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Wednesday 25 June 2014

Anti-shale Gas Group Continues Fight with Industry
Cole Hobson  ::  Times & Transcript  ::  Environment  ::  June 24, 2014


Jim Emberger is a resident of Taymouth, north of Fredericton and has been a vocal spokesman for the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance. He also led the Voice of the People Tour earlier this year and is named as one of the plaintiffs in the recent court filing against the province of New Brunswick, seeking a shale gas moratorium.

Times & Transcript: So you came to rural New Brunswick to hopefully enjoy a quiet retirement, but it seems like it’s been anything but?

Jim Emberger: I think that’s a fair thing to say. I would certainly much rather be doing other things (than shale gas activism). I’m a musician, songwriter and I’d rather be spending time in my studio doing this and also working in my garden that we have here in New Brunswick.

I’m by no means a professional activist, but I have been involved in things that affect my life. I think anyone who is not involved in things that affect their life is missing something. It’s kind of like not living their lives, letting other people make decisions for them.


T&T:  You’ve at times been characterized as one of the main voices of substance in the shale gas debate – with not a lot of information flowing freely from those on the other, pro-side of the debate. Do you feel that’s accurate?

JE:  It certainly evolved I think to being that. I mean obviously there are other forces at play here that agree with our position who aren’t part of the Alliance. We certainly got our first information from the Conservation Council of New Brunswick and it’s been a staunch ally through all this. The Council of Canadians and most of the mainstream environmental groups have had a voice. For a while all those voices came together in what was once a larger but looser – I wouldn’t say alliance – coalition, of like-minded organizations a couple years back under the New Brunswick Environmental Network, which hosts different kinds of forums.

They had a shale gas forum, we all got together as very different organizations and then people went their own way. The core group of about 22 community organizations (that comprise NBASGA) were more centered on this single issue.

Obviously people like Conservation Council have many issues that they are dealing with, so I think we remained as maybe the major shale gas voice because it’s our only issue.


T&T: If you’ve been called the face of the anti-shale gas movement, who do you think is the face of the pro-shale gas movement in New Brunswick?


JE:  To this point as far as I can tell, the government. I would say (Energy and Mines Minister) Craig Leonard and then a few people in the business community who obviously have financial gain to be made from doing this.

That’s all that springs to mind. There are some small pro-shale gas groups out there, they have a Facebook site, but I’m really not well acquainted with anybody for any group that has come across a knowledgeable spokesman for their point of view. I think it’s mostly coming from government and industry.


T&T:  Is it fair to label you as totally anti-development?

JE:  I’m all for the development of solar, wind, tidal energy, clean energy economies. I’m totally for the development of an industry here in New Brunswick that would start doing the retrofitting of homes and businesses and infrastructure to fight climate change.

We are going to have to use less fossil fuel energy whether we have climate change or not ... I’m only anti things that basically cause more harm than good ... I’m in favour of the development in New Brunswick of a local agriculture economy which is something we could also do in a heartbeat with some direction from the government to do the right kind of incentives. I’m in favour of a development of a sensible forest industry and not just cutting down all our trees to pulp them and send them off somewhere else.

There are all kinds of opportunities in New Brunswick if everybody could just get out of the mindset of 200 years of resource extraction.


T&T:  Put more aptly, is it fair to label you as totally anti-development of shale gas, no matter what safeties or measures are in place?

JE:  I have no problem saying that I’m totally opposed to that ... Like many people I have had an interest in energy issues for a long time, as I once worked in the energy industry. From my point of view and that of many people who are environmentally concerned, one of the things we said back in 2000 or thereabouts when (shale gas) first came on to the news that there was this new way to get natural gas, we thought, well that’s a great thing because that means we can close down the coal-fired power plants that are really awful polluters and get natural gas, which burns clean.

It’s only when we started finding out later how the process works to get this stuff out of the ground and how much environmental destruction it causes on its own, plus the fact they lose so much of the produced methane to the atmosphere – in terms of global warming it makes it worse than coal.

Then when you start adding that in, it became, let’s slow down, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. We started doing our research and the more we know about it, the less we like it. It wasn’t an idea of ‘it’s a new energy source, we hate it.’ Just the opposite, this has been an evolution of learning from the science.


T&T:  So do you feel there is absolutely no safe way to safely extract shale gas? Or do you more take issue with the methods used by the industry?

JE:  The way they do it now is pretty much the only way it can be done, that’s the reason why we’ve never mined shale gas until the last 10 years, because it’s extremely difficult to get out, it’s trapped in rock, there was no good way to do it. The current way is a good way to do it technically, they can get the gas out, but ... all the things you know that are bad about the industry are also the only ways you can do it.

If they could come up with some new way to get shale gas out of the ground safely without polluting the environment or making people sick and if that gas was then used to replace coal burning power plants and nothing else, then I’d say it may be good. But in the long term, we shouldn’t be producing any new fossil fuels, whether clean-burning or not, because as the scientists say, we need to leave 75, 80 per cent of all the fossil fuels we know exist in the ground, because every bit more of carbon dioxide or methane we add to the atmosphere pushes it further down the road to climate change. It’s already irreversible.

