The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy

Updates from me:Good afternoon, I am Jenny Yeremiy, I’m broadcasting from Calgary, Alberta. I’m a geophysicist turned oil and gas liability expert turned podcast host and public activist. Defined by Mark Dorin: a person who stands up for citizen and indigenous rights and public safety then damn right I’m an activist. I’m here to create a better story for Alberta than one of pollution and populism by breaking through propaganda. We would not be living in this tumultuous time without it. Please remember to like and subscribe to The Gravity Well, your doing so helps boost the voices and views of these stellar people and important issues.Recall updatesThere are 4 recalls of interest rounding down: Recall Mickey in Calgary Cross; Recall Jackie in Fort Saskatchewan-Vegreville; Recall Justin Wright in Cypress-Medicine Hat; Recall Wiebe in Grande Prairie-Wapiti. Thank you again to everyone who stood up against this unconstitutional government!Recall Nicolaides is working on some data analysis for you, look to our socials for them! That’s @RecallNicolaides Shout out to all my recall Nico-laides, thanks Aimee for pointing this pun out! To get involved in phase two of the recall efforts, subscribe to Recall Nicolaides for now.PLEASE go to OperationTotalRecall.ca to support the final 4 campaigns. Also, BOOST their social media posts!The Gravity Well updatesLast week, you got a glimpse into my Calgary Citizens on Climate Change group, as Bob Sandford presented to us in it. Check out the episode titled Reclaiming Alberta from Water Bankruptcy. And I had a fabulous conversation with Wesam Cooley of Calgary Peoples’ Assembly, please check it out. We discuss the illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran in Reclaim the Middle East from US-Israel Domination. This illegal aggression is changing the global economic system dramatically . New limits are being exposed, fertilizer travels from that area and has been choked off. This will impact producers in North America. Wow! I am chatting with Seb Kennedy of Energy Flux on Monday about the changes to the oil and gas volumes before and after February 28th. That is going to be great.I also just concluded a joint podcast with Michelle Robinson of Native Calgarian Podcast. I hope to share it with you on Tuesday next week.Forever Canadian & Charlie Angus’ Meidas CanadaPhase two of the forever-canadian.ca is underway. Thomas Lukaszuk—former MLA, Minister and Deputy Minister for Edmonton-Castle Downs from 2001-2015, where I grew up—is now focused on re-activating, educating, and ultimately voting down Smith’s 9 referendum questions. Thomas and I had a stellar conversation on Meidas Canada, I am looking forward to watching it myself. Hoping it might be out tomorrow: Sunday, March 15.I am supporting the leader of the Calgary Forever Canadian volunteer effort, Janel’s been an organizing mentor, I am super grateful for her leadership. Sign up for the newsletter to get involved at forever-canadian.ca! I’m excited to see how this project grows!Water Not CoalBecome a canvasser with the WaterNotCoal.ca petition is underway. I have been bringing it around with me and now have a permanent signing location in Cougar Ridge, you can find it on WaterNotCoal.ca I am very much enjoying meeting the people who are going out of their way to sign, I met a wonderful couple from Drumheller on Thursday night. A shout out to Andrew and Jody, it was such a pleasure to meet you!The Coalition for Responsible Energy (C4RE)I have been working with a group called the coalition for responsible energy, you can find us by searching cleanupyourmess.ca. Mark Dorin has been increasing awareness in a big way lately. Firstly, Avi Lewis came to meet with Mark about the Reclamation Boom that Alberta is being held back from. Thank you to Avi for taking the time to understand the risks and opportunities for Albertans and Canadians in this space.In addition, Mark is making landowners aware of their right to address messes on their lands. Check out his conversation with Markham Hislop on Energi Media from yesterday.Common Purpose, Collective ActionI am co-presenting an Alberta Participatory Water Democracy (PWD) project with Colin Smith. It is directly related to Robert Sandford’s address to my Calgary Citizens on Climate Change (4C) group last week. Which I will get to in just a moment.Charlie Angus is a keynote speaker, and I am thrilled to be co-hosting a plenary, at the Public Interest Alberta: Common Purpose, Collective Action Conference in Edmonton, May 8-9.MARK YOUR CALENDAR: May 29th Alberta Day of Action!The goal is to have 1,000,000 Albertans on the street that day. This effort is being led by the Alberta Federation of Labour, please go to: Fight Back Now! - Alberta Federation of Labour, subscribe to spread the word and organize. It’s gonna be quite something!Jody MacPherson – AI Data CentersJody MacPherson, a journalist with a background in the oil and gas industry, is currently engaged in investigative reporting on AI data centers and their connection to oil and gas production in Alberta. Her work focuses on the Wonder Valley Project, a proposed $70 billion AI data center in the Grand Prairie area, and the Olds project, which is progressing rapidly. These data centers are linked to the government’s strategy to double oil and gas production, raising concerns about their environmental impact, particularly regarding water and energy usage.The projects have faced scrutiny over their approval processes and the lack of transparency, especially concerning water permits and indigenous consultation. Local communities have organized to express their concerns, particularly about the environmental and social impacts of these developments. Jody’s investigation also touches on broader issues of data sovereignty and the role of large American tech companies in these projects.Jody’s work is supported by donations through the energy mix and her Substack, where she provides additional insights into her investigations. She continues to explore the implications of these data centers, including their potential benefits and the challenges they pose to local communities and the environment. Excellent investigative reporting you won’t want to miss! If you’re interested in following them or the issue you can do so on Facebook search: Old’s Community Transparency Project.Jody’s coverage of this issue:Hidden Wonder Valley series: https://www.theenergymix.com/hidden-wonder-valley/Latest on Olds:https://www.theenergymix.com/developer-presses-ahead-with-mega-gas-plant-after-alberta-regulator-rejects-deficient-plan/Latest on Wonder Valley:https://www.theenergymix.com/alberta-municipality-bets-tens-of-millions-on-wonder-valley-data-cMore coverage on AI data sovereignty here (Canada is mentioned near the end):https://www.theenergymix.com/openai-calls-for-100-gw-of-new-power-each-year-to-secure-ai-dominance/The Energy Mix donations page: https://www.theenergymix.com/donate/Subscribe to Jody’s Substack newsletter:Send Jody news tips on Signal at: JodyMacPherson.64.Her social media links here: https://about.me/jodymacpherson.Caffeinate her to keep up with her grandson: https://buymeacoffee.com/jodymacpherson. Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

After I provide updates (see below) on the growing grassroots movement in Alberta, this episode features a discussion led by Robert Sandford, a senior government relations liaison for the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, focusing on the global water crisis and its implications for Alberta. The speaker highlights the concept of “Global Water Bankruptcy,” a term used to describe the unsustainable overuse of water resources, which is becoming a critical issue even in water-rich regions like Canada. The report co-authored by Bob and released by the UN emphasizes the need for Alberta to acknowledge its water management failures and to protect its natural water-generating capital to avoid severe consequences.The discussion also touches on the broader implications of climate change, with references to recent scientific findings predicting accelerated global warming and its potential impacts on water resources and weather patterns. Bob criticizes the current Alberta government’s policies, which are seen as neglecting environmental concerns in favor of industrial growth, and calls for a shift in focus towards sustainable water management and democratic engagement.Additionally, the conversation explores the interconnectedness of water security with food security and economic stability, stressing the importance of collaborative efforts to address these challenges. Bob advocates for a reframing of the sustainability narrative, arguing that the term has been diluted and misused, and emphasizes the need for honest acknowledgment of environmental realities to drive meaningful change.Bob concludes with a call to action for Alberta to lead by example in addressing water and climate issues, suggesting that this could also serve as a catalyst for broader democratic renewal in the region.Updates from me:Good afternoon, I am Jenny Yeremiy, I’m broadcasting from Calgary, Alberta. I’m a geophysicist turned oil and gas liability expert turned podcast host and public activist. I’m here to create a better story for Alberta than one of pollution and populism by breaking through propaganda. We would not be living in this tumultuous time without it. Please remember to like and subscribe to The Gravity Well, your doing so helps boost the voices and views of these important issues.Recall updatesOK, first let me update you on the recalls. The recalls are down to 6: Recall Fir in Calgary-Peigan; Recall Peter Singh in Calgary-East; our Healthcare Minister and MLA for Red Deer North, Recall Lagrange are complete;Nate Glubish in Strathcona-Sherwood Park; Recall Mickey in Calgary Cross; Recall Jackie in Fort Sask-Vegreville; Recall Justin Wright in Cypress-Medicine Hat; Recall Wiebe in Grande Prairie-Wapiti; and saving the best for last Recall Danielle Smith in Brooks-Medicine Hat). Remember to tell your Brooks-Medicine Hat friends to call: 587-448-8911. It’s truly a 9-11 situation here in Alberta as our government now looks to mount more than $100 billion in debt.PLEASE go to OperationTotalRecall.ca to support the final 6 campaigns. It’s getting harder with the aggression from the separatist agenda. Lots of women are leading these efforts. I am so grateful to everyone who took the leap with me. Our community is 30,000 people strong, and growing! You can check out my interview with Radio Canada about the recall outcomes in the substack post which will accompany this episode.Podcast updatesI had a fabulous conversation with Mary Stuart of Desmog, please check it out. Desmog is a global news organization focused on cutting through the climate misinformation machine. Desmog’s founder, Geoff Dembicki, is an Albertan and the author of The Petroleum Papers, which is being made into a series, btw. The book outlines the climate misinformation machine centered out of Alberta since the mid-90s using organizations like the Canadian Taxpayer Federation, founded by none other than Jason Kenney. When you consider his influence on our province please understand that he started in 1995 not 2019.Remember, I have the pleasure of speaking with Charlie Angus on Meidas Canada. Please check out the few episodes I’ve done with him already, the latest being one on Danielle Smith’s address to the nation, titled: RECLAIM ALBERTA - DANIELLE SMITH IS LOSING IT.We speak about Danielle Smith’s addresses and the many grassroots movement in Alberta! Like… Forever Canadian.Forever CanadianPhase two of Forever Canadian is about to be start with a new partner the Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta (ACFA). Thomas Lucaszuk and the Forever-Canadian.ca campaign team are now focused on activating, educating, and ultimately voting down Smith’s nine referendum questions. I am supporting the leader of the Calgary effort, Janel’s been an organizing mentor to me. Sign up for their newsletter to get involved! Water Not CoalBecome a canvasser with the WaterNotCoal.ca petition is underway. I have been bringing it around with me and now have a permanent signing location at the Calgary Waldorf School in Cougar Ridge. I’ve already had 3 people sign and TWO offer to get me a local lineup! Tons of fun, get involved. It’s very well organized! Again, go to WaterNotCoal.caCommon Purpose, Collective ActionI am co-presenting an Alberta Participatory Water Democracy (PWD) project with Colin Smith. It is directly related to Robert Sandford’s address to my Calgary Citizens on Climate Change (4C) group last week. Which I will get to in just a moment.Charlie Angus is a keynote speaker, and I am thrilled to be co-hosting a plenary, at the Public Interest Alberta: Common Purpose, Collective Action Conference in Edmonton, May 8-9.MARK YOUR CALENDAR: May 29th Alberta Day of Action!The goal is to have 1,000,000 Albertans on the street that day. This effort is being led by the Alberta Federation of Labour, please go to: Fight Back Now! - Alberta Federation of Labour, subscribe to spread the word and organize. It’s gonna be quite something!Bob Sandford–Global Water BankruptcyOK! Now onto Bob Sandford, I am so grateful to my friend James for introducing me to Bob Sandford. I first came into contact with James and Bob on World Water Day in 2024. He and Kevin Van Tighem presented together at a World Water Day Virtual Event in 2024. Highly recommend you listen to it, especially in light of Bob’s Global Water Bankruptcy report released in January.Bob is the Senior Government Relations Liaison for the Global Climate Emergency Response team within the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, joined the Calgary Citizens on Climate Change (4C) meeting last week to explain how the Global Water Bankruptcy impacts water decision-making in Alberta.This is the first glimpse into both the new reality, sustainability has failed, climate emergency talk has failed, we are now aiming to avoid water bankruptcy. I am super excited and ready for the mountain of work and opposition that is ahead of us. It will be up to you, dear listener, to convince the public to care about this.Before I share Bob’s presentation, I wish to offer my regret and disappointment to the people of Iran and the broader gulf region. The illegal and unconstitutional war against Iran will have drastically detrimental impacts on the global economy, the ecology, and of course supply chain for both food and water. Tune in again today at 5 pm MT/7 pm ET, I will be rejoined by Wesam Khalid to discuss this in detail. There is a LOT to unpack as I haven’t spoken with Wesam since May of 2025 before the 12-day war which we were told ended in World Peace. Not so much!I am proud to share this discussion with Bob and look forward to continued discussions with him. Please listen to the end for Bob’s heartfelt compelling call-to-action. Have a great rest of your day everyone. Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

In this episode of The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy, I give the week’s highlights in Alberta politics before sharing my in-person interview with Dr. Younes Alila of the Department of Forestry and Environment at the University of British Columbia. I remind you to sign your recall petition, you can find your Member of the Legislative Assembly at operationtotalrecall.ca. The episode also highlights the importance of public education, the teachers’ strike, and the role of teachers in political engagement. I emphasizes the need for collective action against government policies and the significance of using scientific evidence and indigenous knowledge in decision-making. The podcast is available on YouTube and other streaming platforms, I encourage you to like and subscribe to spread awareness of the valuable work being done in Alberta and beyond. Younes’s interview starts at ~24:30.The Gravity Well UpdatesI had three stellar conversations recently. First, with Mikayla Resists who’s been attending and sharing separatist signing locations and events to call out the misleading and treason. Andy Sytsema walked us through what Project 2025 is and what it would mean for Alberta if we were to fall to the USA. And Grande Prairie teacher, and former chair for the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s central bargaining committee, Peter MacKay on what teachers have done and continue to do to reclaim Public Education in Alberta. Please listen to those conversations.What we do in the resistance matters, it’s already making a difference. As Peter MacKay reminded me, the teacher’s strike prevented an early election in the 2025. The polls were suggesting Smith’s Government of Alberta was set to gain even higher popular support last fall. Those polls did not factor in the overwhelming public support for the teacher’s strike. They tried hard to villainize teachers but failed. Well done teachers. It is the time to be political, and you have rose to the occasion! Remember, Alberta needs a better story than one of treason and tyrants. I am proud to share the people, places, and plans to Reclaim Alberta. Join your nearest OperationTotalRecall.ca team or join The Gravity Well community.Minister Nicolaides Lashes out at City NewsCalgary-Bow MLA, Demetrios Nicolaides is upset with himself over his decision to fly the Alberta flag on Mount Kilamanjaro.As Tania Vanderland asks in this the City News article which set Nicolaides off, “It is curious to see him use this platform to raise the Alberta flag,” she says. “And it is also curious that he chose to do that as well on this Mount Kilimanjaro trip, which is a different issue that he was trying to raise awareness around.”The recall petition for Nicolaides failed to reach the required benchmark of 16,500 signatures by nearly 10,000. It was the first of 26 launched against members of the legislature in the final months of 2025. Twenty-four are against members of Smith’s caucus, including herself. Two are against members of the Alberta NDP.However, Vanderland says the failed recall bid wasn’t a total loss, as it led to political engagement.As for the flag, she wants to know why Nicolaides chose the one he did and feels, given he is a provincial minister, it is an appropriate question.“Why didn’t he raise a Canadian flag?” she asks. “Or was it necessary at all to use that platform and that moment to raise a flag? You know, I understand the trip was about his sister.””I appreciate Tania’s curiosity but Nicolaides feels quite differently. A letter (photo below) from his office explains he will make no further statements on the matter with CityNews. That they need to remove the story and apologize. Oh my! It’s important to note that recent changes made to family violence legislation in Alberta have increased the likelihood for more violent behavior by cutting the family violence death review committee. Remember, Minister Nicolaides and MLA Angela Pitt pay no mind to the more than 8,700 Albertans who formally expressed their objection to them as representatives of their constituencies. Many recalls are wrapping up this weekend, do your best to give them a final boost at OperationTotalRecall.ca.Take ActionAlberta is Canada, Canada is Alberta RallyAttend your local rally for Alberta in Canada tomorrow, Saturday, February 21. I will be in Lethbridge on Sunday to sign the People’s Petition against Neudorf as he faked his own recall campaign.Let’s bombard the CPPIB meetingI will be at the BMO Center on Monday, Feb 23rd at 6 pm. The Edmonton event is on Wednesday, February 25. The link to register for either is here: https://www.cppinvestments.com/public-meetings/.There’s a better story to be told by you for Alberta and Canada. Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

This episode begins with highlights from my collaboration with Charlie Angus / The Resistance in the “Reclaim Alberta” feature. In the latest episode: Charlie and Jenny address concerns about foreign interference and misinformation by the fossil fuel industry. Charlie highlights the importance of grassroots efforts to pushback against the impact of deregulation on the oil and gas industry. It is evident the resistance is growing.Andy Sytsema of Taking Alberta Forward, an online presence and community Andy built to pushback against “Take Back Alberta" misinformation. Andy shares a background in the oil and gas industry who calls for transparency and integrity in government and advocates for universal public healthcare, education, social services, and the environment. He researches and writes online often about issues that matter to Albertans, in this episode he shares information around Project 25: its connection to Christian nationalism and executive overreach in Alberta’s politics. The podcast also covers various recall campaigns in Alberta, encouraging public participation and highlighting the importance of democracy activism. The conversation concludes with a call to action for a rally celebrating Alberta and Canada, emphasizing unity and community engagement on February 21, from 10 am to noon. I will be at the rally at Calgary City Hall.This weeks’ actionUse this EcoJustice letter writing tool to send an email to your MLA calling for a public inquiry into the $130 billion oil and gas liabilities not dealt with. Demand a public inquiry to keep Alberta’s Polluter Pays principle alive. Add: “No More Pipelines” until the liabilities are funded.Expect a canned reply from your MLA like I received from Demetrios Nicolaides: Dear Ms. Yeremiy,Thank you for taking the time to write and share your concerns regarding Alberta’s Mature Asset Strategy and the management of historic oil and gas liabilities. I appreciate your perspective on this important issue.Managing inactive oil and gas wells is a challenge faced by energy-producing regions worldwide, and Alberta is committed to addressing it responsibly. Our government’s approach is guided by the polluter-pays principle, ensuring that companies—not taxpayers—are responsible for cleaning up their sites.Since introducing the Liability Management Framework in 2020, Alberta has made progress. The number of inactive wells has decreased by nearly 20%, from 97,000 to 78,000 as of December 2024. Industry is also meeting and exceeding annual closure spending requirements, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into cleanup efforts. For example, in 2023, companies spent $769 million on closure work—10% above the required amount.The Mature Asset Strategy builds on this progress. It was developed after consultations with municipalities, landowners, and industry to ensure a balanced approach. Key recommendations include:* Preventing insolvent operators from continuing operations* Ensuring municipal taxes and landowner leases are paid* Accelerating the closure of non-commercial wellsites* Supporting the polluter-pays principle without relying on public fundsOur goal is to protect taxpayers, uphold environmental standards, and maintain Alberta’s reputation as a responsible energy producer while supporting economic growth and good-paying jobs.Thank you again for sharing your views. Your input is valued as we continue working to ensure Alberta’s energy sector remains strong and accountable.Regards,Demetrios NicolaidesMLA, Calgary-BowHow should I respond? Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

