Toxic Alberta: A few of industry’s self-regulated Wild Wild West style, infamous bitumen waste lakes, aka “tailing ponds”
@DrewYewchuk Aug 11, 2024:
On August 9th, Suncor submitted application 1953851 seeking permission to expand their MD9 tailings pit, raising it by 30 metres and merging it with the existing MD9 pit.
@TheFrenchWong:
Who do they apply to? Who governs this? This is an appallingly bad idea.
@DrewYewchuk:
The Alberta Energy Regulator. No elected official ordinarily gets involved.
I bet Big Oil Dildos Danielle Smith and Brian Jean, and or others in her Toxic UCP Klan have already ordered AER to approve it (just like they ordered AER to undo their “No” to billionaire Gina Reinhart’s too harmful, not in the public interest Grassy Mountain Coal Mine) and any subsequent applications like it. Big Polluters didn’t get Alberta’s greedy, ignorant, anti science, anti environment, extreme evangelicals to sleaze Smith into power to serve Albertans or our waterways and environment, they did it to serve the rich, get companies off the clean-up hook, and to enable more $billions in profit-raping (while intentionally destroying education to make Albertans dumber than dumb and destroying public health care (Ivermectin anyone?) to hand its $billions of our tax dollars over to Steve Harper’s rich for-profit health corp pals.
@jgailus:
Surely they’ll need to do a full EIA before the government considers their application?
@DrewYewchuk:
No, this is considered an amendment. A full EIA would only be for a new mine or a major footprint expansion. I doubt the AER plans on more than an internal desk review.I doubt industry’s self regulator will even bother to have a look. The application will get a lovely rubber stamp, as is standard industry “best” practice in Alberta.
Something I have argued for years, but realize I may not have said on twitter before, is that the phrase ‘tailings ponds’ is a marketing trick. These are not structures regular English speakers would call ‘ponds’. The mental image ‘tailings ponds’ calls to mind is deceptive.
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What is a pond? And why is a formal definition important? by Ellen Phiddian, July 10, 2024, Cosmos
Photo of pond surrounded by trees, Lagunas de Montebello National Park, Mexico. Credit: AmericanWildlife / Getty Images
What is a pond? What is the difference between a pond, a lake, a wetland or a swamp? The question need no longer keep you up at night, as an international team of researchers have established the first data-driven pond definition.
“The lack of a universal pond definition causes a lot of confusion, from people wondering about the difference between a pond and a lake, to aquatic monitoring programs with different definitions across governmental agencies, even up to accurately modelling global carbon budgets,” says Dr Meredith Holgerson, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, US, and co-first author of a paper about the definition, published in Scientific Reports.
“We wanted to evaluate how scientists and policymakers define ponds, and examine whether ponds are functionally distinct from lakes and wetlands.”
So what’s the answer?
According to the researchers, a pond is a small waterbody less than five hectares in area, under five metres in depth, and with less than 30% of its surface covered by “emergent vegetation”, meaning plants growing out of the water.
(This still sounds like a pretty big waterbody to us, but Cosmos is based in South Australia, where most lakes aren’t permanent.)
The researchers arrived at this classification by examining the size, depth and vegetation cover of 519 things referred to as “ponds” in the scientific literature. They compared this information to several dozen scientific and governmental “pond” definitions.
“We found that there wasn’t one definition that researchers all cited, and the definitions were often qualitative, describing a pond as ‘small,’ for example,” says Holgerson.
“At the beginning of the study, we weren’t sure if our research would allow us to propose a new definition that we felt confident about, but we think the numbers we offer are solid and a great jumping off point for further research.”
The researchers are particularly keen for more work on the borders between wetlands, ponds and lakes. Other names used for similar waterbodies, according to the researchers’ paper, include “reservoirs, oxbows, prairie potholes, vernal pools, lagoons, dams, puddles, and shallow lakes”.
Their definition did show, however, that there were key ecological characteristics that made ponds stand out.
“We looked at parameters like gross primary production, respiration, chlorophyll levels, greenhouse gas emissions, diel temperature ranges, and the rate of gas exchange with the atmosphere,” says Holgerson.
“Nine out of the 10 ecosystem parameters related nonlinearly to surface area, suggesting that ponds really are acting differently.”
While quaint, the new definition is far from trivial. Ponds emit high amounts of methane and other greenhouse gases, but their lack of distinction makes this hard to monitor.
“We may need to develop unique water quality standards for pond monitoring,” points out Holgerson.
“Researching and monitoring ponds can help us figure out how these globally abundant waterbodies function.
“There’s also an essential human element. So many people have connections to ponds—they have childhood stories of catching frogs or learning to fish in a nearby pond.”
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Lilypad Pond, Boundary Creek Trail, Yellowstone National Park
The horrific destruction and pollution in Alberta isn’t even returning the promised jobs:
How the corruption rolls:
