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Did Kellyanne Conway Lie on Hardball?

by TaraBaumgartner Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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In a post today about Kellyanne Conway’s “Bowling Green massacre” lie, Bob Somerby asks an excellent question:

What have they done with the real Kevin Drum?

That’s easy: he died on November 8th. Continuing directly:

In his own furious, snark-heavy post, Drum asserts that Conway didn’t make an honest mistake in her error-strewn recitation. “Do not for a second think that this wasn’t deliberate,” Drum says.

….It’s plain that Conway made several misstatements on Hardball. Is it possible that her misstatements were made in some type of good faith? That she actually bungled the giant pile of index cards which are constantly fluttering around inside her grievance-fueled head? In our view, she may have known that she was misstating; it’s possible that she didn’t.

Somerby thinks we should be careful about using the word lie. I agree. Generally speaking, it’s always difficult to know if a falsehood is deliberate. That said, let’s review the evidence:

Contra Somerby, Conway is not some fluttery airhead. She is very smart and she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She had obviously prepped for her appearance on Hardball. The Bowling Green incident is not something she would have known about otherwise.
Here is Conway’s quote: “Two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green ______.” Watch the video. She didn’t stumble or search for words. She said “they were the masterminds behind….” The only type of word that fits at the end is massacre or incident or plot or something similar. Instead, she later claimed that she meant to say terrorists. That’s plainly nonsensical.
The idea that you’d accidentally use the word massacre in this context is laughable. That’s a million miles away from any normal description of what happened. However, it is very handy for scaring the hell out of people about the danger of Muslim refugees.
The Trump administration, and Conway in particular, have been spewing falsehoods at firehose volume ever since Election Day. (And before that, of course.) Surely there’s a point at which they forfeit the assumption of good faith? Lying is clearly a deliberate strategy on their part.

This is not 1999. Or 2000. Or 2008. Or even 2016. As the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson said in a piece about Trump’s claim that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast last year—a piece that Somerby praised—”The voter fraud canard was just one in a rush of falsehoods that poured from Trump and his advisers during his first 10 days in office.” The Toronto Star counts 33 Trump falsehoods in his first 14 days. Even if you’re a little more forgiving than the Star, that’s a whole lot of falsehoods. And that’s just Trump. It doesn’t include Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway or anyone else in the White House. If you do include them, here is Politifact’s scorecard:

Kellyanne Conway doesn’t have the deep track record that her boss has amassed with Politifact, but what she lacks in quantity she’s making up for in quality. Of the statements of hers that Politifact has checked, not a single one was true. Not. A. Single. One.

So: did Conway lie about Bowling Green? I’d say the evidence is overwhelming that she did. Now, under normal circumstances maybe even overwhelming wouldn’t be quite enough. You’d need a smoking gun. But that standard doesn’t work for the Trump administration. They don’t just lie constantly, they repeat lies even after they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re lies. They lie to your face in the most insulting possible way, as Spicer did in his infamous performance on January 21 about the crowds at Trump’s inauguration. At some point, the falsehoods come so thick and fast that you have to conclude they’re deliberate.

We’ve easily reached that point. You simply can’t cover the Trump administration accurately unless you assume that most of their falsehoods are intentional. How much evidence do you need, after all? It’s a new era, folks.

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Did Kellyanne Conway Lie on Hardball?

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Canada just shut down another major pipeline proposal

by LelaCouture Posted on July 5, 2016

A demonstrator carries a sign in protest of the Northern Gateway pipeline, May 10, 2014. REUTERS/Ben Nelms

a (pipe)line in the (tar) sand

Canada just shut down another major pipeline proposal

By on Jul 5, 2016 6:02 pmShare

In what looks like the final death blow to another tar sands pipeline, a Canadian court has overturned federal approval for Enbridge’s $7.9 billion Northern Gateway pipeline meant to transport crude oil from Alberta to British Columbia.

The court found the government failed to consult with First Nation tribes in mapping the pipeline’s route, leaving “entire subjects of central interest to the affected First Nations … affecting their subsistence and well-being, entirely ignored.”

Northern Gateway is now probably off the table for the foreseeable future, since Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke out against the pipeline during his campaign. Enbridge has 60 days to appeal.

This won’t completely deter Canadian oil companies, which really, really need to reach international markets with their 2.3 million barrels of tar sands crude oil each day. Now that Keystone XL and Northern Gateway have both been rejected, they will have an even harder time.

“It definitely puts Canadian oil sands projects at risk,” Abhishek Deshpande, an oil and gas analyst and expert, told CNBC.

According to NOW Toronto, local First Nation activists and environmentalists are expecting even more industry pressure to greenlight two other major energy projects: Kinder Morgan’s proposed TransMountain pipeline extension through British Columbia and TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline through New Brunswick.