In this the first episode of third season of The Gravity Well, Jenny provides updates on her activism in Alberta, including her work on recall campaigns and efforts to address provincial concerns. She shares her background as a geophysicist and liability expert, highlighting her transition from the oil and gas industry to focus on restoration efforts in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. Jenny discusses her passion for environmental restoration and her wanting to be working within the fossil fuel industry to achieve these goals.The podcast also covers various recall campaigns across Alberta, with Jenny expressing gratitude for the contributions of numerous volunteers and canvassers. She highlights the importance of community involvement and encourages participation in citizen assemblies to address public issues such as public school funding, coal mining, and public health.Jenny addresses the challenges faced by teachers in Alberta, including the impact of the Back to School Act, which restricted teachers’ rights to strike, negotiate, and work in safe conditions. She emphasizes the need for public engagement and action to address these issues.The podcast concludes with a call to action for listeners to get involved in recall campaigns through operationtotalrecall.ca to uphold democratic values. And to focus on water through the Eastern Slope Watershed Protection Assemblies to begin with to safeguard and reclaim public interests in Alberta and beyond. Here’s that great action you can take, feel free to edit and send to any UCP Caucus & Alberta MLA you see fit!Write to Assistant-Minister of Multiculturalism & MLA for Calgary-North, Hon. Muhammad Yaseen via: Calgary.North@assembly.ab.ca Dear Hon. Muhammad Yaseen–Assistant Minister of Multiculturalism and MLA for Calgary-North,I am writing to you as an (add if applicable: Calgary-North constituent or) Albertan who is genuinely frightened.I am watching what is happening in the United States, studying the steps that brought them to their current reality, and increasingly recognizing those same steps being taken here in Alberta. What we are witnessing south of the border is not sudden—it is the outcome of years of political decisions made when party loyalty was placed above the common good.I wrote to you or your leader asking that you protect minority groups—specifically trans youth—who already face disproportionately high rates of suicide, discrimination, and violence. I asked you not to support legislation that would strip them of their rights. I asked, directly, who the next target of the Notwithstanding Clause would be if it was used so readily against a vulnerable minority.You did not respond. Instead, you voted in favour of using the Notwithstanding Clause against teachers in Bill 2: the Back to School Act (Oct 27, 2025), which imposed terms on striking teachers: ordered them back to work into unsafe conditions without arbitration. Then on December 10, 2025, you voted in favour of that legislation I wrote you about — the Protecting Alberta’s Children Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 9, on Dec 10, 2025) — which invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield multiple anti-trans laws from Charter challenge.This is not an abstract concern. It is recognizing a pattern.We are watching law enforcement in the United States become increasingly militarized and brutalized against civilians. Alberta itself has a troubling history of law enforcement struggling under strained services and a lack of preventative support. Yet you voted in support of creating an additional provincial police force rather than strengthening support and accountability within our existing systems — through legislation such as the Public Safety and Emergency Services Statutes Amendment Act (Bill 4, 2025) and prior clauses enabling an independent provincial police service.We are witnessing the murder of protesters, the abduction of children, and the detention and deportation of legal citizens in the United States. And yet, when separatists in Alberta openly praised joining the United States as a “51st state” and called for legislative changes to allow an otherwise unconstitutional separatist petition to proceed, you voted in favour of Bill 14: Justice Statutes Amendment Act (2025), which amended the Citizen Initiative Act and the provincial referendum framework to remove the safeguards that had prevented such petitions from moving forward.At each of these moments, through your privileged position of power, you have voted in ways that bring Alberta closer to the political conditions we are watching unfold in the United States—and further from the safety, freedom, and democratic stability we cherish in Canada.You cannot undo the votes you have already cast.But you can still show Albertans that you are unwilling to let the UCP lead this province further down that path. Demonstrate your lack of support for separation and the above by stepping aside from the UCP caucus and party. You can use your voice to state clearly that you support conservatism rooted in democratic restraint and respect for rights—not separatism, authoritarianism, or governance by override. Not the pollution of our drinking water, not an Alberta Police Force. Not the stripping of our Canadian Pension Plans. Reinstate the rights of municipalities and restore their funding. Redirect fossil fuel funding towards public schools and hospitals.You can resign in honour, sending a message to your party that these are not the values you—or your Calgary-North constituents—stand for.I am asking you, sincerely and urgently, to stand up for us so that Alberta does not become the 51st state, by name or by nature. Look to the state of Puerto Rico to know what this will look like for Alberta and Canada by extension.Truly,Jenny Yeremiy, P. Geoph and Calgary-Bow, Alberta, Canada resident and citizen.Adapted from Julietta Sorensen Kass’s letter issued to you. Cc Premier of Alberta | UCP Leader Smith Premier@gov.ab.ca Cc MLA for | NDP Leader Nenshi edmonton.strathcona@assembly.ab.ca & Nenshi@albertandp.ca Cc MLA for Airdrie-West | APTP Leader Guthrie airdrie.cochrane@assembly.ab.ca & info@albertaparty.ca Cc Your MLA for Calgary-Bow | Education Minister Nicolaides Calgary.Bow@assembly.ab.ca Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

This episode features Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, who has focused his career on understanding air pollution and climate problems and developing renewable energy solutions. Jacobson criticizes carbon capture technology, arguing it increases CO2 emissions and air pollution, and is primarily used to justify continued fossil fuel development. He advocates for a transition to 100% renewable energy, which could reduce world energy demand by 54% and eliminate a significant number of air pollution-related deaths.Jacobson highlights the inefficiency and high costs of carbon capture compared to renewable energy solutions, which offer greater health, environmental, and economic benefits. He also addresses concerns about the mining required for renewable technologies, noting that it is significantly less than that for fossil fuels. The transition to renewables is feasible and beneficial, particularly in resource-rich countries like Canada. Jenny adds that ecological services need to be restored to genuinely reduce carbon emissions and address water and land contamination and degradation, with renewable and battery technology deployment. Want this, fellow Canadian, as the alternative is clearly a lie.Introduction to Stanford University Professor Mark JacobsonJenny (00:05):Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast with me, Jenny Yeremiy. I host The Gravity Well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 and Metis districts 5 and 6. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples are created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature, and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide The Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of The Gravity Well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The Gravity Well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see and hear, remember to like and subscribe.Good afternoon, everyone. Today’s interview is very meaningful to me. I’ve mentioned on several occasions now that I worked as a geophysicist and liability expert in the oil and gas industry in Alberta for over 20 years. I worked in the office next to the individual who is credited with the birth of the Pathways Alliance. The Pathways Alliance is a project intended to offer mitigation for CO2 emissions to justify future fossil fuel development in Canada. It’s the biggest project of its kind in terms of concept and justifies things like LNG and Oil Sands development plans. On that note, I am thrilled to be having a discussion with Professor Mark Jacobson today of Stanford University. Welcome to the stage, Mark.Mark (02:12):Hi, Jenny. Thanks for having me on.Jenny (02:14):Yeah, thank you so much. As I was saying off stage, I have to go through an extensive introduction of Mark, bear with me, Mark as I do so. Mark Jacobson has been a professor at Stanford University since 1994. His research has crossed two fields, atmospheric science and energy. Mark’s career has focused on better understanding air pollution and climate problems, and developing large scale clean renewable energy solutions to them. He’s developed and applied three computer models: atmosphere, biosphere and ocean, and has used their simulations to understand air pollution, weather, climate, and renewable energy systems. He’s developed roadmap maps to transitions in countries, states, and cities towards a hundred percent clean renewable energy. Mark has also published 191 peer reviewed journals and articles. He’s given over 800 talks. He founded and has directed the Atmospheric Energy Program at Stanford. He’s published seven books. Four of those are related to atmospheric work, and the last three are related to his energy work. And based on all of this, Mark is ranked as number six in terms of publication since 1980. Wow. Thank you so much, Mark, for taking the time to be with me today.Mark (03:32):Yeah, thanks for having me on.Jenny (03:34):Yeah, if you don’t mind, actually, I didn’t mention off stage, but I’d love to hear a little bit of what brought you into this work. What’s been your journey to this? A lot of people will say it’s just a love of nature or whatever. What brought you into the climate field? Can you say?Mark (03:50):Well, when I was a kid, when I was playing tennis, I travelled to Los Angeles and San Diego, and especially in San Diego, the air pollution was so bad. I thought, why should people live like this? I wanted to solve that problem ever since then. And I focused my studies and my research on doing that. For the last 36 years as a scientist, I’ve been trying to understand and solve large scale air pollution and climate problems through clean renewable energy. Part of my work has been to understand the problems. That’s where computer model development came in. And then overlapping the last 25 years now, I’ve been trying to solve the problems. When you’re looking at solutions, I mean, I first look at carbon capture back in 2008, and nothing’s really changed since then except it’s been implemented. Trying the policies, trying to implement it have been expanded a bit, but no actual benefit because as I’ll talk about, carbon capture only increases carbon dioxide. It should be called carbon release, not carbon capture. No kidding.Jenny (05:01):Yeah. I was saying to you, I also have had exposure since that time about, actually, I worked two fields in Canada that doing what we called CO2 flooding at the time. That’s what we would call carbon capture utilization and storage, I suppose. But we would see breakthrough, what we would call breakthrough from one well to another instantly, almost within a week. To me, the idea of capturing this carbon and sequestering it long-term is not a practical solution. Rather, the site cleanup and storage or cleanup and closure of sites would do both things. Well, actually three things, as you were mentioning with the water system, the land system, and the air pollution all in one. Anyway, that’s how I came into this work as well, Mark. Let’s start with why are we talking about carbon capture and storage? If you can just remind people what was the intention of this technology to do in terms of justifying new fossil fuel development, let’s say?The Justification for Carbon Capture and Storage (Hint: there isn’t one)Mark (06:04):Well, the justification was that, well, really it’s fossil fuel companies wanted to keep their fuels moving, being sold. And because of all the policies that were being put in place, they had to come up with a way to keep doing that and also pretend to keep selling fossil fuels, but then pretend as if they’re actually helping to solve the problem. They came up with this idea carbon capture, where you add equipment to, let’s say a coal plant to where the carbon dioxide emitted from the coal plant gets absorbed and then basically captured as a gas, and then that CO2 is compressed and put in a pipeline and then piped somewhere. In theory, they were saying most of it would be piped for storage and be put underground and stored forever. In reality, 82% of all their carbon captured worldwide to date has been used to just drill for more oil through what’s called enhanced oil recovery, where the carbon dioxide is piped to a nearby oil field. The CO2 is then mixed with the oil, it bonds with the oil, makes the oil less dense, more of it floats to the surface faster. And for every ton of carbon dioxide, you get a couple more barrels of oil.Even if you’re just that process alone, by the way, 30 to 40% of the CO2 captured during this enhanced oil recovery process is released right back to the air during the enhanced oil recovery process. And then the additional barrels of oil you get, depending on whether they replace existing oil or their new oil, there’s 20 to 80% more of the CO2 gets released to the air by burning this oil. You end up with 50 to 130% of the CO2 captured just going back to the air just from enhanced oil recovery, which I, again, 82% of all the CO2, that’s what happens to it. Right there, you’re having no benefit. And that’s not even the worst part of it, which we’ll probably talk about later. I’m just saying right off the get go, it’s a useless technology that is only designed to keep the fossil fuel industry going. There’s no benefit whatsoever to humankind.Jenny (08:33):Right. Thank you so much. Yeah, we would call that tertiary production. That’s what we refer to it in the industry is when you’ve got, you can do just regular primary production and then you can do water flood production, which is what we’d call secondary enhanced and then enhanced, sorry, being the third that CO2 injection, whether you’re doing natural gas flooding or CO2 flooding or Yeah, that’s basically the two that I’ve been involved in. But yeah, and like I said, in all of those cases, you’re right, I’ve only been involved in where we’re using it to produce more production. We’re not actually using it to store it and be able to know that that’s being stored long-term. And the other thing, if we can, since we have a little time, I want to talk a bit about the impacts of CO2 and other, let’s call it contaminants in the natural gas system, which causes actual risks to pipelines, et cetera, from erosion. And there needs to be, or yeah, corrosion I should be saying in those pipelines based on these additives, if you will.Mark (09:43):Well, with the carbon capture, the things they add a whole set of new pipelines. And for example, there was a proposal to add carbon capture equipment to ethanol refineries in the upper Midwest in the US to a few dozen ethanol refineries. And then once they capture that CO2, what do they do with it? Well, they were going to build like 2,500 miles of pipelines, CO2 pipelines, just to carry the CO2 to some in North Dakota. And first of all, aside from the fact that you’ve got to build these pipelines, you’ve got to invade people’s land to put the pipelines in, and farmers don’t want pipelines in. It is like an invasive thing. They have to go through thousands or hundreds to thousands of individual homeowners and landowners to try to get them to agree to put a pipeline. And if they don’t want to agree, then they’re trying to get a forced court order to do this.It’s really an invasive process too, and it’s just crisscrossing this pretty landscape with these pipelines, and then you need more energy. I mean, the main problem with carbon capture, aside from the fact that most of it’s used for enhanced oil recovery, which is just ridiculous in the first place, is that it increases CO2 and air pollution and fossil mining and fossil infrastructure and worsens people’s health and increases cost of energy for everybody. You might ask, well, how does capturing carbon increase carbon dioxide? Well, it’s really simple. You need energy to run capture equipment and to run the CO2 through pipelines and compress it. And it’s so much energy. It’s about 25% of the energy of a coal plant is needed to add carbon capture to a coal plant. So that means if you add carbon capture to a coal plant, you need 25% more coal.And when you have 25% more coal, you’re burned 25% more coal, and you have 25% more air pollution. Right away you have more air pollution and you have more mining of coal, and the cost of this equipment is high and it’s going to be passed on to customers. For example, there was only one coal plant in the US where carbon capture was added, and that was in Thompson, Texas called the Petra Nova Project, and that cost 1 billion for the carbon capture equipment. And what did they do to provide the energy for the capture equipment for the coal plant? They built a gas plant to run the capture equipment for the coal plant. You have to imagine how ridiculous this is. They not only built a gas plant next door to the coal plant, then they have to build pipelines to pipe the gas.They have to mine the gas. There’s leaks of methane. They’re burning gas while they’re to produce electricity for the running, the capture equipment. None of that CO2 is captured by the way, just gets released to the air. None of the methane that is captured, none of the coal mining emissions are captured, including leaked methane, including the combustion emissions. You have all this pollution continuing and you have more pollution now because you’re burning gas now and mining the gas, and you have the CO2 that’s being emitted, and plus the methane equivalent of CO2 that’s being emitted is right there virtually the same as the CO2 that’s captured. You’re really doing nothing. In fact, some people say, well, why not just use wind or solar to run the capture equivalent? Then you’re not emitting anything. Well fact you’re up or you are emitting because that’s the best case.Let’s say you use wind or solar, that means that the wind or solar cannot replace the coal plant. If you have wind or solar to run carbon capture equipment, why wouldn’t you use that wind and solar just to replace the coal plants in the first place? It turns out that you can eliminate more CO2 by using the exact same amount of wind or solar that would run the capture equipment just to replace a portion of the coal plant, and you’ll reduce more CO2. By not using that wind or solar to replace the coal plant, you’re actually then increasing CO2 because you’re using it for a lower carbon purpose. And plus, if you use wind or solar to replace the coal plant, you eliminate the air pollution from the coal plant. Whereas if you use carbon capture equipment, you just keep that air pollution from the coal plant. If you use wind and solar to replace the coal plant, you eliminate the mining of coal. If you use carbon capture, you maintain the mining of the coal.And then if you use wind and solar and eliminate the coal plant, wind and solar are now cheaper than coal. You reduce your cost. If you use carbon capture, you not only have to pay for the wind and solar on top of the coal plant, but you have to pay for the capture equipment. In this plant in Thompson, Texas, it costs 1 billion to add the gas plant and the carbon capture equipment to the coal plant. Who pays that $1 billion? Well, and by the way, this plant was shut after three years because there was so many. And all the CO2 that I was captured was sent for enhanced oil recovery, by the way. Who pays over three years that billion dollars? Well, it’s rate payers, and who pays the highest fraction of their income for electricity? It’s low income rate payers. It’s low income rate payers that are saddled with these huge bills for carbon capture equipment and the pipelines and the energy requirements for it. It’s just a complete ridiculous scam. I mean, it’s a scam that pretending as if they’re doing somethingJenny (15:38):Right. Yeah. I heard it’s justifying demand because you’re expanding and therefore you need this demand. It’s increasing mining. It’s not actually getting all the emissions. The other thing, I don’t know if you like this analogy, but I’ve been saying, you’re having people increase smoking and you’re just capturing the secondhand smoke. I think that’s a fair analogy. Yes.Mark (16:04):Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Yeah.Natural Gas is Worse than CoalJenny (16:07):And then to justify. If you could expand a little bit on the gas piece, because like I said, I’m a geophysicist and I feel like sometimes it’s easy to lose the plot in the lies that are spread around. For example, I remember talking about this natural gas transition. One of the things that’s talked a lot about in Canada is LNG is a clean energy, not clean, sorry, green energy solution. To me, when I think back on it now, as you were just describing, we have all of this leakage between, well, first of all, you have to actually drill the wells, and then you have a bunch of emissions that are associated with that. Then you have leakage from the wells themselves. You have leakage from the pipelines, you have leakage from the transport systems. And the only place where you’re actually potentially capturing emissions is from the stack itself at those facilities, correct?Mark (16:59):Yeah. Well, when you have gas or coal or oil, you’re mining and especially gas, which has mostly methane, it’s like 90% methane, and methane is like the third leading cause of global warming. But per unit mass, it’s actually on a 20 year timescale. It’s like over 80 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide. The average methane. It’s not only leaks, it’s forced emissions. I mean, the word leaks is kind of a misnomer. I mean, there are leaks, but they’re also gas companies will release methane intentionally or gas intentionally into the air, either through flaring or just releases to relieve pressure on the pipelines anyway, the average leakage rate across all types of gas mining is around three and a half percent, and it’s up some places up to nine, 10%. Other places it might be 2%, but it’s like on average it’s around three point half percent.