Researchers calculate decades of 'scary' Greenland ice melting



(File pix) Researchers have recalculated the amount of ice lost in Greenland since 1972, the year the first Landsat satellites entered orbit to regularly photograph the Danish territory. AFP/Getty Photo

By AFP - April 23, 2019 @ 2:00pm


WASHINGTON: Measuring melting ice is a fairly precise business in 2019 – thanks to satellites, weather stations and sophisticated climate models.

By the 1990s and 2000s, scientists were able to make pretty good estimates, although work from previous decades was unreliable due to less advanced technology.

Now, researchers have recalculated the amount of ice lost in Greenland since 1972, the year the first Landsat satellites entered orbit to regularly photograph the Danish territory.

“When you look at several decades, it is best to sit back in your chair before looking at the results, because it is a bit scary to see how fast it is changing,” said French glaciologist Eric Rignot, of the University of California at Irvine.

Rignot co-authored the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS),with colleagues in California, Grenoble, Utrecht and Copenhagen.

“It’s also something that affects the four corners of Greenland, not just the warmer parts in the south,” he said.

Glaciologists use three methods to measure ice melting.

Firstly, satellites measure altitude with a laser: if a glacier melts, the satellite picks up its reduced height.

A second technique involves measuring variations in gravity, as ice loss can be detected through a decrease in gravitational pull. This method has been available since 2002 using NASA satellites.

Thirdly, scientists have developed so-called mass balance models, which compare mass accumulated (rain and snow) with mass lost (ice river discharges) to calculate what is left.

These models, confirmed with field measurements, have become very reliable since the 2000s, according to Rignot – boasting a five to seven percent margin of error, compared to 100 percent a few decades ago.

The research team used these models to “go back in time” and reconstruct Greenland’s ice levels in the 1970s and 1980s.

The limited data available for this period – medium-quality satellite photos, aerial photos, ice cores and other observations – helped refine them.

“We added a little bit of history that did not exist,” said Rignot.

The results: during the 1970s, Greenland accumulated 47 gigatonnes of ice per year, on average. Then, it lost an equivalent volume in the 1980s.

The melting continued at that rate in the 1990s, before a sharp acceleration in the 2000s (187 Gt/year) and even more since 2010 (286 Gt/year).

Ice is melting six times faster than in the 1980s, researchers estimate – and Greenland’s glaciers alone have contributed to a 13.7 millimeter rise in sea levels since 1972, they believe.

“This is an excellent piece of work by a well-established research group using novel methods to extract more information from the available data“, said Colin Summerhayes, of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

As with a similar study carried out by the same team on Antarctica, the new study affords a longer term view of the rapid ice melt being observed in Greenland in recent years.

“This new data better enables us to put recent, dramatic, changes to Greenland’s contribution to global sea level rise into a longer-term context – the ice loss we’ve seen in the last eight years is as much as was lost in the preceding four decades,” said Amber Leeson, a lecturer in Environmental Data Science at Lancaster University. -- AFP




SCIENCE

Greenland Is Falling Apart

Since 1972, the giant island’s ice sheet has lost 11 quadrillion pounds of water.

ROBINSON MEYER

APR 23, 2019



NASA researchers burn leftover wood on the Helheim Glacier, 
which is one of the fastest-moving ice floes in Greenland.
LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS


The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second-largest reservoir of fresh water sitting on the world’s largest island. It is almost mind-bogglingly huge.

If Greenland were suddenly transported to the central United States, it would be a very bad day for about 65 million people, who would be crushed instantly. But for the sake of science journalism, imagine that Greenland’s southernmost tip displaced Brownsville, Texas—the state’s southernmost city—so that its icy glaciers kissed mainland Mexico and the Gulf thereof. Even then, Greenland would stretch all the way north, clear across the United States, its northern tenth crossing the Canadian border into Ontario and Manitoba. Kansas City, Oklahoma City, and Iowa City would all be goners. So too would San Antonio, Memphis, and Minneapolis. Its easternmost peaks would slam St. Louis and play in Peoria; its northwestern glaciers would rout Rapid City, South Dakota, and meander into Montana. At its center point, near Des Moines, roughly two miles of ice would rise from the surface.

