Nation-building projects must recognize, address climate change

Date: July 10, 2025
Author: NBASGA
Categories: climate change, Fracking & Health, Fracking and Economics, Fracking News, LNG

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

Date: April 15, 2025
Author: NBASGA
Categories: Most Asked Questions

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

Date: February 20, 2025
Author: NBASGA
Categories: Clean Energy, climate change, Fracking and Economics

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

Date: October 17, 2024
Author: NBASGA
Categories: Fracking & Health

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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Fracked Farmland: “It’s a slow kill”

Date: October 8, 2024
Author: NBASGA
Categories: Fracking & Health, Land and Property Rights, Landscape impacts, LNG, Pipelines, Real Stories

By Deborah Carr

The public seems largely unaware that the Blaine Higgs Progressive Conservatives (PC) want to restart fracking in New Brunswick. The PCs think we should help Europe transition from coal by selling them our ‘clean natural gas’. And most people do not realize that the Frederick Brook Shale Formation, one of the most highly desired gas-bearing regions, runs through south-eastern part of the province  from Memramcook and Hillsborough to Elgin and Sussex. Just a few kilometres from Moncton, Riverview and Dieppe.

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Science does not support lifting fracking moratorium

Date: October 6, 2024
Author: NBASGA
Categories: Fracking & Health, Fracking and Economics, LNG, Moratoria, NBASGA

Protections put in place should be relaxed only if further findings emerge providing evidence no harm will result

By Jim Emberger – Special to Brunswick News – Published Oct 5, 2024

A recent Narrative Research poll, commissioned by Brunswick News, on lifting the fracking moratorium noted that the second largest group of poll respondents (19 per cent) replied “I don’t know” to the questions.

That likely illustrates that the success of the moratorium. For ten years it has, ironically, removed the shale gas issue from civic and media discussion.

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It’s time: make the fracking moratorium permanent

Date: September 30, 2024
Author: NBASGA
Categories: climate change, Fracking & Health, Fracking and Economics, LNG, Moratoria, Research & Scientific Studies

Commentary by Jim Emberger
Originally published on NB Media Co-op
September 30, 2024

This election marks the tenth anniversary of the 2014 election, when voters turfed the Progressive Conservative government of the day, primarily over the issue of fracking for shale gas. This followed years of New Brunswick’s largest protests, petitions with tens of thousands of signatures, province-wide educational tours, expert witness testimony, peaceful blockades, a citizen lawsuit, and, unfortunately, a violent police raid on peaceful Indigenous protesters.

The new government assembled a non-partisan citizen commission, which took public testimony, and reached conclusions leading the government to declare an indefinite moratorium on fracking.

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Comments on the Energy Transition Roadmap

Date: June 4, 2024
Author: NBASGA
Categories: Clean Energy, climate change, NBASGA, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, Sustainable Energy Solutions

Context

The New Brunswick Anti-Shale Gas Alliance is a coalition of Anglophone and francophone groups from across the province that has since 2010 pursued two mandates – promoting the transition to a clean energy economy, and stopping the development of unconventional fossil fuels in New Brunswick.

We have done so via public education, formal testimony to government, legal actions, and media advocacy, all based on a foundation of scientific, public health, and economic facts and research.  We certainly consider ourselves major stakeholders in the Energy Transition.

The context surrounding all of our comments is the rapidly increasing harms brought by climate change – the underlying reason for this energy transition.

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Conditions not met on shale gas ban

Date: April 15, 2024
Author: NBASGA
Categories: climate change, Fracking News

 By Jim Emberger – Special to Brunswick News – Published Apr 15, 2024

The Telegraph Journal’s editorial board advice (Editorial: Drop NB’s gas moratorium, Apr 11, 2024),  to Premier Blaine Higgs, to lift the fracking moratorium, without satisfying the conditions for doing so, was shocking in its lack of both historic and scientific context.

Ten years ago, the provincial government convened a non-partisan Commission of Hydro-Fracturing, which took weeks of testimony from residents, industries, NGOs and expert witnesses from public health and science specialties. This resulted in the Gallant government establishing a moratorium on fracking, which was to be maintained indefinitely, unless several conditions were met.

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