(17:59):And that’s a lot of methane that’s coming out and never going to be captured. And you need, if you’re using gas, for example, to run capture equipment through by creating electricity or something, then you’re going to be mining more gas, and you’re going to have more leaks, and you’re not capturing that. That just goes into the equation of why this is useless. It’s not actually helping anything. And the CO2 that is captured, first of all, the industry claims, oh, they get 95% capture rates of the CO2, and that just has never occurred anywhere. In reality, the real life, in theory, with perfect conditions, you could get 95%, but all real projects across all capture types is the range is 10 to 80%. The capture rate, it’s because sometimes they capture equipment is off, sometimes it’s down. Sometimes they can’t move the CO2, they turn it, they don’t actually capture anything for a while.(18:57):And a lot of them, half of them are less than 50%. You have really low capture rates. First of all, not high capture rates, lots of huge amounts of leaks upstream that are never accounted for, big energy penalty to run the capture equipment. But again, in the best case, you’re using renewables. You don’t even have these mining. In the best case of using renewables, you are preventing the renewables from replacing a coal or gas plant. And by doing that, you actually then increase CO2. You’re always increasing CO2. Carbon capture always increases CO2, no matter what they’re capturing from the stack, because they’re pretending as if the energy they’re using couldn’t be used better for something else.(19:42):And it’s like when you just draw your boundaries very narrowly, you get one result that you then try to advertise, but that’s not actually what’s happening. In reality, what’s happening is now you can’t use that wind or solar to replace fossil fuel source. It’s the same thing with direct air capture. When you’re using clean renewable energy to power, direct air capture, you’re just creating a new demand for energy that would otherwise not be there. Now you’re just making more demand on the grid, and then now you can’t use that electricity, that renewable electricity to replace a fossil source. You have to now need some more. If you don’t have, because there’s limited amount of renewables available, you just have to start burning more fossil fuels to replace the renewables that you’re using for your capture equipment.The Primary Energy Fallacy: a 38% reduction in world energy demand.Jenny (20:26):Right? Yeah. Just quit smoking altogether. Right. I’m going to go back to you were talking about, it’s called the primary energy fallacy where people assume that we, it’s this, the amount of energy we’re using today is the equivalent of what we need in the future versus what if we switch to a renewable? Maybe if we can get into, let’s say we killed this. We think this should be abandoned technology, what should we be doing instead, Mark, what does the renewable transition look like? You’ve talked about a 38% decrease in world demand based on an renewable transition. I don’t know what that number means in the context of where we’re at in this conversation, but if you could just expand on how we would reduce energy demand if we were to move in another way, please.Mark (21:16):Yeah. Well, we developed plans for states and countries and provinces to transition to a hundred percent renewables across all energy sectors. The idea is simple. You electrify as much as you can and provide the electricity with wind, water, solar, which is really wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and the electrification process itself, you can eliminate about 38% of world energy demand because like an electric vehicle uses one fourth, the energy as a gasoline vehicle to go the same distance, but averaged overall energy sectors. That’s about a 20% reduction of demand. Electric heat pumps use 75% less energy than combustion heating and electric conduction cooktops use 60% less energy than gas to do the same thing. When you average across all energy sectors, that’s another 14% reduction of demand. If you electrify industry, that’s another 4% or so, you’re up to 38%. But then, well, actually it’s a little more than that then.(22:21):But then there’s another 11% of all energy worldwide is used just to mine transport and refined fossil fuels in uranium. And we don’t need to do that if we have wind and solar and geothermal hydro because those are renewable resources where the wind comes right to the turbine, solar comes right to the panel, water comes right to the reservoir, geothermal gets replenished by heat from deep in the earth. We can eliminate another 11% of energy worldwide, and then we can, on top of that, we can get end use energy efficiency improvements beyond business as usual for a few more percent. We can actually get a 54% or reduction of world power demand just by electrifying and providing the electricity with wind, water, and solar. That’s without people changing their habits.(23:09):The fuel under the fossil fuel paradigm where they use carbon capture, well, you don’t get any of that 54% reduction because you keep burning fuels, inefficient fuels. You keep using gasoline, you keep using gas heating for buildings, you still burn coal and oil for industry, and you still mine transport and refine fossil fuels and uranium. You barely get any change of your energy, but you then increase your energy needs because you need to run the capture equipment. You need 25% more energy than you did for electricity generation. Your energy demand in fact goes up. It doesn’t go down 54%, it actually goes up. Again, this is like the fossil fuel industry wants to trick you into thinking that they’re doing something useful when they’re just preventing you from doing something efficient, and this is really dangerous. And then you can really see the opportunity cost here, because then when you electrify provide the electricity with wind, water, and solar, you are eliminating the air pollution deaths from the fossil fuels.(24:21):And worldwide, they’re about seven and a half million premature deaths from air pollution, from fossil and bioenergy fuels. And we could eliminate like 90% of those deaths just by transitioning to clean renewable energy. And same thing with global warming agents. You can eliminate them just by electrifying providing the electricity with clean renewable energy, whereas you’re hardly reducing CO2 with carbon capture. When you compare those two scenarios, which we did in a paper recently, where you compare the scenarios of electrifying providing the electricity with wind, water, solar versus not electrifying, but just using carbon capture or direct air capture, what you find is the social cost is about nine to 12 times higher of going the carbon capture route than wind, water, and solar. A lot of that’s due to the air pollution, health cost. A lot of it’s due to the higher carbon emissions from carbon capture, direct air capture, and the rest is due to the higher energy costs from carbon capture, direct air capture. On the order of a factor of 10 higher costs, and that’s no matter how you slice it, you get factor of 10 higher costs. Yeah, if you want to keep paying higher social costs, dying more, having more damage to the climate, having more damage to your environment and paying higher bills, electricity, heat, everything, bills, yeah, go for that carbon capture, it’s just a scam. It’s a greenwashing scam that does nothing but raise costs for everybody.Jenny (25:59):Yes. Thank you. That was great. I heard, well, I mean, this is an increase of nine to 12 times magnitude of harm essentially to people versus something that would half the harm by more than half the harm that we’re experiencing in terms of our pocketbooks, but also in terms of the impact in air quality and land degradation and water stability, let’s say. The one thing I wanted you to expand on, if you don’t mind, is when people make the argument of, oh, well, but then you’re just mining a whole other industry to be able to justify this transition. That’s the argument in the industry is that there’s this whole mining aspect for renewables and for the electrical transport system, let’s say, which is just not attainable, et cetera. I’ve seen the numbers that this system uses 5% of the material usage that the fossil fuel system does. Can you elaborate on that point, please?Addressing the disinformation around renewable (vs. fossil fuel) miningMark (27:01):Yeah. Well, fossil fuels use orders of magnitude. I mean, you have to mine fossil fuels every day for eternity to keep using fossil fuels because in the case of wind, solar, et cetera, wind comes right to the turbine, solar comes right to the panel, you eliminate fuel binding altogether. Whereas the main mining from fossil fuels is fuel mining, which is done every single day, and it’s just orders of magnitude, larger mining for fuel. Now, when you have renewables, yeah, you have to do some mining one time at the beginning, like for lithium, for batteries, for example. But first of all, batteries, you put ‘em in a car once and that car is now they’re going 20, 25 years and then they get recycled. The lithium, you can recycle a hundred percent of the components up to a hundred percent, but say 97 to a hundred percent of the components in a lithium battery can be recycled, and they are being recycled now, and they will be more in the future.(27:58):That same lithium can be reused in 20 years, 25 years for another car or for stationary battery storage. And whereas meanwhile that if you’re going the fossil fuel route, you’d be mining gasoline every day for those 25 years plus the next 25 years plus the next 25 years. You have one time mining versus continuous mining. Basically over a hundred year period to drive, if you converted all the vehicles in the world to lithium-ion vehicles, this includes passenger vehicles and trucks and buses, you’re going to be mining 10,000 to a hundred thousand times less fueled over that a hundred year period versus for mining fossil fuels for fossil fuel vehicles. It’s, its like a speck that you couldn’t even see in a sea of dots of how small the mining is compared to the mining you need for fossil fuels. In the US we drill 50,000.(29:05):Well, actually in the Great plains of both the US and Canada, we drill 50,000 new oil and gas wells every year. In the US we have a million active oil and gas wells and 4 million abandoned ones. And the fossil fuel industry occupies about almost 1.2% of all US land. The ethanol industry for corn is another 1.24% of land. We’re close to 2.4% of US land is used just for energy with fossil fuels and ethanol. If you electrify everything, provide the electricity from clean renewable sources, we’d need on the order of 1% of us land. We’d reduce land use if we go to the wind water, solar route versus keeping with fossil fuels. And you have to keep growing that fossil fuel land every year because you need more fossil fuels. A lot of that’s land is not only for the mines, but for the pipelines.(29:58):There’s millions of miles of pipelines crossing the US for fossil fuels and hundreds of thousands of gas stations. You need to keep growing the land needed for fossil fuels, whereas with renewables, there’s a little bit of growth, but it’s much slower because it’s really one time mining and one time infrastructure, and then it slowly grows as population increases. It’s not a comparison. There’s just in terms of health benefits, in terms of climate benefits, in terms of cost benefits, in terms of reduced land use, and also in terms of jobs worldwide, we estimate over 25 million more full-time jobs produced versus lost when we go wind water, solar versus a fossil fuel economy.Jenny (30:45):That was fantastic, Mark. Yeah, thank you. It’s so fascinating. Again, these stories all seem to weave together in terms of it is a lie to say that we need this carbon capture and storage, let’s say, to justify additional production. And you think of all the reduction in all of these areas. Like you said, I’m picturing all of these ships going across the oceans daily to provide this constant source of fuel versus you do a delivery of solar panels and wind turbines, and your ongoing shipping system is, I’ve heard that the global supply chain system is changing rapidly right now because of this massive demand shift in material movement. Can you speak to that at all, or are you familiar withMark (31:47):I can’t really say much about it. I haven’t looked into that issue too much.What does renewable deployment look like?Jenny (31:51):Okay. If you wouldn’t mind just expanding a little bit on what does a renewable deployment look like? You mentioned you’ve been in countries and cities, and can you speak to, I’m in Calgary, Alberta where there is, I would say we’re, I don’t know what we are right now. I want to say we’re 80% fossil fuel dependent or something like that in our electrical system. I think maybe it’s not as bad as that anymore. I’m not sure. But what does a transition look like just in terms of renewable deployment? How do you go about doing that work forMark (32:27):Jurisdiction? Well, in Canada it’s pretty easy because you have so much land and so much resource. In the south of Canada, there’s a bunch of solar, especially in the summer. In fact, there’s a community, Drake’s Landing that for a couple decades. There are homes where there’s solar collectors on the garages of homes that would take heat from the sun store it underground and soil for up to six months. You have long summer days and you can store that solar heat for up to six months and then use that heat to provide a hundred percent of home heating in the winter. That’s a district heating system. You can use sun, not only for heat, but also electricity generation as well. But there’s, there’s solar in the south, there’s wind pretty much everywhere, but the selected places, there’s hydro in a lot of places in Canada. There’s enhanced geothermal everywhere, which is a new commercial technology where you can just dig down into the earth. If you dig deep enough, you get high enough temperatures to heat the heat water that then provides electricity because you can use a turbine to generate electricity with high enough temperature, heat when you evaporate a fluid. And so now you can do that anywhere. You’ve got hydro, you’ve got geothermal, you’ve got wind, you’ve got solar, and it’s combine that with battery storage for electricity. You already have hydro storage and a lot of hydroelectric dams.(33:59):Then there’s heat storage and there’s cold storage, but you require electrification of buildings, electrification of transportation, electrification of industry. That’s what it looks like. Electrifying, going to electric vehicles, going to electric homes, going to electric industry, providing the electricity from clean renewable sources, which there’s plenty of in Canada, we’ve done a plan for Canada and actually several plans for Canada, and they all are, it’s one of the easiest countries to transition from a technical and economic point of view.Key Takeaways: Reclamation and Renewable DeploymentJenny (34:30):Fascinating. Yeah, I was thinking about all of these oil and gas sites that are powered by a solar and battery system today, and thinking about how those could be redeployed, like you’re saying, those are generally mobile sites as well. Anyway, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of very easy things that could happen. In fact, I’m almost convinced that we have all the solar and battery technology we need, if not more, where I live, if we just looked to it and deployed it properly. Thank you so much for that. I’d like to, if you don’t mind, just explore a little bit with you because of my experience and site cleanup enclosure, when you’re talking about landmass, for example, you talked about how if we just reduced, went away from both fossil fuel and ethanol types of energy use towards renewables, let’s say a third of the land would be used.(35:25):And I look at that as an opportunity to potentially use some of these contaminated lands as another potential deployment of solar and then be able to keep, because they would be tied into the electrical system already. I guess what I’m saying is I see an opportunity to be doing renewable deployment in marriage with site cleanup en closure, and I look at, as somebody, as an industry professional would love to see, instead of drilling a well, we are abandoning wells. Instead of putting in a new pipeline, we’re removing a pipeline. Instead of deploying new facilities, we’re removing them and et cetera, et cetera. Instead of mapping reservoirs, we’d be mapping contamination plumes. These are the types of activities I see in terms of jobs. When you talk about jobs and those opportunities and that, what if any work or thoughts do you have in that space, Mark, about trying to marry those two activities together in terms of reducing the footprint from fossil fuels while deploying renewables?Mark (36:29):Yeah, there’s a lot of places that we can put renewables that don’t take up new useful land. Aside from just putting solar on rooftops, but you don’t need new land or putting solar on agricultural fields where you can combine agriculture and solar in what’s called agrovoltaics, where you space the solar out. You can put wind and solar on degraded land. Contaminated land, and you can reduce even the land use of wind and solar by putting solar, combining it with wind at the same place. There’s wind. You don’t take any land on the ground with wind. They’re just a pole in the ground. But you do have what’s called spacing area, and people equate spacing area while you’re just occupying all that land where you’re not, you’re actually allowing farmers to grow their crops underneath, or you’re still open space or grazing land or ranch land, or if you’re offshore, there’s no land at all. But you could combine solar and wind and battery storage at the same location. And then when you do that, you provide more stable power because wind and solar are complimentary in nature. When the wind’s not blowing, the sun is off and shining during the day and vice versa.(37:41):And by combining the two, you actually get smoother overall output, especially if you add batteries, then you can smoothen the output even more. Yeah, there’s a lot of opportunities in taking these degraded fossil fuel lands and turning them into renewable energy fields. And you can even add geothermal in there too, because that doesn’t take that much land either, especially if they want to keep drilling, just drill for geothermal, and that’s a better drilling.Jenny (38:10):It is, yeah. But I’ve seen that industry a little bit. I think there’s some potential in the regulations that would help make that industry more attractive. I think if anything, there’s been some handcuffing happening between that deployment versus drilling for new fossil fuels and also for renewables. Our province did a whole, what’s interesting to be considered almost like a removal of landowners rights when it comes to renewable deployment versus where they’re forced to receive fossil fuel development on their lands. They can’t pursue a renewables. It’s pretty remarkable despite the handcuffs that this technology is finally making its way that technology, I mean, solar, wind, and batteries and renewable, other renewable sources. Thank you so much for all of this, mark. This has been tremendous. Is there anything in this conversation that you’d like to add? I’m just going to close with that. Thank you for reminding folks why carbon capture and storage is not a legitimate solution. It actually increases emissions. It doesn’t address the primary problem, which is methane emissions, and it is justifying a growing energy demand world in a situation where there is an opportunity to half it and also provide some social and environmental justice along the way. Anything else you’d like to add that I missed in this?Mark (39:43):No, I just suggest we keep our eye on the ball and focus on what works and not ignore these greenwashing planes about carbon capture, direct air capture, also blue hydrogen electro fuels. These are all constructs of the fossil fuel industry. We just want to focus on clean, renewable energy, electrification. That’s what works. We don’t have much time. Let’s just do that and we will get solved these problems together.Jenny (40:09):Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s because of people like you that I’m aware and working on this with you. Thank you for spending some time with me this afternoon, mark.Mark (40:17):Yeah, happy to.Jenny (40:19):Thank you. Take care for now.Mark (40:20):Thanks. Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

