A southern Alberta town has become what it says is the first municipality to endorse a community−developed policy that calls for a permanentban on new coal exploration and development in the Rocky Mountains.
One of the companies that had planned to build an open-pit coal mine in the Rocky Mountains has signed an agreement with an Alberta government agency to work toward converting the project to renewable energy.
Montem Resources is one of the companies considering the Alberta government's decision last month to extend a pause on coal development on the summits and eastern slopes of the Rockies.
"Environment Canada got pushback," said Bill Donahue, an environmental scientific consultant and former head of monitoring for the Alberta government. "It dramatically reduced the proposed standards in terms of their stringency."
Alberta's energy minister says she has received two reports that will determine the future of coal mining in the province's Rocky Mountain foothills and eastern slopes.
Coal mining on environmentally sensitive slopes of Alberta's Rocky Mountains wouldn't be an overall benefit to the province, a wide-ranging analysis from the University of Calgary has concluded.
"It was because of the overwhelming response and the need to accommodate that response with extra time that we had to approach the minister with the request for an extension," committee head Ron Wallace said in an interview Tuesday.
Albertans want to talk about a lot more than coal when it comes to development in their beloved Rocky Mountains, says the head of the committee charged with collecting public opinion on the issue.
The company behind a proposed open-pit coal mine in Alberta's Rocky Mountains has filed a request to appeal a decision by a review panel that rejected the project as being not in the public interest.
