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.