This is episode 10 of a miniseries on Water in Southern Alberta with co-host Bob Morrison, discussing topics such as water security, irrigation history, resource extraction impacts, and climate change. Guests include Dr. David Swann, a retired medical doctor and former politician and founder of the Fish Creek Watershed Association (FCWA), who emphasizes the importance of water quality and quantity, and Jason Unger, executive director of the Environmental Law Centre, who discusses legal frameworks and environmental accountability. The conversation highlights challenges in water management, including the need for better monitoring, compliance, and public engagement to ensure sustainable water use and protect aquatic ecosystems. This conversation underscores the urgency of addressing water issues in the face of climate change and the importance of community involvement in water policy decisions.Reintroductions to Dr. David Swann and Jason UngerJenny (00:00:05):Welcome to The Gravity Well Podcast with me Jenny Yeremiy. I host The Gravity Well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 and Metis districts 5 and 6. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples are created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature, and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide The Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts and openness to different perspectives. And this is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of The Gravity Well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The Gravity Well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see and hear, remember to like and subscribe.Hello Bob, how are you doing today?Bob:Pretty good. How are you, Jenny?Jenny:Good, thank you. We were always trying to get through so much. I forgot to just slow down and say hello. Yes, thank you so much. This has been a great start to the second half of the water, sorry, water in Southern Alberta’s miniseries. How do you think it’s going? Bob, are you pleased so far?Bob:We’ve learned even more than we didn’t know, and we’re starting to get down to the tough questions about water security. What about the aquatic environment and what does the future hold? I’m looking forward to thisJenny:Very much so. Yes, and we have some incredible people who’ve already participated and I’m super excited about hearing from the people we have today and ongoing super good turnout and great dialogue so far. We went through the history of irrigation, the impacts of resource extraction on water, the water act and licence transfer system, the water cycle and modelling watershed and lake stewardship, dry land, irrigated and ranch, land farming and the impacts of climate change on water with respect to insurance. That was the first half of the program. We then met with Brad Stelfox to speak about land use limits and Dr. Dave Sauchyn to discuss how we cope with Climate Change in Southern Alberta. I encourage everyone to listen to each of those and this one of course. I’m going to start with Dr. David Swann to welcome Dr. David Swann back to the studio. Hi David, how are you today?David:All good, thanks Jenny. Great to be with you.Jenny:Great. Firstly, Dr. David Swann is a friend and collaborator of, and Bob and me. David is a retired medical doctor who focused on preventative medicine and he became a politician. He was the leader of the Alberta Liberal Party and the leader of the opposition in Alberta legislature from December, 2008 until September, 2011. He returned as an interim leader of the Alberta Liberal Party on February 1st, 2015. That’s very specific and resigned, sorry, led the party through the 2015 provincial election and actually David is the last liberal elected official in the Alberta legislature, that’s something to think of. It’s very interesting. And he was also a guest on the show with Brad Stel Fox and Dr. Norm Campbell to discuss the harms of coal mining as well. Well, thank you so much for being here, David. Any other things you’d like to add in terms of your introduction today, please?David:Well, as a public health officer, I was certainly very concerned about water quality, water quantity in the context of this podcast, and part of our responsibility, of course was to monitor water quality as far as potable water was concerned and enforce regulations when we found any risks to the water supply that people were drinking. As a politician, I was involved in a number of issues as the environment critic in association with both air quality and water quality concerns around oil and gas activity and inter basin transfers for example, which I hope to say a few words about. And in the last five years, I kicked off a watershed stewardship group called the Fish Creek Watershed Association, in which we have really endeavored to get a clear handle on one of the tributaries of the Bow River outside of Calgary up to the Kananaskis Park, how significant they are in the terms of the question of water security. And I guess I want to ask at the outset, security for whom, because this government seems to prefer and prioritize water security for irrigation and commercial interests over the instream flow needs, and that’s a serious concern for those of us who recognize that the environment has only the advocates as citizens that decide to step up. The fish don’t speak, the biodiversity doesn’t speak, we have to recognize limits if we’re going to protect the instream flow needs and healthy biodiversity related to that.Jenny:Wonderfully said. David, thank you so much for being here. I’m really excited to get into this conversation with you, but before we do that, let’s make sure we re-welcome Jason Unger back to the stage. Thank you so much for joining us, Jason. Jason was also on the podcast in this miniseries. I poked him in September when I saw him in person and said, we’re going to be flagging you again, and here he is. I’m really pleased that you’re back with us Jason. Just a reminder that Jason is the executive director and general counsel of the Environmental Law Centre and Alberta based charity focused on legal education and environmental natural resource law reform. The ELC’s mission is to educate and champion for strong environmental law so that all Albertans can enjoy clean water, clean air, and a healthy environment. Jason worked in the private practice before this in both Edmonton and Calgary and he’s worked for Alberta’s Court of Queen Bench as well. Jason also sits on the Alberta Water Council, which is a multi-stakeholder organization that provides advice and input on provincial water policy. Very pleased to know that we didn’t quite catch that the first time we interviewed you, this is wonderful to have you. Jason, thank you so much for participating again.Jason:Thanks very much for having me. It’s a great and very timely, I guess water’s always timely but extra timely as there’s changes to the water laws and policy as ongoing issues that we see on the landscape and the water.Jenny:Yes, in so many ways it’s becoming more urgent. Both the discussion and the changes and the proposed ways of managing those changes are very urgent. They require urgent attention. Thank you so much for acknowledging that. And before we get into it, Jason, do you mind just giving a little bit of background like we offer David, just how you came into this work and a little bit about what you’re doing in these roles? Thank you.Jason:Sure. Yeah, I’ve been a lawyer for quite a while back to the early two thousands and since the beginning I’ve always had a very keen interest in environmental law and how we manage our natural resources and for the protection of the environment. It’s why I went into law school in the first place, and I’ve really focused on the long-term, looking at things around water loss specifically. It’s always been an interest of mine, everything from federal fisheries, law impact assessment, species at risk, all of which touch Alberta’s waterways as well as how we manage the natural resources on the landscape itself because they have direct implications for aquatic health, whether we’re talking about diversions in water quantity or the water quality. What we’re putting in the water from our wastewater streams, both industrial and municipal and otherwise, both from point sources and non-point sources.I’ve had a long history. I have been on part of the Water Council, which is a consensus-based decision-making organization that was struck as a result of the Water for Life strategy, which dates back a couple of decades now, which has the typical three pillars around social, economic and environmental outcomes. Although they’re phrased in a bit different manner, but I’ve been a long [time] advocate for accountability for environmental outcomes and that goes for water law as well as water policy, whether it’s around our wetlands or our rivers or our lakes. There’s a whole host of law and policy that applied to them and I’ve been active in that area for a long time, advocating for water laws that ensure accountability on the environmental outputs or outcomes that we all want to see.Jenny:Incredible. Thank you so much, Jason. This is great. This has just been a wonderful experience, I have to say, to meet all the people working in this space. Okay, we’re going to let Bob lead off the questions today. I’ll just offer some comments as we go. Thank you so much. Bob, take it away.What are we doing well and what are the areas of concern in terms of water security in Southern Alberta?Bob (00:10:15):In terms of water security, making sure that we actually do have and how much water and good quality water for everyone, not just in particular special interests. Where are we doing well in Southern Alberta and where are we facing some serious problems that we need to deal with? Jason, why don’t I start with you?Jason:It’s a great question and a huge question. I think it’s where are we doing well? I think the challenge is as we’ve evolved as a society, as we’ve evolved in terms of our infrastructure around irrigation and use, I think there’s a lot of different things that come into play there. The history is a big piece of it because as you may have talked about previously, we have a legal system where the rights of historic users of water have those embedded rights to divert that water. And as the climate changes, as water supplies change, the question becomes, well, how do we manage this system when there’s ongoing growth in the population of Alberta? There’s ongoing expectations of growth for the economy and how do we ensure that we’re not undermining the instream flow needs of our rivers and all the ecosystems that rely on them, whether that’s floodplains or fisheries or other things.How do we make sure that is considered in a system that’s really modelled around licensing diversions? The issue of security is really high. Obviously the licence holders want the security of the water supply to know that they can use that water, but at the same time when there’s a shortage of supply, the legal system is not really well set up for dealing with that. We have a long history of water law that drives us towards a situation of when there is shortages of supply, we have to look to government to really focus on protecting the environmental flows and what measures of accountability we have to reflect that security, the instream security I guess I’ll call it, or the security for those flows in water quality I think is one of the key issues and one of the key challenges we have now and into the future for sure. You asked what do I think we’re doing? Well, I think we’re getting there in terms of starting to look at how much we’re diverting, how much is returning, how much we’re actually using. I think we have a long way to go still there, but I think we have a huge way to go in terms of understanding what it means for the aquatic environment, what type of security, what does security look like for the fish and other organisms living in their aquatic ecosystems and on the landscape itself that’s fed by the water of course.Bob:Water supply has caught people’s attention, obviously, which is a good thing. But you mentioned the legal system, it’s based upon that principle of prior allocation or first in time, first in the older licence gets first grabs at the water, but when it comes down to a real shortage in Southern Alberta, at least generally they don’t use the first in time, first in they use some sort of a cooperative agreement. Is that really the way we’re headed? Is first in time first in just simply not workable or untenable?Jason:Well, I think that’s a good question. I think the challenge with first in time, first in in the time of shortage as we’ve seen illustrated is then you have to turn to non-legal or less certain avenues, right? Voluntary agreements between licence holders to share the water. I think the outstanding question in my mind is how long will fit for last or the first in time, first right allocation system last in that structure? I think you could still have a system whereby priorities to water can still be granted based on a historic allocation, but then I think we need to start looking at systems where we formalise a system where, okay, there’s not enough water for everyone. How are we going to share it? Obviously picking winners and losers in water is not an acceptable solution because obviously that can’t be an outcome. I think as time goes by and the pressures go by on our water system, the first and time first and right system is kind of being maintained, but at the same time when we’re always having to resort to voluntary agreements on the side, then really fit for isn’t really being maintained because no one’s going to be calling priority, or if they do, then the system’s going to be really under restrained.Under our legal system, there’s the ability for a licence holder to call priority, which means they get all their licence allocation before the next lower priority licence holder. In that type of system, if that priority call happens, then I think the real strain and kind of emergency happens and there’s legislation, our legislation does allow for the minister to essentially declare an emergency and say the priority system is not being applied, and that was kind of contemplated in 2024, but didn’t have to occur. I think that the whole FITFIR system and the allocation system and security has to be a part of a broader dialogue that we have as a society and who has the voice for instream flows or fish and that type of thing is one of the key concerns that the Environmental Law Center has as we talk about healthy aquatic ecosystems as a core foundation of a healthy and vibrant society with a high quality of life.Jenny:Right? Yeah. Can’t really have a life without high quality water. Just so you guys know, David is on my phone, we can tap him with the question in the background here.Bob:I’m ready for my follow-up question with him because we’ve talked about water supply that David’s experience has been mainly in the water quality area in terms of being a medical doctor and he mentioned the whole issue with potable water. David, how secure are we in terms of water quality from what you’ve experienced, both in terms of your medical background and what you’ve seen on Fish Creek?David:Well, I think it’s an important question that relates very much to how much we’re willing to pay Bob. You’re increasingly degrading upstream activities in our water sources and having to pay increasingly expensive water treatment both before drinking and after wastewater goes through the treatment plants. We are tremendously wasteful of water still in this province, and we are allowing activities upstream that very much increase the cost of creating potable water.Jenny:Right. Go ahead. I’ll just add, would you say ranching in the headwaters for one or oil and gas activities or roads or logging, all of those things are impacting water quality, would you say?David:All of the above. Indeed. Anything that creates more sediment, more organic material, more chemicals including pesticides and fertilizers, all of these add to the challenges I guess, of making sure we have safe drinking water.Jenny:Did you have a follow up?How are we monitoring water quantity and quality?Bob (00:18:39):Yeah, and this gets into the whole question of monitoring what’s going on out there, and they do measure a number of water quality issues, but there are a lot that simply are not measured very often if they’re measured at all. Things like pharmaceuticals, the, you just mentioned that and I forgot what the other one was.Jenny:Fertilizers.Bob:Fertilizers, exactly. That sort of thing. Do we really have the monitoring system, David, to be able to keep track of what’s happening in the rivers and dealing with the quality in the streams themselves?David:Well, I take your point, Bob, especially with respect to pharmaceuticals and point source pesticides and herbicides, which we may not pick up entirely because they’re so expensive, these tests that it, it’s intermittent testing that goes on. But in general, I think we do have very high quality water because of the very expensive treatment programs that we have for our water supplies. I would just add that the water flows have declined 40% in the South Saskatchewan River Basin according to John Pomeroy over the last a hundred years. And when water quantity declines and it has 40%, as I said, that means it’s much more concentrating the pollutants and it takes as I’ve said a much more expensive treatment protocol.Jenny:Of course.Bob:How can you dilute the pollution if you keep taking the water out?Jenny:That’s right. Yeah.Bob:Jenny, you’re up next, I think.Jenny:Oh, sure. Okay. Can we talk a bit about water monitoring and reporting, Jason, because you and I just were discussing, we attended, we attended a meeting together in September in Fort Chippewan First Nation about water security and all I heard that week was about monitoring and it just made my stomach sink because monitoring isn’t mitigating, and as you were alluding to in your opening here, you’re seeing a lot of gaps in the ways that we’re measuring and monitoring, and then also do we understand the impacts of how we’re using water on the aquatic habitat and system function. I know that’s a big question, but can you speak to a little bit around just this, what’s happening in terms of reporting and monitoring and any gaps that you see that are meaningful for us to think about going forward to close? Jason:That is right. Yeah. Well, it is a big issue and I think, monitoring is one part of a broader system that you have to have in place compliance with monitoring and reporting is a challenge I think for the government in terms of licences, in terms of the stream flows themselves and water quality being a key indicator that you’re going to have a variety of things that you have to monitor there, including emerging issues like PFASs and other chemicals that are continuing to show direct impacts on the aquatic environment, specifically salmon species for instance. And I think the challenge, the government actually in the Bill seven, they are amending some areas where they’re trying to expand the monitoring and reporting requirements, and I think the challenge there is to really have the capacity to ensure the water use reporting and that type thing is accurate and actually enforced and every reason’s complying with it in terms of the industrial licensed users.But I think that’s different from, for instance, the water quality challenges around water monitoring, because oftentimes we’re very reactive in terms of our approaches. Our view at the Environmental Law Centre is dilution isn’t the solution to pollution. Pollution prevention is the first order of business. I think one of the key aspects is we need systems and accountability around how we can monitor, but also how we’re going to respond to those shifts in water quality and even reporting on enforcement issues. Certainly up north, a major issue happened when a leak from tailings wasn’t reported by the regulator to the community downstream, and that raised a lot of alarm bells for people. I guess the regulator thought it was of minimal risk or whatever, but there was some decision making there and accountability around how we monitor water quality and how we report to the public, and