It would be nice if Alberta did the right thing |
The Alberta government’s track record on environmental stewardship is dismal. At nearly every turn, you can count on Canada’s oil-producing province to do the wrong thing. In fact, I can’t think of another North American government on this side of the 49th parallel so beholden to industry and unconcerned with preserving its clean air and water.
Alberta allowed oil companies to rake in billions while leaving toxic messes behind that we now know could cost more than $100 billion to clean up. It allowed coal companies to strip mine and pollute the water. It fined Imperial Oil a laughable $50,000 for failing to tell people living downstream of the oilsands about a poisonous tailings pond leak that went on for nine months. (Imperial earned that much in about 40 seconds in 2023/24.) You get the picture.
The latest environmental threat comes from Big Tech, which has come knocking with proposals for more than 40 data centres throughout the province. Data centres are huge consumers of electricity and water. The bigger they are, the more power it takes to run them and the more water is needed to cool processor chips to protect them from damage caused by overheating.
An investigation by my colleagues Rory White and Natasha Bulowski has found 76 per cent of the data........