We’re betting activists can give pressure right back.

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What’s the greenest megacity? Hint: Not NYC

by WayneLaver Posted on May 1, 2015

What’s the greenest megacity? Hint: Not NYC

By on 1 May 2015commentsShare

Take Paris’s transportation system, Tokyo’s water infrastructure, Moscow’s combined heat and power supply, and Seoul’s wastewater services, and you’ve got yourself a pretty sustainable megacity. Sorry, New York — turns out you don’t bring much to the table, except maybe that can-do attitude.

That’s what a group of researchers found when they analyzed how energy and materials flow through the world’s 27 megacities (metro areas with populations of 10 million or more people). As of 2010, these sprawling metropolises housed more than 6 percent of the world’s population, and they’re only expected to grow in number and size. So in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers were all like, “Hey! Unless we want to end up with a bunch of bleak, garbage-filled dystopian wastelands, we should probably greenify these puppies.”

Here’s the big picture:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA

The takeaway? Megacities consume a lot of resources. That’s not too surprising, given how much they contribute to global GDP. Still, when the researchers looked at each city’s unique “metabolism,” they found plenty of room for improvement.

Let’s start with New York, which definitively sucks when it comes to energy use, water use, and waste production:

Click to embiggen.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA

“The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days. When I saw that, I thought it was just incredible,” the University of Toronto’s Chris Kennedy, lead researcher on the study, said in a press release.

This might come as a surprise to those of us in the U.S. who have come to know the city as somewhat of an urban sustainability darling, thanks to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That’s because New York the megacity is much different than New York the city. When you account for the sprawling suburbs, Kennedy said over the phone, “New York has a completely different face to it.”

We already knew that suburban sprawl led to more energy consumption due to increased transportation demand, but Kennedy and his colleagues found another reason to dislike the ‘burbs: Electricity consumption per capita strongly correlates with land use per capita. It’s pretty intuitive, when you think about it — a house in the suburbs is going to require more electricity than a tiny apartment in the city. That wouldn’t be so bad if all that electricity was coming from clean, renewable sources, but it’s usually not.

And then there’s the issue of wealth. “”Wealthy people consume more stuff and ultimately discard more stuff,” Kennedy said in the press release. “The average New Yorker uses 24 times as much energy as a citizen of Kolkata [formerly Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal] and produces over 15 times as much solid waste.”

The researchers report that the Tokyo metropolis, meanwhile, has a better public transportation system and is better designed for energy efficiency. The largest megacity, with a population of about 34 million people, Tokyo also has a remarkably efficient water supply system with leakages down to about 3 percent. (Rio de Janiero and Sao Paolo have leakage rates at around 50 percent.)

Moscow (pop. 12 million) stands out for its central heating system that harvests waste heat from electricity generation and uses it to service most of the buildings in the city — a more efficient way to heat a city than having a bunch of smaller systems.

London stands out as the only megacity to reduce electricity consumption as its GDP has grown. The researchers attribute this to a 66 percent increase electricity prices.

All this is to say that megacities are complicated beasts that should learn from one another. This is especially true for cities in developing countries, which have much lower “metabolisms” than their developed world counterparts due to poverty and resource shortages. These cities will surely grow. The question is: Can they get greener as they go?

Unfortunately, Kennedy said, no megacity has a master architect. “You can never start from scratch. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got and adapt and change.”

Kennedy and his colleagues plan to put out a followup paper later this year with specific recommendations for how megacities can do just that. In the mean time — Hey, NYC, you might want to glance up from your climate action plan for a minute. The suburbs are making you look bad in front of all your megacity friends.

Source:
Megacity metabolism: Is your city consuming a balanced diet?

, Eurekalert.

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What’s the greenest megacity? Hint: Not NYC

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Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

by JacelynSUN Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Erik Eckholm of the New York Times writes that violent crime has plunged dramatically over the past two decades. But the reasons remain elusive:

There are some areas of consensus. The closing of open-air drug markets….revolution in urban policing….increases in drug and gun sentences….Various experts have also linked the fall in violence to the aging of the population, low inflation rates and even the decline in early-childhood lead exposure. But in the end, none of these factors fully explain a drop that occurred, in tandem, in much of the world.

“Canada, with practically none of the policy changes we point to here, had a comparable decline in crime over the same period,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and an expert in criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He described the quest for an explanation as “criminological astrology.”

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

“Criminological astrology” is a good phrase to describe the relentless effort of US criminologists to explain a worldwide phenomenon using only parochial US data. But there is one explanation that really does work pretty well everywhere: the reduction in gasoline lead, which happened all over the world, but happened at different times in different places. And everywhere it happened, crime started to decline about 20 years later. No explanation is ever perfect, but this one comes closer than most.

