Site C Dam the Lesser Evil

(Aired on April 20, 2010)

The proposed Site C power dam in the Peace Country has already raised the hackles of environmentalists and First Nations, less than a day after it was announced by Premier Gordon Campbell yesterday. The controversy was expected, which is probably why the announcement was made in the back country where no one could invade the media hype.

But while the dam is controversial, let's remember a few things. It's not a fait accompli yet, and will require years of environmental study and consultation with First Nations. It will flood prime farmland. It will cost a lot of money. No question it will have a downside. But let's look at the upside. It will provide power for half a million homes, at a time when there are few alternatives. Short of nuclear power, which generates controversy hundreds of times greater than the hydro dam, there are no alternatives for the future. We can't go back to burning trees for heat and light, wind power and solar power are very limited in their potential, so what are the alternatives? We can reduce power consumption, and we should be trying to do as much of that as we can, but short of reducing the population growth, and spreading our growth further and further afield, there's little else to do. The dam is probably the best of a number of alternatives.

I'm not in favor of flooding farmland, but neither am I in favor of destroying even better farmland at the coast, but developers continue to spread out rather than up. We could save billions if we had housing concentrated in a smaller area, instead of eating up beautiful land that could grow our food supply.

We have so many double standards. First Nations complain about consultation, but they don't mind their own decisions on many issues without consulting us. Environmentalists worry about the dam, yet they still drive the old gas guzzling pickups around their farms, and probably use as much hydro as anyone else. Without some new revolutionary technology showing up somewhere down the road, projects like Site C are really the only way to provide energy for the future.