then on the backend, how we manage the landscape for a variety of very challenging, admittedly challenging areas of water quality and diminishing water quality, whether it’s nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen or other more targeted pollutants coming from the landscape or points or submissions or wastewater streams.How prepared is Alberta for an oil sand’s tailing breach?Jenny (00:24:00):Right. You’ve made me think about with, let’s be specific with the oil sand, if there was a major breach, do we have a plan in place for those types of things? Is that something that youJason:Yeah, well, I think there’s probably a variety of emergency plans that are sitting there, whether they’re fully operational, if an incident actually happened, for sure there’s been very large dam breaches in the recent past both in BC and Alberta in the Obed mine for instance. I think an ongoing challenge for sure is there’s a high risk and we try to mitigate those risks in terms of having regulatory standards in place, but we’ve seen witness to those bigger issues failing and resulting in these big incidents. The long-term planning and monitoring and compliance issues are key there in terms of ensuring the safety of downstream communities for sure.Jenny:Yeah, the compliance, you’re right, I heard a lot about monitoring and not a lot about compliance that weekend, that or a couple of days that we spent together. Same question for you, David. Can you outline as well what you think are some of the ways that we’re missing in terms of reporting and monitoring with respect to conservation objectives?David:Well, yes I can. In fact, the whole schedule of notifying organizations across the province when there’s a low flow advisory, for example, was really inadequate when we first started up the Fish Creek Watershed Association, and only through we start to get actual reporting when we should be reducing our demands on that Fish Creek watershed system. I know that the other environments and protected areas is underfunded. It’s been underfunded for the last 15 years since I was in politics, and they struggle to not only capture the data but have someone have the time to go through it. They operate in general on a complaint basis. If someone is doing something that appears to be damaging to the watershed, they’ll investigate it. But in terms of reporting the consumption of licences and the return flows that, for example, the irrigators are supposed to be returning to the watershed, it’s very hit miss and everything I hear is that, well, when I’ve asked, they suggested I go online and look at the numbers myself because they simply don’t nothing to properly monitor both consumption and return flows to the rivers.Jenny:Right. I’m just going to get you to expand on that concept for folks that aren’t as familiar. When I hear that, David, I hear that you have this licence allocation, but we don’t necessarily know when that water was used and if any of it was actually passed through and the cases where it is a licence that they own the volume outright where it isn’t expected to flow through. I don’t know if I’m saying that. Well, Jason, but do you understand my question, David? Can you outline that a little bit more for people?David:I think what you’re asking is whether or not we know how much people are taking, if they have a licence for so much volume, whether they’re actually taking that amount or whether they may be taking more. In many cases they’re taking less in southern Alberta, but that’s partly because we’ve closed the Saskatchewan River Basin since 2007, and we realized at some point there that we had over allocated the river basins south of Red Deer River. We do need to have more handle on the reporting that is supposed to be in the large users monthly, but how much do we audit the reporting and how accurate is it? And in terms of the return flows to the rivers, I don’t think we’re monitoring that at all. And there’s some suggestion now that the irrigators are using what’s supposed to go back into the river for expanding the irrigation in Southern Alberta. Those kinds of monitoring and oil and gas use of water, for example, isn’t being monitored. We really seriously need to look at this critical resource called water and treat it as the vital resource that it is for all of us or we’re going to be in serious trouble, I believe, in the next decade, if not now.Jenny:Yeah. Thank you. Okay, your turn, Bob.Bob:Okay, David, you’ve mentioned over allocation, which is a big problem in the South Saskatchewan system in the 1990s, early 1990s, the province took the approach of we’ve got a problem in terms of allocation, let’s cap the irrigation districts in terms of how much acreage they can actually irrigate and give them the opportunity to improve how many acres they can irrigate by taking efficiency measures. The government changed its mind later on when the South Saskatchewan Water Management plan was put together and decided they were going to cap everybody that is no new licences and go to a trading system where you buy and sell water rights as opposed to the water, and then you have to pay for that. Those seem like two very different approaches, and it gets into the thing that David raised about who are we managing the water for. Jason, do you have any experience or understanding of those two different ways of managing the overall allocation problem?Jason:Well, sure. Yeah. The water transfer system, the water allocation transfer system came into place primarily. I mean it did exist to a degree previously, but in the Water Act itself in 1999. The ability to transfer a portion of your allocation to another water user, water user, it has evolved since then. And certainly I think the intention is to use the allocation that was granted and intensify the use of that water. That could happen through, for instance, expansion of irrigation or otherwise, or through a system where you’re selling water, maybe you’re not using your whole allocation and you’re able to sell part of your water to another party. And I think that’s one of the areas where there has been a lot of transparency around those transactions and a lot of questions arise because no one pays for water in Alberta other than the cost of moving that water or potentially treating the water as well.Obviously that’s a significant cost for potable water, but there’s no raw water cost in Alberta, the fact that people are now able to sell those things is an interesting notion that there was of reset button in an auction around water or anything like that. I think there’s a variety of things at play there in terms of we have limited allocation in the South, we closed applications, we want to grow still, and we’re going to intensify uses within those allocations, and the question becomes, well, when does that have an impact on the environment itself and the long-term sustainability of that system? It brings in things about water waste, water conservation, water efficiency, all these things as well, and how we can get water back into the river because we know that overall in low flow years that we’re not meeting the instream flow needs as they would be scientifically derived. We’re just doing the best we can in a system that’s highly allocated and we’re trying to intensify more water use within that allocation. I think that’s one of the key challenges is how do we move more water back into the stream at the essential times, recognizing that the pressures on the system are really significant and they’re only going to grow as we move forward. A Price on WaterBob (00:32:58):You mentioned not charging for water for the actual taking the water out of a stream, and it seems like if you’re creating a water market, which was their intent, I gather at the province, you have to have some price on the actual water that you’re using. We have a price on oil, we have a price on gas, we have a price on forestry may not be perfect, but at least somebody is saying, okay, it’s going to cost you something that reflects presumably some market demand and also might reflect the cost of the environment. Is pricing actually viable for water?Jason:Right. Well, I would distinguish between the market price between two licence holders that are having their private agreement because we don’t know what those prices are. I think that’s one of the issues that the government actually has seen and is trying to address is that, well, there needs to be transparency so people know how much water is going to cost, aside from the fact that the water in Alberta has historically been owned by the province of Alberta. The notion of charging for that water has been raised in the past. The government has not gone down that route. In BC for instance, they have a price, a volumetric price for industrial water uses and certainly Alberta could do that if they wanted to and that would drive, and I think everyone would see that that would drive conservation because the more you’re using, the more cost it is and look for alternatives as well in terms of alternatives to potable water or high quality water.I think there’s a variety of things that pricing can do. It’s also very contentious because people sometimes think that, for instance, using it in their home will cost more or that type of thing or using it from a water well or that type of thing. I think the overall trend though is you could price the more industrial uses and recover water and that could grow your capacity to deal with some of the monitoring and compliance issues that we’ve been talking about as well. I think one of the key things is that to truly manage and plan around water, you need a lot of resources in terms of capacity within government to actually deal with those things, and I think that’s one of the outstanding challenges, how you pay for that. It has to be a priority for the government moving forward in my view.Interbasin Transfers Create Many RisksBob (00:35:40):Right. Jason, you mentioned the whole thing about getting more water and David, I think you mentioned inter basin transfers. That certainly is in some people’s view, the way that you solve water supply problems. I gather that the bill seven that’s going before the legislature at some point is going to be making it easier to deal with inter basin transfers. Am I correct on that and what impact are you expecting?David:Well, Jason may also have some important comments to make about basin transfers, but when I was in the legislature, it was a very serious matter to consider transferring water from one basin to another in terms of the biology, some of the species that are there and some of the contaminants that might be transferred. Invasive species in particular, a concern in fish species, bill seven, as some of many of the changes are said to improve water security, but they benefit a few large industries over some of the issues that Jason has raised, which is instream flow needs and maintaining some kind of flow that will protect species within the river. I would have to say that without a very good science and very rigorous debate, we should not be transferring water from one basin to another, and Bill seven is going to make it easier for both the legislature to pass such a motion if they were even going to address the issue because they wouldn’t have to address the issue if this new bill goes through.It would be ministerial discretion. The other side of this though is my concern about the massive expansion of irrigation in Southern Alberta when we are already not meeting basic water conservation objectives in the South Saskatchewan basin. It’s appalling that the irrigation industry has managed to, without any major consultation with Albertans extracted significant funds up to almost $800 million from federal and provincial bodies to expand by up to 500,000 acres in Southern Alberta. The irrigation potential and no public debate, no public input, and in some cases no environmental impact assessments. They’re planning 10 new reservoirs or expansions of reservoirs and as I say, based on their calculations of saving water through canalization as opposed to open dikes, they feel they can meet the objectives of massive expansion of irrigation just through those savings and there’s very little evidence that we’ve seen that that’s going to be successful. Allowing that expansion and then transferring from the north to the south, not only is it extremely costly, but many more risks are involved than I think we’ve been led to believe.Jenny:Yes. Can I just get you to expand again on the, that you said we’re not meeting instream flow objectives. Can you just remind people what that means to me? It means we’re not making sure that the species at risk and aquatic habitat are sufficiently sustainable. Is that accurate?David:That’s correct. Water conservation objectives relate to 45% of natural flow, and that’s one indicator which we have not been meeting again in the South Saskatchewan River and Instream objectives are even more minimal flows in the creek creeks and rivers that we in many cases are not measuring and not enforcing. Once again, we need to properly fund upward environment to enable it to do adequate monitoring and put in place some accountability when these flows are not being supporting life in the rivers and the creeks.Jenny:Right. Compliance again, did you have something to add there, Bob?Bob:Yeah, I was going because David said Jason might have something to offer and I go on inter basin transfers and Bill seven and the whole question around how we manage water legally.Jason:Yes, yes. The water act is being amended through Bill 7 and it’s currently before the legislature. Currently under a current law, you require a special act of the legislature to transfer water between basins. Importantly for people in the north, the bill seeks to amalgamate fully the piece and the Athabasca Basin, in which case there would just be normal licences between basins, those river basins because it wouldn’t be considered an inter basin transfer. I think that’s a huge change and I’m not sure, I think it should be not going forward and really addressed in a more nuanced and direct way in terms of interacting with communities and getting their input in terms of that. The bill also enables what their framing lower risk transfers, and there’s some volumetric limits to those lower risk transfers, although there’s a lot of uncertainty about what those might be because they’re going to deal with a variety of the issues with the regulations.But I think the challenge within any interbasin transfer, our starting point is, okay, the first thing is should be maintaining watershed integrity, meaning you should maintain the waters within your watershed because as soon as you start moving water between watersheds, you can move invasive species, you can move chemicals, you can move biological contaminants in a variety of other things, as well as it’s saying, well, we don’t have to worry about water because we’ll just shift it around and really not take ownership of our water use. And I think that’s to the same notion of being preventative and making sure we’re conserving water. I think we should be looking at our watersheds and the water available to us in a way that is more constrained and really dealing with the things that we need while maintaining a healthy aquatic ecosystem at the same time.I think there are basin transfers for sure, but I think there’s a variety of ways where a higher level of assessment, a higher level of scrutiny has to be maintained. The current proposal does provide for the minister to hold public reviews of those lower risk transfers, but what a public review, for instance, should entail, it needs to be detailed because even with water allocation transfers, which are different, the language in the legislation currently provides for public review and what we’ve seen is that doesn’t really occur. We get notice of an application for a transfer, but then beyond that we don’t have much information about what it actually is transferred. That’s one of the challenges is a lot of the water act amendments are enabling with regulations and policy to come, but I think the risk is that you’re taking the guardrails off as soon as you enable those things, and really that’s one of the things that I think is a lot of risk to it, where the current system of special active legislature admittedly, is probably not the most efficient because you have to wait for the legislature to be in session and all these other things.But I think there’s a need to ensure that decisions, because there are long-term impacts with these decisions are taken with the most full understanding and community input as you can have. That’s where I think these amendments are perhaps need to be amended further to reflect that.Bob:The devil’s in the detail.Jason:Yes.Managing Source Point and Non-Point ContaminationJenny (00:44:14):When we interviewed Tim Romanow, he was talking about how that the water in, oh geez, I can’t remember the basin now I should remember this, but the water that comes from Montana that’s rerouted into the St. Mary, that that’s one of the original water base and transfers and it’s still going. Speaking of long term, that’s why I brought it up, is this is 115 year timeframe. This is how significant these decisions are and how this cannot be taken lightly. I also like that you’re bringing in the maintaining watershed integrity piece because there’s a lot of risks happening in these basins without any water transfers to put the watershed integrity at risk already. To layer on some allocations that you don’t know where they’re going, you don’t have the transparency, and then you’re going from basin to basin potentially spreading contamination. Let’s go into that a little bit, if that’s okay, is to talk about how we’re maintaining water quality. David already alluded to we have this unfortunate collision that seems to be happening where we have contaminants that are increasing and then water volume is decreasing, those potential concentrations are increasing with time the way we’re headed. Especially in a legal framework.Can you speak Jason to what are the ways that we can mitigate harm to people based on what is coming based on the information we’ve just been discussing? Thanks.Jason:Well, I think that there’s two distinct areas where water quality are a challenge for regulatory systems. The one side is less of a challenge. They deal with point sources, those areas where, for instance, a wastewater stream from a municipality or wastewater stream from a specific industrial facility can be conditioned and monitored and reported on specifically in that area. The other bigger, more challenging area is what is often referred to as non-point source pollution, where it might just be things like nutrients or fertilizer on a landscape, which is then runs off during spring fresh or during a rain event or other contaminants that are getting in through aerial deposition or other things like that. The non-point source pollution area is really a challenging area to regulate, and a lot of different jurisdictions have tried to do that. I think Alberta does need to start dealing with non-point source pollution, more substantively around the impacts on surface water bodies, whether that’s lakes or rivers, because those often related to nutrients in the water, they can have adverse effects on water quality and actually can, they’re what drive algal blooms and blue green algae and toxins that result from those blooms.I think there’s a lot of challenges around water quality. The government does have a system around in certain basins around surface water quality management frameworks they call ‘em, which is attempting to do with deal with the notion of cumulative effects on water quality. They do our, for instance in the south, they have various rivers where they’re monitoring water quality and they’re trying to have that ability to track changes and to respond to them. I think the challenge there again is it’s better to be preventative because trying to identify the impacts or the causes of specific water quality indicators and then actually mounting a management response to that is a huge legal challenge in terms of how to identify who’s responsible, who’s doing these things and that type of thing. I think we need to move to more proactive management of landscapes, more proactive and more higher quality wastewater stream systems. Obviously, over the decades we’ve done pretty well in major urban centers. Obviously we have the amount of tax base to pay for some of these wastewater treatment systems where we need to see that expanded to other areas of point source and non-point source pollution into the landscape, into the water bodies that we’re talking about.Jenny:Yeah. Did you want to expand on that, David, do you have anything to add?David:Yeah, I would thanks Jason for outlining that very well, and I guess the implication is not only increasing the revenues coming into government that they can fund the necessary experts in upward environment to do the monitoring and enforcement, it’s clear that this has not been a priority for governments in the last 15 or 20 years, and it has to be if we’re going to have real quality and sustained quantity of water for basic human uses as well as for commercial and agricultural use.Jenny:Okay, I see we are almost at the hour. I can’t believe how quickly this conversation went. Bob, I’ll let you lead off maybe into some takeaways and then a final question for these guides. Does that work for you?Bob:Sure. This has certainly raised a lot of issues, ones that are very troubling and very complex, particularly as Jason was mentioning on the water quality side. And I will follow up with one maybe a technical question, and Jason, I think you’re probably the person who might be able to answer it, but I gather that the City of Calgary in terms of managing water quality has some umbrella approval from the