Re: “Ex-bureaucrat’s swan song raps gas royalties,” column, March 28.
Thanks, Les Leyne, for putting the spotlight on the natural-gas sector over the past few weeks. We already know some of the horrific impacts fracking has had on domestic water supplies and much is still unknown about the full breadth of effects that it has on our environment.
Now we understand that there are an estimated 700 abandoned gas wells and who knows how many unstable sludge ponds that have not been properly decommissioned. Corporations extracting the gas have been not been required to provide adequate funding for putting wells to bed, and there does not seem to be much of a plan for cleaning up the mess.
But it doesn’t end there — we are now being informed that the LNG sector also receives substantial, unneeded tax breaks for deep drilling and that these giveaways exceed the value of royalties British Columbians receive for allowing them to extract the resource. How can we accept this outrageously poor quality of resource stewardship?
I hope that citizens are expressing their frustration about this kind of gross mismanagement, though I don’t see many letters on the editorial page.
Michael Hill
Esquimalt
