See, feel and hear the land and the people of the Peace River Valley threatened by the Site C Dam.
Hell even the BCNDP, often beguiled by their inner 'union jobs vs. tree hugger' split, understands this angle. The NDP MLA, and Green Economy critic, George Heyman said that Site C must be seen in the context of the province's future need for food. Heyman pointed out that droughts in California have already increased the cost of produce, and the effects of climate change will only make this situation worse over the next 10 to 30 years."It's going to be harder and harder for us to get food from elsewhere as people focus on feeding themselves."
Every mega-project has its cheerleaders, they've always got big bucks to attempt to buy your consent through manipulative advertising and well oiled government mouthpieces. Queen Stooge in this case is Christy whose 100 year chant is meaningless because the banks of the valley are unstable so predicting how much they cave in and how much resulting silt will be deposited behind the dam how quickly is what scientists call a 'wicked problem' - basically the dirt people [sedimentologists] don't know. Queen Christy's 100 year projections are...as the 'dirt people' say unknowable.
Accounting is another large part of the illusion. The mega-project cheerleaders, and accounting braintrust generally, are stuck, they can't grock that an intact environment provides the underlying structure that supports everything, including their dream dam. for zero dollars.
The David Suzuki Foundation's report titled 'The Peace Dividend' is the first study of its kind that attempts to quantify the enormous natural wealth in B.C.'s threatened Peace Region. The study found that ecological services provided by farmland and nature in the Peace River Watershed are conservatively worth an estimated $7.9 billion to $8.6 billion a year. It concluded that the economic benefits of keeping the Peace River region's remaining farmland and nature intact are enormous, saying, "These ecosystems play a critical role in providing clean air, clean water, habitat for wildlife and many other ecological benefits that sustain the health and well-being of local residents, and contribute to the cultural and traditional ways of First Nations."
That's about $8.6 billion a year every year. But that's only part of what a really Green accounting balance sheet would include. It doesn't include the cost that a damed mega-project would avoid now by passing it on to future genersations in the way of pollution cleanup and degradation of health conditions. Every industrial activity all along the capitalist chain has a cost, a footprint, it consumes energy - embeded energy, it pollutes. Those costs are externalized in accounting jargon.