It’s the old metaphor of the big ship moving at sea, even if you put on the brakes, it goes on for a long time before it stops. What (climate change) we have now is based on the stuff we put in the atmosphere 40 years ago, we can’t just say we’re going to slow down a little bit, we need to slow down significantly and find other ways to power our civilization.


T&T:  Is your background in the oil and gas industry (as a regulatory officer for the Federal Energy Administration, a government organization created to address the 1973 oil crisis) what spurred you on to go forward with this lawsuit?

JE:  My experience was back in the 1970s during the oil crisis when there was the oil embargo and the wars in the Middle East ... That gave me a familiarity with the oil industry and how it works in general and what its bottom line is ... and also how regulations of any kind are rarely effective. Let’s just say I have little faith in the regulatory process for any extraction industry anywhere in the world right now, because first-hand I could see how the money and power of these industries basically corrupted any regulatory agency that was set up to deal with them.

In that sense I guess you could say that led me to the idea we need to actually get to the courts, because there is this history of regulatory agencies not being able to have any meaningful regulatory control of the industry that they are designed to watch over.


T&T:  The anti-shale gas movement may have gotten a bad name this summer in Rexton with reports of illegal activity, arrests and violence that erupted. Your approach to this whole thing has been different, as you’ve focused more on trying to pass on information through the Voice of the People tour and researching scientific studies, as opposed to standing on the side of a highway with a sign, blocking trucks and other such activities. Do you feel this is a more intelligent and focused way to approach things?

JE:  We’d like to believe that people of reason can examine the evidence and come to the right conclusion and that’s where we have been from the beginning as an organization. But when we say peaceful, we consider protesting and carrying signs and waving signs as peaceful. People who are willing to partake in civil disobedience also follow a long-held historical method of peaceful resistance and so we weren’t out there endorsing that as an organization, but we have no problem with that. It’s an individual decision.

You grab 100 people from the street and it’s just human nature you are going to get a few of them who are hot heads and who aren’t happy, especially angry young men with a lot of testosterone going who have legitimate grievances. We have to remember that for four years this has been going on peacefully.

But when large scale industrial activity is taking place, the people who were opposed to it felt like they weren’t getting heard, and when people get pushed, they push back. I’m not defending any type of violence. You can’t characterize a movement that way, but every movement has those characteristics in it. I don’t care whether it’s anti-war protest or the protest against the G7 or civil rights protests, there are always some people who will be violent ... Yet virtually every news story whether it’s the paper, the TV, the radio, you name it, at the end of the page there’s always a reference to Oct. 17, things at Rexton.

We’re talking about peacefully going to court, doing scientific things and (the media) keeps bringing up the fact that there were violent demonstrations, even though we had nothing to do with the violence. There is a characteristic too of it not being one big unified thing in position, that is people oppose it for different reasons that overlap and they also have different stakes in the matter ... It’s way too nuanced, I think, to talk about ‘well, these people are good protesters, and these people are bad protesters.’


T&T:  I notice the NBASGA lawyer, Larry Kowalchuk, is from Saskatchewan. How did he get involved in this case?

JE:  There are not a lot of lawyers in New Brunswick with a lot of environmental background, there hasn’t been a lot of environmental law done in New Brunswick and this was actually going beyond that. The way we’re approaching this is beyond a simple, ‘they are breaking this environmental law.’

The entire context of our suit has to do with our rights as citizens to have a say in things that will be detrimental to our lives.

So we heard of Mr. Kowalchuk and we checked him out through both public and private sources and found out that he was of like mind on the issues, he wasn’t just there as a hired gun lawyer and he has had success in arguing similar kinds of constitutional cases and at Appeals Court and Supreme Court level. We spoke to him and he was interested in taking up this cause, so it was just like a good fit ... We were mostly looking for someone who had the track record and who also had similar outlook on the world as we do.


T&T:  It seems it’s pretty easy for those who support the industry to ignore a protester with a sign on the highway, but it’s not so easy to ignore a court action, is that why this avenue was taken?

JE:  Exactly. Two things, the main thing, as you say, it can’t be ignored. There’s going to have to be a judgement, a ruling, and they’re going to have to be aware of all the evidence, so at least it’s out there. If we hear all the evidence and the people hear it during the court case and they still believe it’s safe, then at least they have heard all the evidence.

But the second thing is, I think right now it’s also important that this be done in the relatively neutral realm of the judicial system where hopefully there will be a minimal opportunity to spin the message and the information, and it takes it out of the hands of politicians.

We would love to have a political party get elected this September, which on their own says ‘we are going to put a moratorium in place.’ Actions on a moratorium don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We’re happy with that happening, but at the same time we don’t want it to be a case of, well, the next administration that comes in suddenly has a change of heart because there’s some money being thrown around, they say maybe we lift that moratorium.

We want it to come from a source, and have an action taken, that actually can be long-term and do what it’s supposed to do, which is to allow all the research to be done before making decisions.

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