Suffice it to say: The Greenland Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to refill the Great Lakes 115 times over, is very large. And it is also falling apart.

A new study finds that the Greenland Ice Sheet added a quarter inch of water to global sea levels in just the past eight years. The research, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, covers nearly 20 years previously not included in our detailed understanding of the troubled Greenland Ice Sheet. It finds that climate change has already bled trillions of tons of ice from the island reservoir, with more loss than expected coming from its unstable northern half.

“The glaciers are still being pushed out of balance,” Eric Rignot, a senior scientist at NASA and an author of the paper, told me. “Even though the ice sheet has [sometimes] been extremely cold and had low surface melt in the last year, the glaciers are still speeding up, and the ice sheet is still losing mass.”

The paper casts the transformation of the Greenland Ice Sheet as one of the profound geological shifts of our time. Scientists measure the mass of ice sheets in “gigatons”—each unit equal to 1 billion metric tons, or roughly the same amount of water that New York or Los Angeles uses in a year. Greenland, according to the study, has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972. That’s enough water to fill 16 trillion bathtubs or 1.3 quadrillion gallon jugs. That much water weighs about 11 quadrillion pounds. (A quadrillion is 1 with 15 zeros after it.)

More worryingly, the paper finds that Greenland lost about half of that ice—roughly 2,200 gigatons—in the years between 2010 and 2018. The ice sheet has also failed to gain mass in any year since 1998.

This melting isn’t happening at a steady pace, in other words. Greenland’s demise seems to be accelerating. Think of Greenland as a huge inland ice sea, surrounded by faster-moving ice rivers (which are glaciers) that empty the sea and carry ice to the ocean. The paper finds that those rivers are speeding up, carrying ice out of the island’s core nearly twice as fast now as they did in the 1990s or 2000s.


Read: Ancient Rome’s collapse is written into Arctic ice

That’s an alarming result, because it means glaciers might now be shrinking Greenland from the bottom faster than hot weather can melt it from the top. And researchers believe that bottom-melting glaciers are less stable and more prone to rapid collapse. “If there’s a risk of rapid sea-level rise in the future, it will be associated with glaciers speeding up, and not anything happening at the surface,” Rignot said.

The paper’s findings are stirring in part because they go much further back in time. “A lot of the publications [about Greenland’s mass] start in 2000 or 2002, some go back to 1992, but this is the first time we go back another 20 years,” Rignot said. Historically, most studies of Greenland combine data from radar flybys, GPS beacons, and laser or gravity-sensing satellites. But there’s not enough data from before 1992 to be useful, so that’s when estimates usually stop.

Rignot and his colleagues helped hit upon a new resource. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat satellites have circled the planet nonstop since 1972, imaging every speck of land on Earth every 16 days. This archive—which is a kind of Earth-science version of taking a photo of yourself every day for years—includes hundreds of images of Greenland. Rignot and his team taught a computer how to read those pictures of its icy surface, zooming in especially on the dozens of glaciers that connect the interior ice sheet to the sea.

“It’s looking at two different pictures of a glacier, before and after. [In each frame,] the rocks don’t move but the glacier moves, so it can compare and cross-correlate image points,” Rignot said. “Then the algorithm searches around the window for where the pixel might have gone.”

Read: Studying Greenland’s ice to understand climate change

The team ultimately used this technique to calculate the speed of Greenland’s glaciers from 1972 to 1992. Then they combined that data with modern observations of the ice sheet to estimate its historical mass. (They used a similar method to estimate Antarctica’s ice loss in a paper published earlier this year.)

Rignot and his colleagues relied on another new resource too: OMG!

