For Ed Wiebe, seeing prominent ads claiming that “B.C. LNG will reduce global emissions” while on his daily bike ride to work as a climate researcher was particularly galling.
“What really got me was it was just completely blatantly false,” Wiebe said about advertising displayed prominently on city buses and billboards in Victoria and the Lower Mainland. “I just could not understand how they could get away with it.”
Wiebe wasn’t alone.
According to the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, or CAPE, “multiple” anonymous complainants believed the ads were misleading and asked Ad Standards Canada to investigate. Wiebe confirmed to The Tyee that he was among them.
But Wiebe may never learn the outcome of his complaint. He has been cut out of the process after another complainant leaked an initial decision, which unanimously found the ads by industry advocacy group Canada Action Coalition gave an “overall misleading impression that B.C. LNG is good for the environment, amounting to greenwashing.”
I may be completely out of the loop here so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t China making a monumental shift towards solar and renewables right now as well? Why would they need LNG when they have record amounts of renewables being implemented and an established Coal system.
They are, but you still need baseload. Solar and wind are great — when it’s daytime and/or the wind is blowing. Coal (and natural gas, hydro, and nuclear) can provide more scalable power on demand. These fill in the gaps for times when solar and wind production are lower.
But China isn’t likely to convert existing coal plants to natural gas. If they wanted to do that they could do it already — they have an LNG pipeline from Siberia. But instead of replacing existing coal power plants, China keeps approving new ones — it was reported last year they were approving two new coal fired plants per week. So even if they increased their LNG imports (they’re looking to open a second pipeline with Russia on the western side of the country), those coal plants aren’t going anywhere — with the rate they’re building new power plants, they’re not likely to be “upgrading” any coal plants to LNG anytime soon — they’ll just build additional LNG plants (and likely further coal plants) alongside those existing coal plants instead.
Coal plants can be fairly easily repowered to natural gas, which decreases CO2 emissions but more significantly drops local particulate emissions nearly to zero. China’s air quality is famously poor so this would be a smart move.
China still needs baseload generation and converting coal to NG is far cheaper than nuclear or advanced stack scrubbers.
I didn’t realize that converting coal to LNG was a thing, Interesting. Thanks for the information!