province now that includes both its wastewater treated water going into the rivers, and it also combines the non-point stormwater type of pollution that’s coming from the city. Is that a good idea or should we keep those two kinds of pollution separate? Because if you combine them, that tends to put the burden back onto these very expensive wastewater treatment systems that David had mentioned earlier on and takes the kind of relieves us as individual land managers, homeowners or businesses takes the pressure off on us in terms of being good stakeholders. Am I missing something here or is that really an issue?Jason:I think management of wastewater versus stormwater are both very important water quality issues that need to be dealt with. I think the challenge is that our historic treatment of stormwater in separate streams from wastewater resulted in the stormwater typically just going into the rivers and having consequences there, whether it’s salt from road salting to other things like other spills and other things on the landscape or sediment. I think the combining of those systems is important to capture as much pollution as we can. I think there are probably some other alternatives as well, but I know that certainly different municipalities have challenges on different aspects in terms of having the infrastructure to actually deal with both those issues. I know that some stormwater systems also can be managed somewhat by more of the outlets. You could put in more compact treatment systems or even systems of stormwater management where you’re trying to keep the stormwater from flowing into the river at least so quickly where you have natural infrastructure that can be used to treat those things.I think again, it’s water management is an area where it’s complex and there’s so many, everything we do from an urban landscape perspective has a direct impact on our water quality downstream. Whether it’s moving our waste away from us or otherwise. I think those are the challenges that we face in terms of we still have relatively high water quality in terms of Alberta. We’re very lucky to be close to headwaters and not a lot of communities upstream, but I think it’s incumbent on us to take as much as we can in terms of minimizing our water footprint on the landscape or in the rivers.David:Okay.Jenny:Did you want to ask David one last final question, Bob, or not to put you on the spot?Bob:Well, I had one and I’m not sure how much time do we have left there.Jenny:Well, I realized we started late, maybe we’ve got a few more minutes. Sorry, I just didn’t want to cut short.Bob:Yeah, I’m looking at the timer. We’ve got about seven minutes left.Jenny:Yeah, let’s [go] with one more.Bob:In terms of Fish Creek, which has been very lucky, at least in the downstream reaches to have a park surrounding it, but people are living upstream. What are the challenges you see on a small tributary like that in terms of managing the land in particular the way we use the land that then affects the river or the stream?David:Well, Bob, the Fish Creek starts up in McLean Creek, Kananaskis country, and there’s clear cut logging going on up there. There is seasonal grazing of animals. There is off-road vehicles running through the creek often without being regulated. They’re supposed to follow certain trails and use bridges. That’s not being well monitored unfortunately. But indeed, further downstream, we have 2200 people now outside the city in acreages depending on the groundwater and the surface water between Calgary and Kananaskis, agricultural operations, a 36 hole golf course. All of these have obvious impacts and potential risks and affecting both quantity of water, which has significantly diminished over the last four years, particularly with the climate impact. It appears and it’s a real concern that with diminishing quantity and diminishing fish wellbeing there, we’ve done our fish survey in the last two months that is still to be recorded, but it’s very evident that the numbers and the species have declined significantly, especially the native species and all of this to say that like most places on the planet, if you’re not careful and you allow unfettered development and extraction and activities on the landscape, you can predict a decline in quality, quantity and species, which we’re trying to educate both the public and the government on at the present time.Bob:Right. Well, and we have really a really good idea of what’s happening to the main stem rivers, but the tributaries where people actually see the impacts first and the impacts more directly. We don’t know as much about those tributaries and Fish Creek is one of those examples where thanks to you folks, you were at least trying to get some decent information there.David:That’s right. Yeah. We’re learning a lot as citizen scientists and I monitor some of the chemistry in the water every two weeks with a kit that’s created by a group called Creek Watch or River Watch in Alberta. There are many lay people across the province that are testing the water every couple of weeks and identifying if there are changes, significant changes in the common parameters like oxygen level, pH temperature, which are critical for fish habitat.Key TakeawaysJenny (00:57:04):Right. Thank you. Okay, I’m going to offer some of my key takeaways and let us all offer some final thoughts on anything that we wanted to add or that we feel is important. The first thing is we’ve got monitoring in place. We’re doing reporting. We have some conservation objectives. They’re not being met, compliance is not in place and there isn’t a cost to potentially continuing going in the wrong direction here. Those are the key things that I took away. We’re not looking at the maintenance of watershed integrity, we’re not being proactive enough and that we’re not looking at these non-point source issues closely enough as well, that there’s a lot of things we’re not seeing on, as David just said, and Bob, that those tributaries, for example, are the ones that potentially are seeing those higher concentrations of issues that are not necessarily being seen, and then they also experience climate change more severely and urgently, we’re not fully seeing that picture as well. Those were my key takeaways. Maybe I’ll go to you, Jason next to see if you have any things that you wanted to add or anything you wanted to say that we didn’t touch on, please.Jason:Well, I think one of the key challenges we have is we have a pretty substantive regulatory system, but I think we’ve had this discussion around water availability and water supply, and yet we still don’t really engage communities and a broader discussion with Albertans around what their expectations are around their rivers and lakes and streams, because I think that’s the only way we’ll prioritize these things is we have a true understanding and a true engagement with communities. I think inherently we all probably tend towards saying, yes, of course we want healthy rivers, healthy lakes, and yet it’s not prioritized. It’s easy to look at the engineered responses to these things of supply and vulnerability, and really what we need to be having the dialogue is how are we going to prioritize these things as a society and move these things forward? Because I think that’s the only way we can actually get past some of these challenges, which are complex and have trade-offs and all these things, but I think that’s the dialogue that we need to start now because the more, the worse it’s going to get or the harder it’s going to get.Jenny:Yeah, good to bring that up. Thank you. The overarching problem is that we’re not properly engaging people in this work, in this knowledge, and then it would become a priority like you’re saying, and people would be very concerned about interbasin transfers, for example. Okay. Bob, how about you? Did you want to offer some thoughts quickly and then we’ll let David wrap us up?Bob:Why don’t we go straight to David summarizing?Jenny:Okay, thank you. David, did you want to offer some final takeaways?David:Well, what an excellent discussion we’ve had. I appreciate what you’re doing, Jenny and Bob and Jason. I really appreciate your comments. I guess from a more political point of view, I recognize that public education is absolutely essential to get political change and policy change that would result in better monitoring and analysis and enforcement. If people understand more about what we’ve talked about today, which thanks to your podcast, some will, they will be more intentional about connecting with their member of the legislature in this case because this is primarily a provincial issue and that’s incumbent upon both those of us who are involved in NGOs and those involved in the scientific community university, for example, to pay more attention to educating the public on the quality and quantity issues and the impacts coming of climate change and the need to be ever more careful about land use and protecting and conserving water because absolutely, there are examples in the states, for example, and around the world where the failure to plan ahead and protect these vital sources has resulted in tremendous conflicts and even wars. And it’s, as I’ve said in some of the literature, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting, and we have to take some of that historic wisdom to heart.Jenny:Thank you, David. That’s brilliant. I am going to be very specific for you and your example about speaking to your MLA. I am doing one step further right now and actually trying to hold my MLA accountable for these massive decisions that are misleading us, specifically in my case, the misinformation around fossil fuel pollution and how that impacts water and everything else is one of the main reasons why I’m doing a recall campaign in my constituency to hold my MLA accountable. This is the real life concerns that we are facing and the ways the tools that we have available to us to address ‘em. Like you said, I’m hoping these conversations will help people also understand why somebody like me would be doing this. You talked to David about scientists in taking these samples, and I picture the people that are going through with ATVs and probably not even understanding what’s going on there and the importance and the value of staying on those paths, for example, and not going off course. Okay, that’s a lot. Thank you so much everyone for your participation. Please remember to and subscribe to The Gravity Well help this message get out, help make Jason and David’s time and Bob’s for that matter worthwhile. I really appreciate you guys being here. Take care for now.Bob:Thank you. Thanks all. Thank you. Great discussion. Get full access to The Gravity Well with Jenny Yeremiy at www.thegravitywell.net/subscribe

Bob Morrison is welcomed back to discuss the second half of the series on Water in Southern Alberta. The series began with discussions on irrigation history, resource extraction impacts, and water management, featuring experts like Professor Shannon Stunden Bower, David Mayhood, and Dr. Trisha Stadnik. This episode features Dr. Brad Stelfox, a scientist and thought leader, who groundbreaking work has influenced land management across Alberta and beyond, ensuring a balance between development and ecological integrity. Brad was also a guest on The Gravity Well podcast, Season 2, Episode 2 where we discussed The Harms of Coal Mining in Southern, Alberta.Brad highlights the challenges of linking social, economic, and environmental models, emphasizing the need to understand trade-offs and prioritize sustainable land use. He discussed the degradation of natural capital in Alberta, particularly in the eastern lowlands and the foothills, due to excessive land use and the failure to account for environmental liabilities. The conversation also touched on the importance of the Eastern Slopes for water quality and quantity, advocating for careful land use management to preserve these critical areas.The podcast concluded with a call for a shift in economic models to prioritize natural capital to ensure a sustainable future for Alberta’s landscapes.Re-Introductions to Dr. Brad Stelfox and the Water in Southern Alberta PodcastJenny (00:00:05):Welcome to the Gravity Well Podcast with me, Jenny Ami. I host the gravity well to celebrate and share the stories of people looking to empower others with the knowledge and skills required to reestablish stability in our communities. My mission is to work through heavy issues in conversation and process in order to lighten the load. I acknowledge that I live on the traditional territories of Treaty seven and Metis districts five and six. The treaties and self-governance agreements established by indigenous peoples are created to honour the laws of the land, maintain balance with nature, and give back to uphold reciprocal relationships. This knowledge and intention are what guide the Gravity Well conversations. I ask for genuine dialogue, real hearts, and openness to different perspectives. This is your invitation to find common ground with me. Positions taken by participants either individually or collectively do not necessarily represent those of the gravity well. This podcast is dedicated to the natural world, our children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and all future generations. The Gravity Well is on YouTube and streaming wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you see and hear, remember to like and subscribe.Good morning folks. I am very pleased to be welcoming back Bob Morrison to the studio. Bob has been working hard over the last few months to generate the second half of our series water in Southern Alberta. Much gratitude to you, Bob. Without you, this second half would not be happening. First of all, thank you for that.Bob:You’re welcome.Jenny:Yeah, I’m just going to quickly, we’ll run through where we’re at. We started this series in May of this year. We started with Professor Shannon Stunden Bower and special areas expert Jordan Christiansen. They discussed the history of irrigation with us. Then we discussed the impacts of resource extraction on water with limnologist, David Mayhood, Dr. Younes Alila, who’s a forestry expert and engineer and environmental law expert, expert Dave Unger. We learned about the Water Act and the water licence transfer system from Professor Arlene Kwasniak, a law professor, and Davin McIntosh, who’s a water transfer expert. We discussed the water cycle and modelling with Dr. Trisha Stadnik of the University of Calgary. We engaged with Watershed and Lake Stewardship current and former leaders, Mike Murray, Susan Ellis and Tim Romanow. We listened to Dryland, Irrigated, and Ranch land farmers, Dwight Popowich, Julian Vandenberg, and John Smith about the changes they’re seeing on the farming landscape.And then finally, I was joined by Markham Hislop to have a conversation with Derek Connick about the impacts of climate change or water on insurance. We have come a long way, and now we’re in the second half where we’re helping to help unwind all of what we learned and take it forward. I’m very pleased to, and I recommend you please have a look at those seven episodes as we dive into these next ones. Now I’m pleased to invite to the stage Dr. Brad Stelfox, who I’ll lead with. Brad has for more than 35 years, Brad has been a driving force in reshaping how Albertans and the world understand cumulative effects of land use. A scientist, educator, and thought leader, Dr. Stelfox, has dedicated his career to helping policy makers, industry leaders, and communities make informed decisions about environmental sustainability. His groundbreaking work has influenced land management across Alberta and beyond ensuring a balance between development and ecological integrity. Brad was also a guest on The Gravity Well podcast for episode two this year where we discussed the harms of coal mining in Southern Alberta. Welcome back, Brad.Brad:Thank you very much, and thanks for the invitation. Good to talk to both of you, Bob and Jenny.Jenny:Great, it’s greatly appreciated, Brad, your episode has been very popular. People really resonated with the thought about being somebody who’s been working in water and land use for decades and suffering the consequences of the average person not paying attention to these vital things that we do. Thank you very much. I’m really pleased to hear more from you today. And with that, I’m going to let Bob lead us off with some questions for you. Thank you.Bob:Great. Thanks, Jenny. No, we were hoping to hear from Brad first in terms of his experiences.Jenny:Oh, yeah, go ahead. Bob would like you to lead us off with some of your experiences, please.Brad:Okay. Well, I’m Albertan, born in Edmonton, but grew up west of Edmonton on a small ranch northwest of Stony Plain. Yeah, my university background is primarily as a zoologist at U of A. And I had an opportunity after my undergrad to go to East Africa and look at land use, particularly livestock and wildlife in Kenya where I lived for several years, and also set up a university campus and taught there and then came back to Canada and where my wife and I raised a family, had an opportunity to go down to Jackson Hole and work at the Teton Science School in Grand Teton National Park, looking at environmental relationships dynamics, primarily environmental education where I taught from basically six year old’s to 96 year old’s. That was thoroughly enjoyable. We moved back to Canada and that’s where I started working with the provincial government for a few years, heading up the Wildlife Ecology Program, then what was called the Alberta Environmental Centre, and then branched out on my own, starting to build some of the early cumulative effects models which tried to look at how a collection of overlapping land uses were reshaping the landscape of Alberta and other provinces.And that of course, led to some opportunities with my colleagues who really helped build some wonderful software to look at these relationships in countries like United States and Australia, parts of Europe, southeast Asia. That’s kept me busy over most of my career. Bob is looking at the interface between humans and their landscapes primarily through all the land uses that makes humans human, I guess.Jenny:Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’ll just offer that I saw you speak in Bragg Creek where you were showing just that how you would put road use and agriculture use and oil and gas and et cetera, et cetera, into these models to help us see how they add together and how they can cause what I would call deconstructive interference on the landscape.Brad:Right? Yeah, that’s a good way of describing it. Yeah, there’s a lot going on and Albert’s a very busy placeJenny:For sure. Okay, go for it, Bob.What are the gaps between different types of models generated?Bob (00:07:24):Okay, well let’s start off with modelling because you’ve done quite extensive mound of that. And there are economic models, there are water management models out there, there’s some, I gather environmental models in terms of what’s the impact of one thing or the other. We’re not doing well in some cases on political models in terms of how decisions should be made. Where are the gaps in terms of making all those models work together that you see?Brad:That’s a good question. I mean, I just say there’s just so many models out there and I think we as society, struggle with scale and how we relate these models together. There’s thousands of models that just deal with how water moves for the landscape or how wildlife walk through habitat or how people select the homes they live in or how our climate may change, whether it’s the next forecast or the next 12 hours or two weeks or next 18 decades. There’s an abundance of models out there. I think one of the historical problems that we as modellers have had is in linking effectively social, economic and environmental models together. And our particular focus with the work that I’ve done and with the colleagues that I’ve worked with is trying to help people understand at a strategic scale that humans and their land uses all create benefits. They create social benefits. It could be, okay if we have a commercial logging operation area, what does this mean to royalties and rents in that area that might help fund all sorts of infrastructure that’s critical to the community or just build a community of people that are making adequate money so that they can live together and have community. Those are examples very roughly of social benefits. Other people for any given area want to know how land uses create economic benefits. Again, the jobs, the royalties, the rents, how does this contribute to GDP?And those things are critically important. And I think most probably of listeners have heard of tryout approaches that are trying to help people understand the social, the economic and environmental effects. What we’ve tried to do is a good strategic job of quantifying social dynamics, economic dynamics, but mainly try to focus on how do land uses affect natural capital or environmental variables. The landscape habitat, carbon in the soil, the wildlife themselves or populations, biodiversity water, both quality and quantity, and help people understand that all land uses, I guess without exception, create benefits, social and economic benefits. I don’t know of any exception to that. They also create liabilities. Where we think a lot of historic models may be struggle a little bit is that they don’t do a good job of highlighting the trade-offs, the liabilities. My personal belief is too many models that are used by industry and government are looking for win-win win scenarios.We’re going to have all the force we sector logging and energy and mining and agriculture, whether it be livestock or crops and recreation settlements. And if we’re wise about it, we are not going to compromise water quality or water quantity