As in, literally, the project is named OMG, short for Oceans Melting Greenland. OMG is a five-year NASA mission, started in 2016, to study how warmer oceans are eroding Greenland’s waterfront glaciers. Rignot helps lead it. “Thanks to OMG, we’ve been able to construct a [bedrock] model of Greenland that is pretty good under the ice, and is very, very good underneath the ocean,” he said.


Brad Lipovsky, a glaciologist at Harvard who was not connected to the research, said in an email that the results “seem plausible at first glance,” but that scientists would need to carefully check some of the team’s methodology. The overall story of Greenland, he said, is that the ice sheet’s flow is slowly accelerating. This “makes sense,” he said, “because it takes the slowly flowing ice sheet a lot longer to respond than the rapidly evolving atmosphere.”

Rignot believes that the new study should make glaciologists look anew at the speed with which Greenland could collapse. The ice sheet’s bleeding-out could eventually raise global sea levels by as much as 25 feet. So the key question, Rignot said, is “How fast can you make these entities fall apart?” The answer will matter to all of us. The surface of Greenland doesn’t have to move through magic to other parts of the world—already, today, its deluge is on its way.

Greenland Ice Sheet Losing Ice at Alarming Rate

The sheer amount of water ice lost by the Greenland Ice Sheet since 1972 is staggering.

By John LoefflerApril, 24th 2019


Pixabay

Since 1972, the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost the equivalent of trillions of tons of fresh water from its ice stores, raising global sea levels by a quarter of an inch in just eight years, and the rate of its ice loss is accelerating.

Trillions of Tons of Ice Lost from Threatened Greenland Ice Sheet

According to research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the rate of ice sheet loss from Greenland’s main ice sheet is even worse and more terrifying than previously understood.

RELATED: GLOBAL REPORT WARNS THERE IS LESS THAN 12 YEARS TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Using data going back an additional 20 years than is included in our current models, the amount of fresh water ice lost by the Greenland Ice Sheet since 1972 amounts to trillions of tons of ice melt added to the ocean.

Specifically, it has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons, which means that on average enough water has melted out of the Greenland Ice Sheet every year that it could supply the current water needs of New York City or Los Angeles for a century.

Unfortunately, the ice loss has not been spread evenly over this period. Instead, the rate of loss has been accelerating, with half of its ice loss occurring in just the last decade. The speed at which glaciers are moving the mass of the ice sheet out into the oceans is almost twice what it was in the 2000s.

Size of the Greenland Ice Sheet Shows the Severity of the Crisis We Face

Robinson Meyer’s recent report in The Atlantic about the newly released research gives an appropriate understanding of the size of the Greenland Ice Sheet and what we risk unleashing if we do not reverse the rate of ice loss.

If the Greenland Ice Sheet’s southernmost tip covered the southernmost city in the state of Texas, Brownsville, the ice sheet’s northern tenth would reach all the way into the province of Manitoba, Canada, with its easternmost reach extending to St. Louis, Missouri, and its northwestern extent reaching into Montana.

The center point would be near Des Moines, Iowa and would be nearly two miles thick. 65 million people would be crushed underneath, about a fifth of the US population, though that is largely a function of the inner regions of the state being less populated than the coastal cities, where large population centers reside.

With enough fresh water to fill the North American Great Lakes more than 100 times, the entire melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would add 24 feet to the global sea level. Even ten feet of sea level rise directly threatens New York City, much of Florida, and hundreds of other cities in the US alone.

Miami Provides a Preview of Our Climate Future

Here in the US, there is a growing awareness that the city of Miami might have to be abandoned within the century. Sitting on a bedrock of limestone, efforts to build sea walls around threatened areas will do nothing to stop the water, which will simply soak through the limestone underneath like a sponge and come up on the other side.

Right now, Miami is already experiencing flooding any time it experiences a heavy rain and the city is racing to lift the roads at least two feet above the high tide line, as well as require new construction to rest at least a foot above this line. Existing construction will need to connect to a pump network to control the flooding that crests over these higher bulwarks against the seas. All of this is coming at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars for the city of Miami Beach alone.

