Thread by @CBCFletch

Oh hey, the Alberta Government did one of those 4:52 p.m. news releases.

They're cancelling 11 recently issued coal leases.

That might sound significant but the affected areas are very small additions (black) to much larger existing coal leases (grey) in the area. #ableg

This is interesting news but it's unlikely to significantly affect any of the proposed projects in the area.

Here's some more background / context from a thread I tweeted in mid-December:

https://twitter.com/CBCFletch/status/1339676766558846976

Also the new (black) leases & existing (grey) coal leases in that map are zoomed in on just southern Alberta.

Here's that map in the full context of Alberta's coal leases & former coal categories.

Category 2 lands, where open-pit mining was banned from 1976 to 2020, are in blue

Note that many of these leases have been in place for years. Some for decades.

Even in Category 2 lands, there were lease *applications* in place. (Basically a first-right-of-refusal thing.)

Now that the 1976 Coal Policy is gone, many of those have been exercised into leases.

It was possible under the old Coal Policy to get an exemption to the open-pit restriction on Category 2 land but an industry representative described it as cumbersome and a hurdle that is now gone:

cbc.ca/news/canada/ca…

And as @kavibal25 (who until just recently was the Alberta Energy press secretary) notes here, the previous NDP government wasn't ruling out a potential coal project in Central Alberta back in 2016, despite being on Category 2 land:

https://twitter.com/kavibal25/status/1351323612297392128

All this is to say this Coal Policy issue is *complicated* so the context is important.

If you're interested in reading, ahem, 8,000 words on the subject, might I suggest this feature that @DrewPAnderson, @jordanomstead and I wrote last summer:

newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/bring…

And if 8,000 words is a little, um, *much* ...

Here's a 4-minute video version:

And just one last thing, I swear.

It would be helpful to both journalists' & the public's understanding of these kinds of things if the government did more technical briefings, was more responsive to questions, in general, and refrained from 4:52 p.m. news releases.