Author Archives: NBASGA

There are energy alternatives – the Tantramar RIGS project is not the answer

Commentary: Telegraph Journal – Dec. 18, 2025
By Lisa Griffin

A Sunday, December 14 Brunswick News article quoted Premier Susan Holt claiming there are “no alternatives” capable of meeting New Brunswick’s electricity needs by 2028. That statement is misleading and risks locking the province into an outdated, harmful decision that can still be avoided.

New Brunswickers want reliable power – but they also want clean air, protected wetlands, safe drinking water, and a future that does not mortgage public health for short-term convenience. These goals are not mutually exclusive. Suggesting that fossil-fuel peaker plants are the only solution is both inaccurate and irresponsible.

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Open Letter on the Centre Village Gas Plant project to Minister of Environment and Climate Change

On Nov 20th, Co-founders of Atlantic Wildlife Institute in Cookville, NB, along with founding members of the Stop The Tantramar Gas Plant group, accompanied by Tantramar MLA, Megan Mitton, traveled to Fredericton to meet with NB Minister of Environment and Climate Change Gilles LePage and his Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) team. They discussed our immediate concerns regarding the Centre Village (Tantramar) 500MW fossil fuel plant planned in the Chignecto Isthmus. Below is the follow up letter to Minister LePage, highlighting once again their concerns for this project. They’re demanding if not at least a full and comprehensive environmental assessment be done, but to fully cancel this project. Please read why this area – the Chignecto Isthmus – is of vital importance and must be saved from industrial development of this scale. The environmental and health effects will be irreversible.

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Opinion: Climate crisis demands no more fossil fuel projects … period

Tantramar gas plant proposal contradicts the imperative of reducing emissions and slowing temperature rise

by Jim Emberger • Telegraph-Journal, Nov 27, 2025

NB Power asserts the proposed Tantramar gas/diesel generator is the only solution to a coming electricity crisis. The utility, the project’s proponent, and various government agencies seem determined to limit the scrutiny of that assertion. It won’t be until the Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) holds hearings in February that we may see NB Power’s evidence showing whether the crisis is real or contrived, and whether it has only one solution – fossil fuel generators.

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Proposed Chignecto Gas Plant: Fact Sheets & Events

As we wait for November to see what projects the federal government is going to promote, and as politicians continue to peddle a gas pipeline and an LNG terminal for the province, the opposition to the proposed Centre Village gas/diesel fueled electricity generator continues to grow beyond the Chignecto Isthmus.

There are good reasons why New Brunswickers from across the entire province should reject this project.

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Chignecto at a Crossroads: Conscience or Catastrophe?

by Deborah Carr, 
I want to share the letter I submitted on Aug 15, 2025 to federal and provincial governments on NB Power’s gas plant proposed for Centre-Village, NB on the Chignecto Isthmus. In this time of wildfires and heat, drought and dangerous air quality, political strife and polarization, wars and genocides, it’s easy to overlook projects that do not seem to affect us directly. We’re all carrying a lot of weight these days.
But, as I point out in my letter, we are all connected and our actions have long-lasting impacts. People can enjoy watching the miracle of the shorebirds at Dorchester and Mary’s Point now because protective measures were taken long ago to secure a critical stop along the route of travel for millions of these species. They are a perfect example of how local actions matter on a global scale.

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Comments on Proposed Centre Village Gas/Diesel Generating Station

These are the comments of the New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance, a collection of groups from across the province that, since 2010, have acted to prevent the extraction and use of unconventional fossil fuels in the province, and have promoted the transition to a clean, renewables based economy. Using public education and litigation as our tools, we have helped obtain and maintain a moratorium on hydrofracking for ten years, intervened on the side of the federal government at the Supreme Court of Canada to validate the Carbon Pricing legislation, and been co-plaintiffs in a case in the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal that challenged an EIA, which helped defeat a planned LNG facility in Goldboro.

Our approach in all cases is to use the best science available, and apply it to the latest legal standards.

Following those two principles, as detailed below, brings us to the following conclusion.  Any act that increases the extraction or use for burning new fossil fuels must, by any scientific standard, be opposed, and that national and international jurists increasingly view limiting climate change and the ghgs that cause it, as issues that require legally binding responsibilities and  agreements within and between nation states.

Therefore, our primary position on the Centre Village gas/diesel turbine is that we oppose its construction. If there is any case to be made supporting it, it would require, at the very least, a comprehensive federal Impact Assessment (IA), to provide details that the current EIA plan lacks.

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Nation-building projects must recognize, address climate change

Every measure of climate showcases our failures

Jim Emberger  •  Telegraph Journal, Jul 08, 2035

On Earth Day, “Seniors for Climate” rallied at the legislature to remind governments that solutions to recent economic turmoil must reflect climate science.

Unexpectedly, Premier Susan Holt visited the rally and delivered an enthusiastic address in support of the rally’s message. Days later, she contradicted her uplifting remarks by promoting gas and bitumen pipelines, and LNG exports as Canadian nation-building solutions. That she didn’t recognize her contradictions places her in a new constituency that accepts industry propaganda that climate change can be solved, while burning more fossil fuels.

It’s an alluring belief, as it offers politicians an easy way to address our economic circumstances using resources we possess. But as the saying goes, “if it sounds too good to be true…”

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Older Canadians rallying for climate action

By Muriel Jarvis,  Seniors for Climate  (Telegraph Journal Apr 15, 2025)

Ten million Canadians, according to Statistics Canada, were over 60 years of age in 2023. That’s 26 per cent of Canada’s population. You might think of this age cohort as retired, traveling, or otherwise not doing much. Think again. Almost 20 per cent of Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1965) are still working, 40 per cent volunteer, and, critically, almost 80 per cent vote, according to Elections Canada, compared to almost 54 per cent of 18-to-34-year olds.

Seniors for Climate is a national movement of older Canadians rallying around the idea that we have the social power, time, resources and skills to make a difference on climate change and to do it for the sake of our children and grandchildren. We are gathering in communities across Canada this Earth Day, April 22. In New Brunswick, Seniors for Climate organizers from Saint Andrews, Moncton, Sackville, Saint John and Fredericton are inviting climate concerned citizens from across the province to join us Tuesday, April 22, rain or shine, in Fredericton where we will gather at city hall and the New Brunswick Legislature.

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Don’t backslide on fossil fuel projects

By Jim Emberger – Special to Brunswick News – Published February 20, 2025

Threatening times, with rapidly changing events, inevitably produce two things. Public and media attention becomes focused on the turmoil and pace of immediate concerns, and longstanding issues, regardless of importance, are set aside.

Secondly, some corporate or financial interests will attempt to use the distraction to push profiteering schemes, especially unpopular ones.  This is sometimes known as “disaster capitalism.”

We see this today as Canada’s fossil fuel producers, and their political and media allies, respond to Donald Trump’s tariff threats by re-introducing the ideas of the Energy East bitumen pipeline and various shale gas/LNG projects.

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Take a lesson from B.C. on fracking

Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, NB Lung, Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment calling for permanent ban on fracking

Published Oct 17, 2024  •  Brunswick News

There’s a crisis in British Columbia’s health-care system, and it serves as a grim warning for New Brunswick if the province’s decade-long moratorium on fracking is threatened.

Years into B.C.’s work on developing a massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) export industry – driven by fracking – we know from experience just how harmful this industry is to our health-care system.

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