"There’s only 3 percent of Miami-Dade County that’s greater than 12 feet above sea level," said Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and an expert in rising sea levels and its implications. “With sea levels rising at over a foot per decade, it’s over.” By the end of the century, the entire county encompassing the city of Miami will be functionally uninhabitable, and they are not alone.

Of the 40 large cities where more than half of its area is at ten feet above sea level or less, 27 of them are in Florida alone. In New York City, 700,000 current residents will be underwater at a ten foot sea level rise. Hundreds of cities in the US alone will be directly impacted by a rise in sea level of ten feet, which is now guaranteed because of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The only question now is how quickly will we experience that rise.

With the acceleration found in Greenland, the same is likely happening in the Antarctic, which together holds about 200 feet of sea level rise between them. As the rate of melting in these two threatened stores of water ice accelerates, it ensures that the consequences of human caused climate change will no longer be a crisis for the distant future but places that crisis squarely within the lifetimes of those who are currently living. That makes it a problem only the current generation can solve

CULTURE

By Jordan Foisy

Apr 23 2019, 1:04pm

What I Learned at the 'Debate' Between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek

Žižek was less a cognizant thinker and more a pathological sacred cow tipper while Peterson was emo as hell, a bard for the reactionary elite.


Screenshots via YouTube.


It was 8 PM and I was at Toronto’s Sony Center waiting for the start of what was being called the “debate of the century” between Slavoj “I found this shirt” Žižek and Jordan “Why would I leave a good tip if the service was bad” Peterson when I overheard some terrible news.

“Excuse me,” I asked a kindly usher, "did you just say the debate is going to last two hours and 40 minutes?” He nodded.

As a look of horror washed over my face he tried to comfort me, “Since it’s starting late, they might skip some parts so it’s done by 10:15, but it is scheduled for 2 hours and 40 minutes.”

Two hours and 40 minutes! Was this a Ken Burns documentary about ruining parties? There were people in the audience of this thing who have had sex for less cumulative time than this talk would take. Specifically, I am talking about the young guy a few rows back from me dressed in a MAGA hat and a Joy Division t-shirt who was giving off serious “I got kicked off of Reddit” vibes.

Damnit, I had a plan. I wanted to catch Žižek/Peterson Mind Derby 2019 (officially titled “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism”) because I wanted to see Peterson fandom in its element. Who are these guys? What do they get out of listening to the aggrieved meanderings of the dark prince of YouTube? Are their sideburns wild and untamed or curt and efficient? At the same time, my brother was in town visiting and my beloved Raptors, whose playoff run is currently my emotional ballast, were playing. I was thinking the talk would be like an hour. I could swoop in, do a brief character sketch of somebody who spends his days playing Axis & Allies, make fun of Žižek’s slovenliness, and rejoin my brother for the end of Raptors game and grow our familial bond by screaming at lanky millionaires.

Discovering this talk was going to be longer than Infinity War (but thankfully shorter than Endgame) was not my first disappointment of the evening. I had been expecting freaks in attendance; squirrelly-eyed weirdos sporting t-shirts emblazoned with right-wing manifestos and deluded loners with wispy chin-straps and embarrassing necklaces. And sure, there were a couple of delightfully cargo-panted, amateur magician-types roaming the venue, but the actual makeup of the crowd was distressing for a different reason: they were completely normal.

As an acquaintance I ran into described it, “Everyone here just looks like us.” This was a hip, young crowd dress for a goddamn night out. Clear-framed glasses, nice haircuts, shiny shoes, baristas I recognize; this could have been a War On Drugs concert. There was also a surprising amount of dates. I listened to one as I waited in line; him imploring her to at least keep an open mind. There were fancy old couples, moneyed vampires recharging their cultural cache. This was not a gathering of scuzzy commies or crazed alt-righters, no, this was what passed for the Toronto elite: the beautiful, the educated, the privileged.

