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In April 2010, when then-premier Gordon Campbell announced that B.C. was resurrecting plans to build the Site C dam, atmospheric scientist Andrew Weaver was along to lend support.

Well before he became an MLA, and later the leader of the B.C. Green party, Weaver used words to describe the controversial project that became a template for Liberal and NDP premiers to come:

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Hydro power is “clean.” It is “zero-emitting” power. It “does not produce greenhouse gas emissions.” Therefore, it is good.

Weaver’s assertions were as demonstrably false then as they are now.

All energy has environmental costs. Hydroelectric power may be clean in the extremely narrow sense that the energy carried in transmission lines does not emit greenhouse gases. But it is dirty in countless ways. Consider just three: flooded farmlands and uprooted farming families, destroyed Indigenous hunting and gathering sites, and mercury-contaminated fish in reservoirs that are themselves sources of greenhouse gasses.