Burning natural gas, which is what will happen in the generation plants, creates all sorts of nasty pollution, including sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, benzene, formaldehyde, and tiny particles of matter that are responsible for many health problems in people and animals. Burning natural gas creates greenhouse gases. The three generation plants on Vancouver Island will produce 4 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. Your family car probably weighs about one and a half tons. Stack up 2,666,666 cars like yours, and that's how much greenhouse gas we'll be putting into the air, every year, from these three plants.
Natural gas is made up mostly of a gas called methane.
Methane leaks wherever natural gas is stored or shipped in a pipeline. The greenhouse gas effect of methane is 21 times worse than that of natural gas when it is burned. The greenhouse gas issue is huge. As I mentioned at the beginnng, in BC we get most of our electricity from hydro-electric dams. We don't create a lot of greenhouse gases in making electricity.