This isn’t to say there wasn’t something sinister in the air. As I was entering, a group of beefy dudes started wondering if there were going to be any agitators. One of them kept taking quick glances to see what I was writing in my notebook. While a fair chunk of the audience was there due to intellectual or, at least, ironic curiosity, the Peterson fans began to stand out. A huge tell, a friend noticed, was of course posture: ramrod straight as if they had just been rapped across the knuckles by a grumpy nun. A strange phenomenon is how many dressed like him; tie and a blazer, skinny dress pants or dark-washed jeans ending in nice shoes, pointy shoes. Peterson and his flock all dressed like I did the first time I went to a wedding after making a little bit of money, like, “Look at me, I can dress nice now, look at my point shoes.”

While many people were laughing and jovial, there was also a troubling seriousness amongst the Petersonhead. It was in the eyes, equal parts flat but vulnerable. A hollow anticipation, a readiness to be filled with purpose and action. Maybe they unnerved me because it was the first time I was witnessing what a believer looked like.

I took my seat. I had to ask a duo of men, the most common arrangement of people I see tonight to let me through. The were polite. In front of me there was a couple, his arm draped around her in an almost violent fashion, as if he was trying to absorb her. An announcement went over the loudspeaker informing us that any hecklers will be removed immediately. It was met with a roar of approval from the audience, the polite duo beside me bellowing along. I could only imagine the beefy dudes I met earlier cracked their knuckles at the thought of removing the agitators.

A man named Stephen Blackwood, a philosopher, defender of the private sphere and potentially an aristocratic werewolf came out to introduce the pair. Calling them, “towering figures,” Blackwood promised us, “Real thinking about hard questions,” and that’s exactly what we got, if by “real thinking” you mean “ego-driven meanderings” and by “hard questions” you mean Peterson not knowing what books Žižek was talking about. Throughout the debate, Peterson seemed like the kind of guy who purchases many an impressive tome, lies about reading them, and actually rereads Game of Thrones.

Outside of the reference gap, the contrast between the two could not have been more stark. Dressed like a John Wick cosplayer, Jordan Peterson sat in front of an open laptop and a field of San Pellegrino bottles, his legs crossed and fingers splayed across his chin, in a pose that seemed to say, “I’m thinking so hard right now.” When he spoke, he paced and bounded around his podium, his fingers constantly poking at and prodding at the air, or he would hunch over, his face pained with torment as if the marvels of his ideas were just too much for a man to bear.

Žižek meanwhile had all the grace and style of a 90s sitcom dad. Grouchy and slouched, a pale white calf permanently exposed at the bottom of his pants, I would bet money that there was a toothpaste stain somewhere on his person. He was also undeniably charismatic and charming in a way that Peterson is not (Peterson admitted as much, fawning over him at one point, by saying, “You are a character…it’s what makes you attractive” to titters from the audience around me). As his tongue darted from his mouth like some sort of mad ferret, Žižek won over the audience thanks a wily combination of Slovenian dad jokes, self-deprecation, and irreverence. The largest applause breaks and laughs belonged to him throughout the night.

There wasn’t really a debate. That would require points being made. Instead Žižek free-wheeled and riffed around a variety of hazily related ideas: the Chinese social model as a synthesis of tyranny and capitalism; how belief in God or a higher project or morality allow for men to do the most evil things; the occasional Himmler quote; how happiness should never be a goal; the coming ecological crisis that may also not happen because Europe has more forest than ever now; the scourge of political correctness as a sign of the weakness on the left; the cowardice of optimism and insurmountable inner evil of man. Žižek was less a cognizant thinker and more a pathological sacred cow tipper. His main goals seemed to be to provoke and get applause breaks.