or biodiversity or carbon. And I don’t know of any examples on earth historically where that’s the case. It’s all about trade offs and many governments, and I think the current administration in Alberta is basically spun a narrative that smart people with smart models can figure out how we can have it all and we can’t. Our modelling approach has been to help people understand that there are trade-offs and that Alberta or any other jurisdiction needs to figure out what their priorities are and to make hard decisions about where are we going to get our jobs from, where are we going to produce our food?Where are we going to get our wood fiber from? How important is water? And if so, where are we going to get it from? Same with biodiversity. And instead what I’m seeing is a hyper exponential growth in almost all land uses and a narrative message from much of industry and certainly government that if we’re just careful about this, we can do it all and have it all, or in fact, we can’t. Any objective examination of the quality and quantity of water in Alberta today compared to when this place became a province in 1905 or biodiversity or soil carbon shows an absolutely profound loss of natural capital. Clearly we traded off a lot, and I think the rate at which we’re trading off what remains, what little remains is alarmingly fast. Yeah, just a few thoughts on modelling. Anyway, wellJenny:Now…Bob:Go ahead, Jenny.Jenny:Oh, I was just going to reflect back a little bit of what I heard. From what I’m seeing, and you and I have talked about, I’m a liability expert as well, and the first rule I’ve learned is we don’t talk about liability as much as possible. This is part of the problem is we’re not accounting for those genuine risks to a continued freshwater source if we continue to take more than the system can allow. That’s what I think you’re describing. Is that correct, Brad, that we are taking more from the system in Alberta that will allow for the water and biodiversity to recover? Is that a good summary?Brad:Yeah, land use, I have no problem with logging and mining and oil and gas and people and residential patterns and recreation. As long as we have people we’re going to have land use. The problem is the number of people that we have has grown quickly and the average significantly normal human, they’re per capita resource use. Just looking at the three of us compared to our parents or our grandparents or our great grandparents, the water, the carbon, the land, the electricity, our footprint is large compared to previous generations. The basic equation is number of people times per capita resource equals true effects. And as Jenny indicated clearly is with so much of the historical work we have, I think intentionally externalized natural capital, there is this trade off and we do not factor it in. And if we’re going to have people, we’re going to have land use, we will be using carbon, we will be using water where there will be losses of biodiversity, and those systems can support a certain amount, we could call out the interest, but we’re not taking water away at any sort of natural interest rate.We are profoundly cutting into the capital. We’re literally choosing what this province has been around 120 years. I guess this year we have a profound loss in the capital of biodiversity. I think many Albertans would be amazed to know that pre-European times, if you just looked at mammals, they probably native mammals. That would be all mammals except for humans or pets and livestock that yeah, they’d probably, yeah, we’re not doing as well as we were say three, 400 years ago because three or 400 years ago, they were like 99.2% of all biomass or numbers. In Alberta, there were people, first nations and they had dogs.Most people would say, yeah, we’re down, but we’re not down to 90% of, or 80 or 70 or 60 or 50 or 40 or 30 or 20. And a lot of people in Alberta would say, if you’ve got friends in Argentina or Germany, come over to Alberta. It’s this beautiful natural place. And maybe biodiversity or wildlife would be part of the attraction to bring them over. But we’re not down. It’s not like we have 90% of what we had and we’re not down at 30%. We’re not down at 20% of, we’re not even down at 10% today we’re maybe 4% of what we had pre-European. And the severely normal Albertan doesn’t get it. Part of it is shifting baselines because this stuff, we’ve been losing it at maybe one and a half percent per annum. Very few people effectively see these one and a half percent changes per annum.And of course we have some biodiversity, maybe white-tailed deer or coyotes that are doing really well. But on mass, we just wiped out our native biodiversity and replaced it with humans and livestock and pets, and we’ve largely lost our natural capital and water, both quality and quantity. I mean, the water we have today is just unbelievably different. Qualitatively, many parents that want to throw their kids into creeks today, they get quite sick, especially in the southern half of the province and most of our creeks and the prairies, they’re just gone. I mean, they’ve been ploughed over and put into canals for irrigation. This goes back to what Jenny said is all land uses require the use of natural capital. We externalize it. We don’t factor it into long-term equations because for the most part, Albertans and their governments are, they’re me here now type of people. I’m an Albertan and most of my friends are Albertans. I love Albertans. But our actions tell us that we’re not really concerned about our kids or our grandkids. We’re concerned about ourselves, and we’re not concerned about regional landscapes, we’re concerned about where we live, and it’s a me here now type of mentality, which is fundamentally externalized natural capital. We have grown economically, unbelievably, we have very affluent people, but in a province that has been mined of most of its natural capital and all evidence is that we’re going to accelerate that rate.Where are we in the most trouble with respect to land use?Bob (00:18:34):Well, most of us see natural capital and biodiversity and all those things. When we go to a park, we go out to the mountains, we go out to Banff, we go to our local park and walk around and say, oh, isn’t this wonderful? Where are in the southern part of the province? Where are we most in trouble? If you compare, say the mountains to the foothills, to the parkland areas we have to the prairies, where are we having the greatest problems from what you can see?Brad:Well, that’s a good question. I would suggest, I would think about it in terms of, let’s say if you’ve got a bank account full of natural capital, whether it be water quality or water quantity or biodiversity or soil carbon. In southern Alberta, there is a very noticeable gradient from west high elevation to east low elevation hard. I guess the good news is we’re not losing a lot in the eastern lowland parts because it’s already empty. There’s nothing to lose. Okay? If you have a bank account, you got a hundred pennies in it, and two weeks ago you ain’t gotten any more money in that bank account. I don’t think you’re worried about losing anything because nothing to lose. The biodiversity of the water quality, the water quantity in the lower eastern portions of Alberta is gone. I’m not too worried about losing a lot there.The only way we could move is to talk about how we could reclaim it, and then people will point to an individual species of a bird or a mammal or reptile that’s doing reasonably well. And yeah, that’s true. But if you look across the board, the full communities, whether it be insects or birds, mammals, amphibians in these landscapes that have been heavily transformed by agriculture, water quality, water quantity, and biodiversity is basically gone. The ones that are at greatest risk right now, I would argue are the foothills and the mountains where we seem to have this attitude that we want to love them to death, we want to recreate in them. We’ve got this human population that’s growing at 2% and quite affluent, and they want to recreate in motorized and non-motorized ways. We have a protected areas network still quite small in many ways, larger than other people’s landscapes and others going from Waterton, Kananaskis, Banff, and Jasper, there’s places to go.Those places are full of land use, but they’re primarily recreational. Although there’s a lot of residential too. If you think of places like Banff, Kananaskis has got a lot of residential. We have a bow wave of rural, residential and acreage owners like what I used to do or I used to live. These landscapes in many ways are critical. It comes back to us soon. One of the key topics of this interview, which is water. I dunno, what I think this province gets must be seven, 800 billion cubic meters of water fall on it every year, and about three quarters of that evaporates. It’s not available for land use, it’s back in the atmosphere. And we probably have 130 to 150 billion cubic meters that will flow in streams and rivers or slowly in our aquifers, and then we use some of that. But that water, which in all lands require water, we have a part of Alberta in the southwest part where it’s high in elevation and it’s colder, and a good chunk of that precipitation falls in the form of snow and it accumulates through these winter months.It gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then in the spring it warms up and we have this fertile discharge of water, and that is critical to our fish, our wildlife, and also our land use. And southern Alberta, we’ve got logging and we’ve got agriculture, both crops and livestock and mining and oil and gas and transportation and residential. We’ve got it all and they all need water. And those east slopes are absolutely critical. And it seems like somehow Albertans have forgot their original conversation with the federal government when those resources transferred to us as a province, which everyone back then knew in the absence of all the amazing science we have today from the Pomeroy’s and Sauchyn’s and others of just how important these slopes are to water. Yeah, they’re there. It’s an important land use, just let ‘em be, let them do their dynamics, let them accumulate that water, leave the organics in the soil so that some of that water can be absorbed and replenish aquifers and allow them to deliver profound quantities of high quality water for downstream land uses. And now we are incrementally eroding that with every time we put more acreages or more roads or more people hiking that pee and poop in that landscape and more cattle.But in architectural sense, we have all of this logging that is profoundly changing the hydrology of that area and its infiltration rates. We’re just treating these slopes as some sort of bank account we want to draw down in one generation, and we are drawing it down, it is being destroyed at a stunning rate at the same time, probably no more than maybe one point a half percent per year. Then if you’ve got a hundred pennies in your bank account and someone takes out one point a half, next year you’ve got 98.5, the average severely normal, Albertan doesn’t detect that, and on it goes, but over a few generations it’s all gone. And we’re mining it down so quickly right now, in my view anyway.How can ranching be viable in a water limited Southern Alberta?Bob:And I know in terms of ranching, and you came from a ranch originally, that there are many ranchers who would say, yeah, we agree, but tell us what to do and make sure that we can still survive as ranchers. How do you somehow accomplish that with a land use that’s already established? How do you make sure that those folks can still be viable unless you’re going to kick them off the land and still be able to protect the environment in the way that they would like to protect it?Brad:Well, I think first you admit if you believe in an empirical world in science, that it’s not protected now. It’s not a matter of we need to protect it for something that’s coming. We’re already dealing with something that is being profoundly transformed. Your questions still bang on Bob. I think you need to recognize that that landscape can receive some land use. The first thing is, what should the east slopes before? I mean, maybe their destiny is we just log the heck out of them because we as Albertans can just accept completely damaged water quality. Okay, that’s a decision I guess, in a society if they want to make that decision. And others would say, well, no, it’s priority land use as oil and gas or cattle or recreation or coal. But right now the answer is we think it can sustain all of it and it can’t.A blunt conversation like the Alberta Land Stewardship Act was designed to do, which is recognizing that we need landscape legislation that says you can’t do everything everywhere all the time, the time. You need to figure out what the priorities of the landscapes are. And of course, in the East slopes, and even Elsa said, that’s a great example, it’s for watershed protection. And then you could ask the question of what land uses can occur. If you did that, then I think the answer would be what land uses could be compatible with water quality and water quantity because there’s no part of Alberta that gives us more water quality and quantity than southwest Alberta. And then you could look at cattle and crops and logging and mining and rural residential in that context. If we’re losing it already, I think the first thing we need to do is stand back and say, we’re already in trouble. We have to start looking at reclaiming these landscapes, and we have to instead of growing, because all these land uses are growing, like logging is a land use that even though I think it’s over allocated, it’s growing. We’re finding ways…Jenny:At an accelerated, right? It’s accelerated growth, not just growing. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Keep going.Brad:It is, yeah. And we already have a bow wave of rural residents that are living up and down the east slopes, and that’s growing. And we have an oil and gas sector, and many people would like to see it grow. Coal mining would be an example. We could conceivably mine commercially valuable deposits of coal right up the east slopes. That’s an area that has been seriously entertained. As everyone in Alberta knows, in recreation, we could say, well, we need another 15 or 20 Canmore that be wonderful, and we could increase the number of livestock on it. If it were me, I would say what land uses would be compatible with water quality and quantity? Then those are different things. Some land uses agriculture is massive on the water use side. And I would say I’m quite impressed by many, not all, but many of the local ranchers who do a pretty good job of putting cattle on these foothill landscapes and keeping ‘em out of streams and keeping their densities low.And they’re there and encouraging native grasses and the soil dynamics that let water infiltrate, but not all of ‘em. Many do. But those cattle, like the others in Alberta, I think we’ve got about four or 5 million head of cattle. They all go to feedlot systems. And those feedlots need, well, every cow needs to eat two and a half percent of its body weight per day. And they’re not getting that from feeding on any field. They’re in feedlots. They get that from literally tens of millions of hectares of cropland that are grown, much of it even on the irrigation side, which needs water. I’m a pretty big advocate of sustainable cattle ranching. I’m not a big advocate of feedlot systems, but our livestock system in Alberta is, I’d say entirely based on feedlots, at least in terms of number of animals that are processed well over 98% and tremendous water.We have the cattle ranchers going, we need feedlots, we need good quality water, let’s not damage it upstream. I get that. But they’re by far the biggest users. And then of course, irrigated crops for humans too. That’s a lot of humans. I would be looking at what land uses can exist and more importantly, how to conduct them. And I think quickly you’d start looking at logging and forestry and say, well, first of all, I think we’d back up the eastern slopes in their forest. These are disturbance ecosystems. There’s nothing wrong with disturbance. Ever since glacial ice sheets retreated, what, 14,000 years ago, these systems have been kicked in the midsection regularly by fire, by insects, by floods, by droughts. There’s nothing wrong with disturbances, and we still have them. And because of climate change, we’re actually radically changing the intensity and the frequency of natural disturbances.It’s now an anthropogenic system. That’s a problem in and of itself. But in addition to that, we have all these land uses, which are disturbances. The disturbances are additive. It’s not like we’ve removed natural disturbances and just put human made ones on. We are logging at a very high intensity. We need roads to get up there. It’s causing immense amount of sediment, which is going into our streams. Bigger streams, bigger streams, yet rivers and downstream, we are removing so much carbon, the amount of carbon that’s being able to decompose and maintain organics and soils is going down. We’re doing a poor job of holding and absorbing and replenishing that water into aquifers. Logging, there’s just too much of it. And we’re not conducting best management practices, even though the fourth sector and the government would say we are, I think there’s often a fairly good agreement as to what best management practices should be in terms of, for example, how many residual green trees should be left in cut blocks, how big cut blocks should be?What is the rotation age? How far back from large creeks and rivers should we go before we log anything? Our practices in reality are different than the best management practices on paper. And then best management practices, I would say are essentially useless if industry doesn’t actually implement them. And if there isn’t an enforcement to monitor, then you don’t have a good system. We have a lot of logging, but when I look at it, it is not configured in a way that fundamentally respects the value of water. And I mean just the number of roads, the number of crossings, the number of hung culverts, the amount of sediment getting into it, the shift in reduction in our age class structure, and the changes in biodiversity. That’s just be an example of one land use that could be conducted in slopes, but I would say at far lower rates and with fundamentally different practices.And the same with mining if you want mining, but why would you put mines at the headwaters, these water towers that everyone realizes nothing’s more important than water. Why would we want any land you said is going to interfere with the quality of water in these headwaters? And why would we let off highway vehicles up there? Why would we allow in municipal lands, acreage owners to build right on parent habitat? First of all, it’s a liability for them and floods. And secondly, those landscapes are critical to flood dynamics, and they need to be allowed to do their own thing. What I would suggest, Bob, is a bottom up by a physical strategy that recognizes these ecological processes and say, okay, how much disturbance can they take? What land uses could we fit in? And how much of them, and in the east slopes, I just can’t imagine where we’d be more careful with those discussions than there I would think.Bob:Well, wasn’t that the purpose of the Eastern Slopes policy back in the 1970s?Brad:Yeah,What is the land’s carrying capacity and in what direction do we need to go?Bob (00:34:33):Okay, what’s our carrying capacity and where should things go?Brad:There were a bunch of thought leaders. I called ‘em the Lorne Fitch’s and Cheryl Bradley’s of the world who back then, of course, those two were part of those conversations and people could very clearly see the degradation in natural capital. It was occurring on e slopes. There was some very progressive encouraging discussion about the role of e slopes and that what we could do or couldn’t do. But at the same time, Alberta is a, for the most part, pretty right-leaning, economic driven. This is a province where we need to see our economy grow rapidly. Land uses need to expand so we can attract risk capital and we can get high profit margins. And I mean, just look at the land uses we have today in Alberta, whether it be forestry, energy, agriculture, transportation, residential recreation, or I don’t know, whatever.Today they’re all, if you read their business plans of either industry or government, they’re all unacceptable today to their own sectors and why they’re all unacceptably too small. They all have to grow, and they’ve all experienced exponential growth, but they’re unacceptable. You look at their five or 10 or 20 year pounds, they all, no one says, we’re going to hold our own. We’re all going to grow. It was against that backdrop that those early discussions on the East Slope said, okay, we just can’t allow that to happen. But we’ve had a series of governments that said, we’re smarter than the rest of humans on earth. We can make it all. We can have our cake and eat it too. We can have win-win, win win, win win scenarios. Just because we’re so smart, we can put another 300,000 residential homes and right here habitat, and as long as we do it well, there won’t be a problem.We can put another 15 coal mines into the headwaters of the East slope. And as long as they all adopt best managed practice, there’s no problem. We can put more cattle, we can mine these landscapes for gravel. We can have rural residential urban sprawl. It’s just, nothing’s going to be adversely affected because we’re just so damn smart. And the evidence suggests that there’s no truth to that at all. But it’s a great mantra, civilian norm, Albertan goes, yeah, that’s what being an Albertan is. We’re just smarter than everyone. And how else could I buy