Save Our Rivers Society

The Issue:

We as a
population in BC face a historic challenge. All through time our
rivers have flowed freely. Our provincial government is quietly
giving away rights to our public rivers for private power production
to some of the world’s biggest corporations. Not only is new
private river power significantly driving up our power bills already
but the policy that has never been debated threatens our environment,
economy and society as a whole.

The
trend toward private power that bears no benefit for us would only
get worse if private power escaped public intervention. Since 2003,
The BC Energy Plan has forbidden our profitable public utility BC
Hydro from doing its job growing our green power assets and instead
forced our utility to write extraordinarily overpriced purchase
orders to buy power from private hands making power with our money
and our rivers.

What we have been
told by our political leaders about our energy supply is now proven
to be untrue. We import power because we can-because of our big
dams-and we sell it back to our neighbours at higher prices when
their demand is high. We choose to do this because it is
profitable-returning a hundreds of millions of dollars a year to
our province for health care and education. While private river power
is promoted as “green” the reality is these projects cause
massive damage to BC’s watersheds and wilderness: cutting
carbon-absorbing trees for power lines and roads, and diverting up to
90% of a river’s flow through miles of pipe. In this era of global
warming and conflict over shrinking natural resources, maintaining
control of our water-for life and peace-is the most important
challenge facing British Columbians today. Help to eliminate private
renewable energy licenses now and keep our power public!

The Goal:

To educate
the people of BC-owners of the finest, greenest, most profitable
public electricity system in the world-to save our rivers and our
renewable energy assets. This means that together we must take charge
of our environment by making elected people accountable to us.

Together we
will bring about the cancellation of the BC Energy Plan and its
restrictions on public power development, the cancellation of private
power water licenses, and the cancellation of the BC Hydro-Accenture
contract which saw 1500 public employees outsourced to a private
multi-national consulting firm along with a little housecleaning at
BC Hydro. We must together ensure that nobody is
elected to any public office in BC unless she/he agrees to defend the
100% public ownership and 100% public benefit inherent in public
education, public health and public power. Save Our Rivers!

Web site: http://saveourrivers.ca