But at least he said things that were interesting. Peterson, meanwhile, was completely vacuous. He played his greatest hits: hierarchies are natural; Judeo-Christian values and myths represent fundamental truths; capitalism is making things better for poor people; one of the West’s biggest obstacles is divorce rates going up. It was like getting a Economics 101 lesson from a man who tried peyote exactly once. He made ludicrous claims like no one has ever gotten power through exploiting people (this after boasting about tickets for the event being scalped for higher than Leafs tickets). He lightly denied climate change by saying the crisis, “...is dismal but not as dismal as the people saying it is.” He said profit is an excellent motivator because it discourages people from acting stupid, to a room of people that had paid for tickets (I saw some resale tix that were over four hundred dollars) to hear him speak. He excoriated Marx for ignoring the glorious labor that managers do. At one point he said, 100 percent sincerely: “To reassure the sheep, you invited the dragon into the house.” Will somebody get this guy a sword collection so he will leave us alone?

The biggest thing I took from Peterson, though, is that this guy is emo as hell. For Peterson, human suffering is not a product of society or economics. No, it is our inherited state of being. We are born into it; to be human is to constantly be warring with the evil that resides within us all and the pain that exists outside of us. Again and again he brought up the evil we must overcome. He continually reiterated a vision of life as a slog of sadness and misery. It was all very My Chemical Romance, I would not be surprised if he had a “Life Is Pain” tattoo somewhere.

Beyond everything, I think it is this Bert McCracken-approved theory of life that draws people to Peterson—why he has become the bard of the reactionary elite. If you are one of the privileged, Peterson is here to protect your glorious suffering from any agitators that would question it. He values your pain, it is as valid as anybody else’s. For Peterson, the only political struggle that matters is against your own personal demons. This view of life flattens everything and scrubs out injustice. Oppressor or oppressed, poor or rich; these are meaningless categories. All that matters is your reckoning with your beautiful, mythic suffering. It’s the most important thing, certainly more important than asking if you are part of the problem.

I guess this is all to say, I should’ve just hung out with my brother and yelled at sports. If I’m going to suffer it might as well be fun.

Final tally paints a picture of how Alberta voted

Elections Alberta workers completed their unofficial tally of votes on Friday, giving Albertans the first complete glimpse into how voters marked their ballots on April 16.

JANET FRENCH

Updated: April 24, 2019

An unofficial count of ballots in the 2019 Alberta provincial election is complete. DAVID BLOOM / POSTMEDIA

SHAREADJUSTCOMMENTPRINT

Elections Alberta workers completed their unofficial tally of votes on Friday, giving Albertans the first complete glimpse into how voters marked their ballots on April 16.

When it reconvenes in May, the legislature will be dominated by fresh faces since 45 of 87 MLAs will be new. There are 26 women and 61 men, leaving the legislature about 30 per cent female. There will also be five MLAs named Jason, all representing the United Conservative Party — Jason Copping, Jason Stephan, Jason Nixon, Jason Luan and Jason Kenney.

The count last Friday found 1,880,508 Albertans voted in the provincial election, which was a provincial turnout of 71 per cent. That’s a substantial jump in participation from the 2015 election, when 57 per cent of eligible voters marked a ballot.

Turbulent turnouts

The voters in the riding of Airdrie-Cochrane streamed to the polls, posting the highest turnout in the province at 83 per cent. Almost as enthused were voters in Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre, which had a 82.9 per cent turnout.

Least engaged were voters in Calgary-East, only 43.1 per cent of who turned out to vote.

Calgary voters were slightly more likely to head to polling stations than their counterparts in Edmonton. Tallies show 68.3 per cent of electors in Calgary ridings voted, compared with 67.6 per cent of Edmonton voters. Electors outside the major centres were more enthused, with more than three-quarters of those eligible scratching out an X.

Show me some love

Not only do the folks of Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre love to vote, they love to vote for Jason Nixon. The returning UCP MLA-designate was Alberta’s top vote magnet with 20,579 ballots, which made up 81.6 per cent of the votes in the riding, despite Nixon facing seven challengers.

Almost as popular was re-elected Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills UCP MLA-designate Nathan Cooper. Cooper was the only other candidate to earn more than 20,000 votes, cruising to a comfortable win with 78.6 per cent of total ballots cast.

