Howdy. It’s been a while.
Those of you who know (or care) about what I do professionally might be able to guess why I’ve been otherwise distracted. I try not to subscribe to the cult of busyness, although it is fair to say life has been full. Rather, when working on something confidentially that is so close to my usual subject matter, writing freely became close to impossible. And if we can’t speak freely, well, what’s the point?
With that behind us, what a year it has been! Where to start? There’s so much to cover, from the eternal joy of US politics, the absence of any fiscal responsibility in most developed countries, Trudeau continuing to strive for Canazuela, the UK police using Brave New World as a guidebook, to the petri dish that is New Zealand. Then, late last week, a gift floated into my newsfeed…
Our friends at Greenpeace and the Sierra Club co-published a report titled “Permit to Kill” (you have to hand it to these folks, it’s a great name. Their PR team is outstanding). I’ll let them summarise it themselves:
· Direct air pollution from currently operating LNG export terminals is estimated to cause 60 premature deaths and $957 million in total health costs per year.
· If all the planned terminals and expansion projects are built, these numbers would increase to 149 premature deaths and $2.33 billion in health costs per year.
· By 2050, the same permitted air pollutants from currently operating LNG export terminals alone are slated to yield cumulative impacts of 2,020 premature deaths and $28.7 billion in total health costs, with these figures rising to 4,470 and $62.2 billion respectively in a scenario where all planned projects are built.
Alrighty. Sounds pretty bad, hey? I lived for several years with my then-young family around 10 miles from a very large and globally significant LNG complex (worse than that, some parts of it are… old…), surely, I should be concerned?
As they paradoxically say in the antipodes, yeah-nah.
We’re dealing here with a favourite tactic of the activists – apply the microscope to a single issue, become outraged, run around with hair-on-fire screaming that a single consequence is unacceptable, and demand that everything be shut down. It’s a technique they perfected during covid.
Let’s take away the microscope and open the aperture.
A lot of US LNG has been delivered into Europe in recent years, significantly exacerbated by the drop in Russian supply since the start of the Ukraine conflict. The Economist – not exactly a friend of the non-renewable energy industry in recent years – estimated that in Winter 22-23, 68,000 excess deaths could be attributed to higher energy prices. Price subsidies (largely underwriting imported gas) were estimated to have saved 26,600 lives. Without the ability to redirect mostly US LNG supply into Europe (which, as I have observed previously, was not without consequence), this number would surely have been much, much, higher.
But wait! There’s a social justice angle in the report, and maybe the authors are less concerned about glow-in-the-dark Northern Europeans like me.
OK then. The premise of the Permit to Kill report is largely related to the correlations between airborne particulates and health problems. So why aren’t they talking about the estimated 3 million deaths per year, almost entirely in developing Asia and Africa, attributed to indoor air pollution from cooking with solid fuels? These are exactly the countries that benefit from economic development – and can do it more cleanly with gas than coal, at an affordable economic cost.
Taking a selective frame of reference is, frankly, deliberately misleading from groups who love to scream about mis- and dis-information. I’ve walked through this frame of reference exercise with the Environmental Science class at Squamish Senior High School (aka the greenest kids in a green town in a dark green province), and whilst I won’t claim to have converted the room, I’m certain it caused them to think.
Now, I’m not denigrating the importance of industrial hygiene. Take a drive through the counties listed in the report (as I have through most of them) and you’ll see sprawling refining and petrochemical complexes. If you ever visit Houston, take a drive south to Galveston, not only because it’s an interesting place, but because as you head up and over the bridge by Texas City, I guarantee that you’ll be astonished by the size of the complex sprawling out to your left. It’s pretty breathtaking – literally. With the wind in your face, some of it stinks.
It stinks in a manner that sticks in your throat – and I’m glad this isn’t something I have to experience daily. I know folk with health issues attributable to a career around facilities like these, and we as operators of such facilities should be seeking to reduce harm.
However, it is unhelpful to cherry-pick new and relatively clean LNG facilities that happen to be adjacent to petrochemical and refining complexes an order of magnitude larger and two generations older. Such narrow-angle techniques should be slaughtered by the media… but when was the last time we saw that happen?
So, this isn’t going to get me a job in the Greenpeace PR department, but here’s my alternate pitch:
Reduce harm in the areas of greatest need (not the areas of political expediency);
Provide affordable energy so people don’t need to choose between freezing and starving; and
Use gas in preference to coal to enable health and economic development that gets (mostly women and girls) away from the wood and dung stoves.
Surely that stinks a little less?
Thanks for the big-picture, common-sense analysis.