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Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

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Hillary Clinton won’t discuss Keystone XL

by Milo48Vosatxzaw Posted on June 17, 2014

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Hillary Clinton won’t discuss Keystone XL

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Hillary Clinton is talking up a storm as she promotes her new book on TV shows and at readings across the country, but there’s one subject she doesn’t feel like chatting about: the Keystone XL pipeline.

As secretary of state, Clinton oversaw some of the protracted decision making over whether to approve the pipeline to carry Canadian tar-sands oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast. So she understands the environmental issues involved. And she also appears to be highly sensitive to the political issues involved.

The Toronto Globe and Mail published a Q&A with Clinton that included an oddly framed question about Keystone and her waffling answer:

Most people believe that Washington’s partisan politics – not environmental concerns – have held up the decision on the Keystone pipeline. What do you say to Canadians who feel that our special relationship is being taken for granted?

Our relationship is so much bigger and more important than any one decision – even one as important as this is. Canada is critical to who we are and what we hope to do together in the future. We have no better relationship. [But] this particular decision is a very difficult one because there are so many factors at play. I can’t really comment at great length because I had responsibility for it and it’s been passed on and it wouldn’t be appropriate, but I hope that Canadians appreciate that the United States government – the Obama administration – is trying to get it right. And getting it right doesn’t mean you will agree or disagree with the decision, but that it will be one based on the best available evidence and all of the complex local, state, federal, interlocking laws and concerns.

So do you personally believe that the U.S. should go ahead with the pipeline?

I can’t respond.

In 2010, as secretary of state, Clinton said her department was “inclined” to sign off on the project “for several reasons,” including that “we’re either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada.” In the four years since then, her views have only gotten muddier. The Washington Post explains:

By embracing Keystone XL, Clinton would risk alienating herself from the liberal activist and donor wing of her party that mostly opposes the project. That includes billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer, who plans to spend big bucks supporting like-minded candidates this election cycle.

By opposing Keystone XL, she would risk losing more moderate supporters in red and purple states where she has more natural appeal than many Democrats.

Take West Virginia and Kentucky, two Appalachian, energy-producing states that lean Republican at the federal level. For a sense of how Keystone XL is playing in those states, consider that the Democratic U.S. Senate nominees in both states — Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes and West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant — favor the pipeline. …

Taking a position on such a highly-charged issue later won’t be easy. Doing so now would prove politically impossible. It’s no-brainer for Clinton to steer clear of one for as long as she can.

But it’s a pretty weak dodge for a woman touting a book entitled Hard Choices.


Source
Q&A with Hillary Clinton: ‘Can’t respond’ to whether Keystone should be approved, The Globe and Mail
Hillary Clinton has a Keystone XL catch-22, The Washington Post

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Hillary Clinton won’t discuss Keystone XL

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

by KianBittner Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

The implications are revolutionary. Your smart refrigerator will keep an inventory of food items, noting when they go bad. Your smart thermostat will learn your habits and adjust the temperature to your liking. Smart lights will illuminate dangerous parking garages, even as they keep an “eye” out for suspicious activity.

Techno-evangelists have a nice catchphrase for this future utopia of machines and the never-ending stream of information, known as Big Data, it produces: the Internet of Things. So abstract. So inoffensive. Ultimately, so meaningless.

A future Internet of Things does have the potential to offer real benefits, but the dark side of that seemingly shiny coin is this: companies will increasingly know all there is to know about you. Most people are already aware that virtually everything a typical person does on the Internet is tracked. In the not-too-distant future, however, real space will be increasingly like cyberspace, thanks to our headlong rush toward that Internet of Things. With the rise of the networked device, what people do in their homes, in their cars, in stores, and within their communities will be monitored and analyzed in ever more intrusive ways by corporations and, by extension, the government.

And one more thing: in cyberspace it is at least theoretically possible to log off. In your own well-wired home, there will be no “opt out.”

You can almost hear the ominous narrator’s voice from an old “Twilight Zone” episode saying, “Soon the net will close around all of us. There will be no escape.”

Except it’s no longer science fiction. It’s our barely distant present.

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In the Future, Home Appliances Will Be as Smart as Your Phone

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Stop Trying To Make “Muppets Most Wanted” About Putin

by BrentonHoutz Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

As you probably heard, Russia invaded Ukraine. This has been big international news for the past few weeks, and now it is even affecting how people cover and review the new Muppets movie.

In Muppets Most Wanted (released on Friday), the antagonist is Constantine the Frog, a notorious criminal with a thick Russian accent. He also looks an awful lot like Kermit the Frog. Early in the film, Constantine escapes from a gulag in Siberia, tracks down Kermit, steals his identity, and gets the good-natured Kermit thrown in the Russian labor camp in his place. (Tina Fey plays Nadya, the officer who runs the song-and-dance-obsessed gulag.)