Some Calgary candidates, meanwhile, eked out narrow wins. The smallest margin was in Calgary-Falconridge, where the UCP’s Devinder Toor triumphed over the NDP’s Parmeet Singh Boparai by 102 votes, or 0.7 per cent. Turnout in that riding was one of the lowest in the province, at 53 per cent.

Across town, the UCP’s Nicholas Milliken usurped former NDP cabinet minister Brian Malkinson by 188 ballots in Calgary-Currie. The difference was just 0.8 per cent of the vote.

The NDP candidate to win her seat by the largest margin was NDP Leader Rachel Notley, who earned support from 72.1 per cent of Edmonton-Strathcona voters.

Returning officers are now completing a second count of poll votes, Elections Alberta’s deputy chief electoral officer Drew Westwater said Tuesday. The agency will release final counts on Friday.

jfrench@postmedia.com

With files from Anna Junker 

Kenney election promise could spell trouble for in-situ oil sites

EMMA GRANEY

Updated: April 24, 2019

In-situ projects extract bitumen too deep to be mined, generally by using steam. They comprise around 80 per cent of Alberta’s oil reserves.

But Kenney’s pledge to nix the cap will change all that, making in-situ sites subject to federal review processes, rather than those of the Alberta Energy Regulator.

These pipelines carry steam to Suncor's Firebag in-situ operations north of Fort McMurray.

POSTMEDIA, FILE

Jason Kenney’s election promise to remove the oilsands emissions cap will likely have far-reaching consequences for Alberta’s in-situ oil projects.

It all stems from federal Bill C-69, which would overhaul Canada’s energy regulatory process and change the rules for project approvals.

In-situ projects extract bitumen too deep to be mined, generally by using steam. They comprise around 80 per cent of Alberta’s oil reserves.

Federal Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi told Postmedia Tuesday his government had assured Rachel Notley that in-situ sites would not be subject to C-69 — and therefore federal regulations — as long as the NDP’s 100-megaton emissions cap was in place.

But Kenney’s pledge to nix the cap will change all that, making in-situ sites subject to federal review processes, rather than those of the Alberta Energy Regulator.

Tim McMillan, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, is unimpressed.

The emissions cap wasn’t going to affect the industry for years, if not decades, he told Postmedia, adding the province is the best regulator.

“I think it’s inappropriate for the federal government to use that as a lever to put the responsibility into a regulator that doesn’t have the expertise,” he said.
Consultations continue

Canada’s Senate is in the midst of nationwide hearings on Bill C-69.

The Alberta NDP government had a ream of concerns with the bill, and both Notley and her environment minister Shannon Phillips took those worries to Ottawa.

One of their problems was the bill’s perceived over-reach into provincial jurisdiction. Sohi said Tuesday his government “gave an assurance” to Notley that wouldn’t be the case.

“(Notley’s) other concern was that as long as the cap remains on emissions, in-situ projects should not fall under C-69, and we gave her assurance on that,” Sohi said.

And if the cap is lifted, as Kenney has promised?

“Then in-situ will be part of Bill C-69,” he said.
‘Federal sucker punch’

Whether Kenney knew of the implications for in-situ sites before he promised to lift the emissions cap is unclear.

Christine Myatt, spokeswoman for the premier-designate’s office, wanted to know when NDP and federal Liberals agreed to a deal.

“It’s well known the issues with Bill C-69 go far beyond whether in-situ projects are exempted. According to experts, the legislation makes it unlikely that new pipelines can be built,” Myatt said in an email.

“The incoming UCP government looks forward to a productive discussion with the federal government on these key issues.”

Kenney has made no secret of his dislike of the bill.

During the election campaign he repeatedly vowed to launch a constitutional challenge to Bill C-69, saying it would prevent the building of future pipelines.

“Bill C-69 is a federal sucker punch to an already reeling Alberta economy,” he said.