Coal mining on the environmentally sensitive slopes of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains would not be of an overall benefit to the province, a comprehensive analysis from the University of Calgary concluded.
“The net economic benefit is minimal,” said Jennifer Winter, an economist at the university’s school of public policy.
“When you compare that to the fairly significant impacts to wildlife, to the natural landscape, to other economic activities, Alberta is not interested in continuing.”
Winter and his colleagues took a different approach to their analysis than a strict cost-benefit breakdown. He said they tried to go beyond weighing wages earned and taxes paid to examine overall economic, social and environmental impacts.
“In many of these project evaluations, there is a great emphasis on economic impacts because we have numbers to attach to,” he said. “It is much more holistic to look at these other impacts and identify not only that there are impacts, but who would be specifically affected.”
The analysis, released Wednesday, considers the impacts of a hypothetical open pit coal mine built on land that is now considered environmentally sensitive. Much of the technical information was drawn from recent hearings, which rejected the Grassy Mountain coal mine proposal for the Rocky Mountains.
Using the most recent figures for the steelmaking coal price and market projections, the paper concludes that the hypothetical mine would be marginally profitable – around $ 140 million over the life of the mine. Taking a higher cost of capital into account could even make you a $ 72 million loser.
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The report estimates that total wages over the life of the mine would be around $ 35 million, most of which would remain in the coal mining region.
Against this, the report tries to weigh the environmental and social impacts.
“We can’t necessarily monetize them, but it’s very important to discuss them,” Winter said.
A broad analysis finds overall negative impacts of #CoalMining in the Rockies. #ABPoli # Rocky Mountains
“We are not trying to arrive at a single bottom line. We are trying to decide whether these impacts are significant enough to outweigh the potential economic benefits.”
Those impacts, the report says, affect all Albertans, while the benefits are more closely concentrated.
“Private benefits are concentrated on the project proponent; any increase in tax revenue is marginal given the size of Alberta’s economy, and any incremental labor income is captured by a few people employed by the hypothetical mine,” the report concludes. . “In contrast, negative environmental and social impacts would affect a much larger population.”
Mining companies said it was not fair to draw conclusions about real-life projects using hypothetical models.
“The paper focuses on a theoretical mine that is completely different and irrelevant to the Grassy Mountain Project,” said an email from Jackie Woodman, spokesperson for Grassy Mountain proponent Benga Mining.
Each project offers unique opportunities and problems and should be evaluated as such, he said. His company’s project, for example, would have cleaned up the impacts of old mines and had broad First Nations support.
Alberta Prime Minister Jason Kenney said the document ignored the impacts on coal mining communities.
“I think it’s important to look at the human dimension of this,” Kenney said. “I would invite anyone who wrote that newspaper to come and have coffee with a family of coal miners.”
New Democratic environmental critic Marlin Schmidt said that’s a false promise.
“The prime minister must know in which direction the world is going and prepare these families to take on the future. It is quite clear that there is no plan to help these families secure their economic future.”
He called the university study one more piece of evidence for an already compelling stack.
“This confirms what Albertans have been telling us for months.”
This Canadian Press report was first published on November 10, 2021.
– By Bob Weber in Edmonton.
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com