Tag Archives: tar sands

Climate activists shut down five tar-sands oil pipelines.

by ShirleeBidencop Posted on October 12, 2016

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton appeared side-by-side in a Miami campaign stop that framed the climate-change challenge in an unusually optimistic light.

“Climate change is real. It’s urgent. And America can take the lead in the world in addressing it,” Clinton said. She focused on the U.S.’s capacity to lead the world in a climate deal and as a clean energy superpower in a speech that mostly rehashed familiar policy territory.

Clinton ran down her existing proposals on infrastructure, rooftop solar, energy efficiency, and more, though she omitted the more controversial subjects, like what to do about pipeline permits, that have dogged her campaign.

Though Clinton and Gore largely framed climate change as a challenge Americans must rise to, they didn’t miss an opportunity to jab at climate deniers.

“Our next president will either step up our efforts … or we will be dragged backwards and our whole future will be put at risk,” Clinton said.

Besides Donald Trump, Florida’s resident climate deniers Marco Rubio and Rick Scott got special shoutouts.

“The world is on the cusp of either building on the progress of solving the climate crisis or stepping back … and letting the big polluters call the shots,” Gore said.

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Climate activists shut down five tar-sands oil pipelines.

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Pro-tip: It costs a lot when you spill tar sands oil into a river

by Franklyn86C Posted on July 20, 2016

You Break It, You Bought It

Pro-tip: It costs a lot when you spill tar sands oil into a river

By on Jul 20, 2016Share

One of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history will result in a fine second only to the one levied for the Gulf’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster — and the largest ever for a pipeline accident. Canadian-based Enbridge will pay $61 million for violating the Clean Water Act and $110 million in safety upgrades for its pipeline system that spans the Great Lakes, the U.S. government announced Wednesday.

The 2010 rupture near Marshall, Michigan, polluted the Kalamazoo River and tributaries with more than a million gallons of dirty tar sands oil. Workers in the Enbridge control room initially ignored automated warnings about the rupture and continued forcing oil through the broken pipe for several hours. Enbridge has already spent close to $1 billion on clean-up and related costs.

Although Enbridge initially denied its line was carrying bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, it became quickly apparent that this was no ordinary spill. The heavy oil sank to the bottom of the riverbed, increasing the length and difficulty of the clean-up. The spill occurred just as the movement against the Keystone XL pipeline, proposed by an Enbridge competitor, was gaining momentum. President Obama ultimately denied Keystone’s construction permit last year.

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Pro-tip: It costs a lot when you spill tar sands oil into a river

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5 Ways the Keystone Pipeline Might Make People Sick

by LatoyaMallory Posted on February 21, 2015

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5 Ways the Keystone Pipeline Might Make People Sick

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Whales start pulling their own weight, save us for a change

by well Posted on December 5, 2014

prince of whales

Whales start pulling their own weight, save us for a change

By on 5 Dec 2014 2:19 pmcommentsShare

Whales: what a bunch of majestic slackers. We’ve been saving them for DECADES, and only just now are we starting to see the favor returned, thanks to a go-getting group of belugas making moves to shut down a controversial pipeline in eastern Canada.

Preliminary work on the terminal of TransCanada pipeline Energy East was suspended this week due to concerns about the habitat of endangered beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River.

The Cacouna, Quebec marine terminal was proposed for the eastern shore of the St. Lawrence and would serve as a loading point for oil carriers. But COSEWIC’s endangered species classification for the population, which contains about 900 individual whales and is the southernmost population of belugas in the world, could make building the terminal in Cacouna difficult for TransCanada.

“We are standing down on any further work at Cacouna, in order to analyze the recommendation, assess any impacts from Energy East, and review all viable options,” TransCanada spokesman Tim Duboyce told Bloomberg.

I mean, FINALLY, belugas, you give us something to be grateful of besides that one terrible song. (I guess it might be worth considering the small point of humans having driven this particular beluga whale population from 5,000 in 1900 to 1,200 by the 1950s … technicalities!)

And Energy East, though less famous than KXL (the Kardashian of celebrity pipelines), is pretty bad news for humans, as well as the rest of terrestrial life as we know it:

The construction of Energy East would involve converting an existing gas pipeline that stretches across Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario into a tar sands pipeline. …

It would be carrying the same tar sands oil that Keystone XL would carry, but Energy East would have a higher capacity: about 1.1 million barrels of tar sands crude each day versus Keystone XL’s 830,000 bpd. Earlier this year, a report from Canada’s Pembina Institute also found that Energy East could create even more greenhouse gas emissions than Keystone XL.

Wow. Big first move, belugas. Maybe next you can think about chipping in on the rent.

Source:
Work Stops On Tar Sands Export Terminal Due To Endangered Beluga Whale Population

, Think Progress.

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Whales start pulling their own weight, save us for a change

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Big Oil doesn’t even need Keystone — all the more reason to kill it

by MayraWorthy Posted on November 17, 2014

Big Oil doesn’t even need Keystone — all the more reason to kill it

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17 Nov 2014 6:16 PM

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Big Oil doesn’t even need Keystone — all the more reason to kill it

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A day before the Senate is expected to vote to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline, Bloomberg hits us with the (not shocking) news that the oil industry doesn’t need the much-fought-over pipeline anyway.

Turns out, the industry wasn’t holding its breath in expectation of a quick Keystone approval in the first place. Instead, Big Oil went to work finding other ways to get its product to market: According to Canadian analyst Patrick Kenny, railroads will soon be capable of transporting around 700,000 barrels of Alberta tar sands per day (a scary thought), and the industry is planning new and expanded pipelines to carry far more of the goop than the 830,000 barrels-per-day Keystone is designed to handle.

But the fight over Keystone is about more than just oil. Ever since James Hansen, then of NASA, wrote that building the tar-sands pipeline would be “essentially game over” for the stable climate, the (debatable) factuality of that statement ceased to matter. The issue became fiercely political: It was climate activists versus Big Oil.

And while some have questioned the wisdom of that fight, there are many good reasons beyond climate change to fight against the planned pipeline: Last week, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota announced that authorizing the pipeline would tantamount to an act of war.

Perhaps most importantly, the Keystone XL fight has built a climate movement where there was previously none. And symbolic or otherwise, the people in that movement want to win this one.

Clearly, Keystone’s supporters are thinking the same way: The U.S. energy industry doesn’t need Keystone so much anymore, and early claims of prodigious job creation have proven largely inaccurate – yet Republicans remain committed to ramming the project down Americans’ throats.

The good news for climate hawks is that President Obama has hinted that even if the Senate approves the pipeline, he will veto it. A veto would provide further proof that he is committed to the climate, while sending the oil-stained GOP a clear message that it is on the wrong side of this debate — and the wrong side of history.

Source:
Keystone Is ‘Kind of Old News’ for Oil Industry

, Bloomberg.

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Big Oil doesn’t even need Keystone — all the more reason to kill it

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