it’s going to go. Because even if we stop using energy today, the climate has changed and it’s going to continue to change. Become very clear as Albertans about the supply and the demand, make them understand what we’re going to lose in terms of wildlife and their distribution and water quality and water quantity. Make ’em very clear about the benefits too. It’s not like there aren’t benefits. The question is how does the risk benefit ratio exist? These are interprovincial waters. The federal government has been asked to get involved and to either do or sponsor a proper cumulative effects assessment and they’ve said no.
And in doing so, there is no opportunity for Albertans to fully understand the system and what they’re left with is sound bites about whether grassy mountain exploration should go forward. There is a logical, empirically robust, scientifically defensible way of helping them understand benefits and liabilities. And so far, Wilkinson and the federal government have said, “No, we’re not interested in seeing that” kind of conversation. We seem to be lacking the appropriate governance and leadership to put good information in front of Albertans. I’m a pro-business guy, give me the right information and then maybe we can collectively make the right decision. And they have stayed away from the conversation itself.
Jenny:
Yes, thank you. Very well said. As I said, please use this. It’s a personal letter writing tool. It outlines some things to highlight for Brian Jean, I’ve called for his resignation over this. There’s been so much back and forth that this is exposing Albertans to potential significant lawsuits. And it’s lying. It’s lying to the public, and we need the federal government to support us. I would please add Jonathan Wilkinson as a cc on that and ask for their intervention as well. Okay. That’s enough. I am going to take you up on this offer though, Brad, to talk more about a broader energy discussion in the future. That’d be wonderful. And the same goes for you guys. I’d love to have you back in some other capacity. Thank you very much everyone for your time. I really appreciate it. Well take care for now. Thanks for standing up for Alberta. Take care.
Brad:
Take care.