my fourth pickup unless this whole system continues to grow. The whole system is based on this insufferable, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow and solve at the expense of natural capital. If we can do that elsewhere, we can certainly do it for the East Slopes sickness.Land Stewardship Laws (aka the Laws of Nature)Jenny (00:37:26):I’m wondering, Brad, if you can unpack a little bit, you touched on something that is obviously very close to my heart, which is the land use management programs. I would describe that work. I had a view of it when I was in the industry and we were looking at, I’ll say, I’ll be specific. We were looking at caribou habitats and we were looking at restoring those habitats by 2060. And part of the issue with those conversations I saw is that it’s very, what does that mean for humans? We hear this concept of species at risk, and I understand it to be that’s an indication of ecological health. And if those species are intact, then your ecological system is intact. That’s a very, I would say for the average Albertan, that’s not really something that is resonates with them. I’m going to share a short story. I was at the water and land conference for the Athabasca Fort Chippewan First Nation in September, and they were talking about indigenous land rights, like access to traditional ways of living. But the challenge I see when you talk about biodiversity losses, we’ve also had indigenous community losses as well. I look at, and I’m curious how you would describe this, Brad, because I look at all of us living in a basin should really think about having those traditional land access to those traditional land rights. Meaning if we don’t have caribou, then there isn’t a sustainable land, or sorry, a sustainable food system, let’s say, in our watershed. And I would say the same thing for trout species. That’s another example of species at risk where, that to me is the purpose of those. And I think that’s often lost on people that when we talk about species at risk, we’re ultimately talking about the human species being at risk. And you already talked about how we are overstretched right now. We’re not in a position where we have this option to say, well, let’s just keep going. We are keeping going, but it’s going to lead to catastrophe, meaning we will have a breakdown in our water system. I’m thinking of, I’ll be specific around Lethbridge, we just heard Chris Spearman explain that we’ve got piped water a hundred meters around Lethbridge, the same thing in Edmonton since the spill that was experienced in Wabamun Lake and Two Hills all the way out to those areas.That’s 150 kilometer radius around Edmonton that is sustained by Edmonton’s water system. These are the ways that we have taken more from the bank account than we can sustain, which will lead to catastrophe ultimately if we do not make restoration the center of our economy. Is that a fair summary of what you’re arguing? We need to look at these land uses and say, which are the things that need to cease and which are the things that we can sustain in a way that will serve us both locally? And I don’t even know if globally will be an option if we do let it break. I don’t know if you can sort of clarify what I said here in terms of how do we help people understand what it means to be restoring and what that looks like in terms of those difficult conversations.Brad:The Alberta Land Stewardship Act, and I can’t even remember when it came out, I want to say 15, 20 years ago, it seems like yesterday it was on the bus piece of legislation that was supposed to ride over top of all other types of legislation and crystallize precipitate the conversation, Jenny, you just talked about. And it started it. But I think once, and I saw a fair bit of appetite for it at the community level or for the severely normal Albertan. But I think once industry and government understood that that conversation would lead to, Hey, we have to stop growing the total amount of water. We take out the total number of cubic meters of wood. We harvest the total amount of cubic meters of natural gas or conventional or shale gas or whatever that we extract that there needs to be a limit maybe on our livestock population.People started, some people said, well, you know what, this could mean that we need a limit on number of people. And everyone got, oh my God, who said that? It became a very awkward conversation and the initial efforts within the land use framework to do this work well and show the trade-offs were just politically, they’re just non palatable. And I also saw, and unfortunately I think I detected that people could have that conversation theoretically, but in their own watershed, and of course it’s another person, people Albertan say, when I’m in the watershed, there’s never been an Albertan’s ever got out of the watershed. We’re always in the watershed, should remind ourselves. But anyway, when you start talking about people’s individual watersheds, it could be the upper bow or it could be Red Deer or Athabasca, that there needs to be trade-offs in terms of growth opportunities, in terms of the primary resource sectors.People became very quiet and would ask, well, what does this mean to the funds coming into my municipality or my job, or maybe even the performance of their investments in the stock market? It just reminded me in a very sobering way that this is a fundamentally difficult, maybe impossible conversation for humans. Only a very small fraction of them seem to be able to be willing to actually change their behaviour today to not only stop the growth of these land uses, but as Jenny was saying, how do we put money and effort and time into reclaiming them so that we might have streams in the future, which are the ones that our grandparents talked about putting their kids in or drinking water that is not treated chemically or physically or being able to see the suite of wildlife.I’ll just say we’ve lost 96% of our native wildlife, native mammals and birds are very similar insects. We really don’t know. We’re sitting at with a grade of F minus right now. Maybe we want to reclaim it back to a C. Well, that would take tens of billions of dollars. And most people, they might think it’s a good idea in theory, but the effort and the money, they’re going, no, my primary concerns are the flame’s going to win tonight, and what kind of pizza am I going to order? More important things like that. People struggle with this conversation, immense thatHow do we address the most damaged lands?Bob (00:44:54):Well, you’ve hit upon two things there that are very much interconnected. First of all, can people actually manage their land the way they probably should, at least in terms of their own self-interest and also in terms of the overall societal good? And the whole question of in floodplain management, they talk about a strategic retreat from floodplains that is, we’re already developed these floodplains. How do we somehow get the worst potential damaged areas out in terms of the land use? And I know that after the Calgary flood, the provincial government actually did go in and buy out some of the most threatened properties just so that we could at least reduce some of the impact. And you’ve hit upon this whole question of how do you get people to understand that and then be able to willingly talk about those non palatable at this point?Brad:Yeah.Bob:Well, that is what, are you enough of a sociologist as opposed to a zoologist to be able to answer that question?Brad:Well, I was one of those guys that had my house severely damaged by that flood living in Sunnyside in Calgary at the time. Isn’t it interesting, and I’ve heard estimates that that was the single most expensive catastrophe in the history of Alberta in terms of the total cost. Some people said it was 4 billion, I think it was 9 billion. Anyway, it was a major one, just inconvenienced a lot of people and destroyed a lot of floodplain infrastructure. And yeah, there’s some of it, maybe 2% that’s been removed since then. But isn’t it interesting after that event, I would bet anyone that for every house or piece of infrastructure that’s been removed from floodplains, and we’re not talking about Alberta, but just southern Alberta, I would say it’s a 10 to one ratio. We’re building 10 for every one we’ve reclaimed. That event has had no effect.All you have to do is hop in a car and start driving up and down not only the main stem rivers, but the smaller trips on the elbow and Bragg Creek and Sheep Creek, and just look at all the new driveways and new well pads or cut block access roads that are going up and down riparian. I have seen no evidence of a reduction in the amount of infrastructure in the province of Alberta going into floodplains despite this teeny meanie, teeny little 8 billion flood that happened in Calgary once upon a time. Now that was, I’m trying to use hyperbole here, hopefully effectively, but that was an event some people should have heard about or experienced. Maybe they saw it in the news, but it was just way too small an event to get anyone interested in doing anything than try to mitigate it by saying the solution isn’t getting out of the floodplain. The solution is paying TransAlta to manage water volume so that they don’t release water or to build a big or dam face on the Glenmore or to have off river storage like SR one outside of Bragg Creek. The answer is to tame mother nature not to get our infrastructure out of the flood plane.What will collapse look like?Jenny (00:48:42):Right? We’re still solving the infrastructure or over land use problem with more land use solutions.One of the questions I have then, because like you said, we’re refusing to have this conversation, let’s put it that way. We’ve decided that we’re going to keep burning the flame at both ends and keep going with this. From your experience, from your knowledge, Brad, where do you think the areas will show up first? I’ll be specific. I look at any natural gas, oil sands, coal mining, gravel mine sites and know that they are at the worst quality for the highest damage to the ecology going forward. The cost to extract them is getting so expensive for the reward that it is just not valuable, add that the rest of the world is now rapidly moving into renewables, that demand is also falling as well. To me, those are some of the ways that I think that this conversation will be forced upon Albertans. Let’s say from your understanding of, as you were talking about from example feedlots, is that a place where you anticipate will be where we will see a breakdown? Can you say from, you talked about scale from a scale perspective, can you highlight the areas where you think Alberta might feel the pinch and be forced to move in a more restorative manner, if you will?Brad:I remain stunned that Albertans don’t respond to the signals they see, and we can pick on any land use, but Jenny, you just talked about feedlots. Let’s look at those. And it goes up and down year to year, decade to decade. But often we have around 4 million ahead of cattle, and we generally have, we’ve recently grown into Ford of approaching 5 million head of humans in this province too. But they outweigh us, I think probably six to one, and all our cattle with very rare exception go through feedlots. And on the provincial herd, about 25, 20 5%, about one out of every four cows or beef. Are you going to go into a feedlot in any given year? Okay, we’re processing one and a half million head per year in feedlots. That’s more cattle biomass than we have the whole weight of all humans in this province.And those animals need good water. The ranching community and rightfully so, says, I’m really concerned about what’s going on upstream. It might be like, I don’t want coal mining happening because of selenium, and those are very legitimate concerns. But if anyone wants to just go out and look at the quality of water coming into feedlots and the quality of water leaving feedlots, you’d be stunned. It’s already, we’ve lost it. And that is especially in feedlot alley. And of course we’ve literally got tens of thousands of lots in Alberta, depending on their scale. Of course, we’ve got the big ones that can hold 20, 30,000 animals, but we’ve got so many smaller ones too. But the water quality that exits to the east moving downstream out of feedlots is just, in my view, horrible. And the watershed report cards tell us that, but they \say, you know what?It’s holding its own or it hasn’t deteriorated. But I mean, if you’ve got a D minus, there’s not much lower. You can go in a report card, right? And the severely normal Albertan just accepts that. If I was from Saskatchewan, I might wonder why the water is not very good, and they should, and I think they do. But we already have this massive degradation of water quality, whether it be sediment or organics or pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, growth hormones. The whole cornucopia is there. Myself, I’d go, I’m pro livestock, I think we should have a livestock sector. I think we should have a lot of ranch gate or farm gate sale of cattle. I think we should significantly reduce the population. I don’t think it’s Alberta’s job to feed every human, but when you talk to the Alberta Cattle Commissions or Alberta beef producers are going to go, yeah, there’s 9 billion people on earth and the population’s growing.We have a responsibility. And you walk out of that door and you go into the next door and there’s all the oil and gas people and say, well, they’ve got 8 billion people and we’re cooking nine and their per capita demand for hydrocarbons growing. We have a responsibility, an ethical, maybe even a religious responsibility to energize these people. And the same with coal, and the same with everything. And there’s 9 billion people, and I represent the tourism boards. I want them all visiting the headwaters of the bow every day because my goodness, our province is beautiful. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’d become wealthy, and of course it would be no adverse effect. And it goes on and on and on. The problem isn’t the land uses per se, it’s just the intensity and the amount and the province of Alberta hasn’t changed by a square centimeter in area. It’s the same province it was in 1905, but the land use has gone up by multiple orders of magnitude. It goes back that base equation, total number of people times per capita resource use. Whether it be water or distance travelled or carbon or food or oil and gas, it’s just we’re using, whether looking at Bob or Jenny or Brad, if we were average Albertans, we’re using probably seven or eight times as much resource per capita as our grandparents.And the province hasn’t changed at all in size. Oh.Bob:Brad,Brad:I couldn’t hear you, Jenny.Bob:Brad, in terms of the extensive experience you’ve had, where have you seen successes and in terms of people being willing to first of all talk about these non palatable and be able to actually do something about it?Brad:Well, I don’t think I have a very encouraging response to that important question where in my own experience where I’ve seen communities with tremendous commitment actually doing something would probably be the ole region of India, where I worked for a bit in an area that allowed all their land uses to grow, and particularly fueled by more water because they over the previous decades had discovered the ability to drill their aquifers. It was an area that was basically low intensity agriculture, sustainable been going on for probably thousands of years. And then foreign aid from Canada and Europe and the United States came in and said, you know what? If you guys could just start using borehole, you’d be much better off. Tens of thousands of bore holes go in, food production goes up, population explodes. Yeah, family size goes down, but youth survivorship explodes up. Populations are growing now at four and 5%.Aquifers get drained, crops fail, people starve, but you can’t, when you’re starving, you’ll eat whatever’s around. They ate everything they could. Vegetation was gone, no vegetation. The soils got eroded and it went back to rock. And then it was in the aftermath of that, and others were invited into Look at that. And I saw people committed to doing something, and I thought, wow, I couldn’t imagine a more blunt signal. Basically everyone that anyone knew was dead, and my goodness, these people were committed. Now at this point, they’re dealing with rock. They wanted rock to turn into soil, and they wanted soil to turn into vegetation, and they thought vegetation could be eaten by humans, and then they are working. They have people out on the ground working with particles of soil just to try and move this particle here so that maybe a water droplet might stay there for six seconds, not two. I saw immense commitment. Now, I don’t think there’s any hyperbole in that narrative, but the point I’m trying to make is I’m stunned at how bad s**t has to be before anyone seems to go beyond rhetoric and want to do something about it. But those people were actually serious.Jenny:Right. It’s fascinating. Like you said, how low do we have to go before we finally change? And yeah, it seems like we aren’t there yet, at least in Southern Alberta. We’re still going to play this game. But I do think that those pressures are coming, Brad, I don’t know how they’re accumulating, if you will. It is different pressures from different areas that will potentially lead to one of these catastrophes. Like you said, when we had our conversation about water transfers with Davin Macintosh, the one example he used where the fit for allocation system broke was in a feedlot. That was the precise example he used that there was not enough water to provide for them who were lower licence or lower ranking in the fit for model, and therefore the ranchers had to make those trade-offs to make sure that those feedlots were able to sustain themselves. I definitely think those types of situations are the things that we should be looking for as those big signals that something is needed rapidly. If you wereBrad:Those scenarios, Jenny, I’d be curious how well are those scenarios embracing the full suite of what if scenarios on climate change and looking at the probability of intensity and duration of droughts? Because the ones that I’ve looked at are looking at some variances, but not the kind of variances that I think are reasonable relative to the work of Bill Donahue and David Schindler and Dave Shan. Tell us about the magnitude and intensity of droughts that we’re likely to experience. We’ve been unbelievably secure in our water for many decades, and that’s in a non climate change scenario. We have every good reason to expect that we’re going to be dealing with a whole lot less water in the future just because of natural dynamics. It should reappear plus all the climate change scenarios, and we’re building a demand complex in Southern Alberta that is highly unlikely to be met by the future water availability we’re going to encounter, I think.Jenny:Right.Bob:Go ahead.Jenny:I was just going to… Go ahead, Bob.Bob:We’ll be talking to Dave Sauchyn in a future podcast. Good. I think it’s next week, or maybe it’s this week. I don’t rememberKey TakeawaysJenny (01:01:03):Any closing comments that you wanted to offer, Bob, and then maybe a last question for Brad before we set him free. Thank you so much for joining us. Go ahead, Bob. Brad:Your welcome, thanks for the questions. Bob:Thank you, Brad. It’s been very, very informative. Very great discussion. Do you have any hope that we can get around this problem where we need to maybe even get into Degrowth rather than growth exponentially?Brad:I think I’d answer this question differently today than maybe 10 years, but I think unless Albertans and more broadly Canadians want to have a heart to heart about not only the benefits but the liabilities of growth economies, I don’t know how we rationalize the fact that economies need to grow and deal with environmental issues. I think we have to rethink our economic models if we want to see a pragmatically helpful discussion on how to manage natural capital because a continuous growth economy, I don’t see examples where it’s effectively internalizing natural capital, maybe in words, but not in practice,Jenny:Right? Yeah, I mean, we decided that growth and that the oil standard was our economic backbone, and we can decide that water is, and that could be our focus. It’s certainly something that I think we need to come to grips with as a country, and specifically as you said, as Albertans in Southern Alberta, we have to cherish those eastern slopes and start fighting for their restoration. To me, that is the 80 20 rule. If we can get after that and make sure that we are preserving that sacred area, then we have a hope of restoring the rest of it too. Is that true?Brad:I wouldn’t disagree. I think that would be a good per step, and I don’t think that’s it’s anti economy. It’s just like let’s define an economic model that actually makes sense and perhaps does a good job of allowing our great, great grandchildren to have a healthy lifestyle in a landscape that has some reasonable natural capital. Because right now, the prospects I think are indeed poor.Jenny:Yeah. Well, I am committed to making sure people understand this and moving us forward. Thank you so much for joining us today, Bob. Thank you, Bob. Sorry, Brad. Thank you, Bob, for getting this going for us. I’m really pleased to be back in conversations around water and I look forward to hearing the rest of them. Just lastly, please remember to and subscribe to The Gravity Well, make sure that these important conversations do have a broader reach for the precious time that Brad offered us today. Thank you so much, Brad, and have a good rest of your day everyone.Brad:You guys too. And thank you so much. Take care. Thanks. 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