The Russia content in Muppets Most Wanted grew out of the filmmakers’ desire to create a “classic cold-war musical comedy,” and to give a lighthearted nod to the Russian bad guys of 1980s movies. Director James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller of course had no idea that their new Muppet movie would hit theaters right around the time Russia annexed Crimea. Constantine is a world-infamous thief, not a stand-in for Putin or any Russian politician (not that the Muppets haven’t dabbled in politics—or been accused of partisan bias—before). Regardless, critics and writers found a way to make their coverage of Muppets Most Wanted more topical!

Here’s a sample:

“The newest Muppet is Russian, prefers to go shirtless and is intent on evil domination. Sound familiar?” — USA Today.

“The one discordant note comes by way of the gulag gags: With Russian President Vladi­mir Putin enthusiastically reviving that country’s most oppressive totalitarian past, making light of what now seems all too real may strike adult viewers as, if not tasteless, then at least unfortunately timed. (The backfire also serves as a cautionary reminder to studio executives eager to exploit the newly all-powerful international market.)” — The Washington Post.

“The United States government today called on Walt Disney Pictures to delay or cancel the release of Muppets Most Wanted on national security grounds. Or at least, it should have. Not only might this movie annoy Russia, with whom the American government is already nose-to-nose over Crimea, but it could also cause any European allies being courted by President Obama to unfriend him and the rest of the country. The film, a music-filled follow-up to the 2011 hit The Muppets, lands poor Kermit in a gulag in Siberia, which is depicted just as unflatteringly as gulags in Siberia always are. Vladimir V. Putin is unlikely to be amused.” — The New York Times.

“The film’s female lead, Miss Piggy, arguably bears some resemblance to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose stance on Russia has toughened considerably as the Crimean crisis unfolds.” — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
“He’s kidnapped and replaced by evil frog Constantine, Kermit’s exact double apart from a facial mole and an accent that sounds like Vladimir Putin trying to invade his space.” — The Toronto Star.

…Ugh.

Now, for something better, listen to Muppets Most Wanted‘s fun, self-referential musical number “We’re Doing a Sequel” below:

Jump to original:  

Stop Trying To Make “Muppets Most Wanted” About Putin

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Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

by LadonnaClune Posted on February 4, 2014

Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

By

Katherine Herriman

Tunisia, the country that kicked off the Arab Spring in 2010, has now finalized a new constitution. It ensures gender equality and rejects Sharia law. And it does another awesome thing that only two nations before it have done: It commits the country to contribute to the protection of the climate for future generations. Responding to Climate Change explains:

Before today only Ecuador and Dominican Republic had included climate change in their constitutions.

Speaking to RTCC from Tunis, [Member of Parliament] Dhamir Mannai, who proposed the inclusion of a climate amendment, said legislators were concerned about the potential impacts a warming world could have on Tunisia.

“This opens the door for legislation for both the environment and climate protection,” he said.

“As MPs we wanted to tackle the issue head on, and then tackle it through climate legislation, and hopefully put us in a position where we can demand that other countries do the same.”

This isn’t just a case of saying nice words about an environmental crisis. The constitution obliges the government to act against global warming – and experts say that obligation could spill over into international arenas. Here’s the Toronto Star with more on that:

“What Tunisia has done is something relatively new in terms of world constitutions … it is a big step,” said David Estrin, a senior environmental lawyer with Gowlings, a large Canadian law firm.

Tunisia, he said, has not only given its citizens the right to ask their government to deal with climate change — it has also “elevated the concept (of climate change) to one of an international law.”

Basically, it could open doors for one country to sue another on climate change, he said, and “eventually allow bodies like the International Court of Justice to act on complaints that one country is causing harm to another by not abating its emissions.”

This is an important step, said Estrin, who has practised environmental law since 1971. “Right now we are almost in a lawless rule when it comes to (climate change).”

Oh, and one more cool thing: Tunisia’s constitution also says the “state shall provide the necessary means to eliminate environmental pollution.”

Well played, post-revolutionary state. Well played.


Source
Tunisia embeds climate change in constitution, Responding to Climate Change
Tunisia embeds protection of climate in new constitution, Toronto Star

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Tunisia’s new constitution calls for climate protection

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Meet perfluorotributylamine, the world’s worst greenhouse gas

by BlancheOFlynn Posted on December 10, 2013

Meet perfluorotributylamine, the world’s worst greenhouse gas

By

What synthetic compound has 27 fluorine atoms, a dozen carbon atoms, and a dash of nitrogen? The world’s worst known greenhouse gas.

A class of compounds known as perfluoroalkyl amines have been manufactured for more than 50 years for use by the electronics industry. Climate scientists don’t know much about them, but they have been worried for some time that they could be affecting the climate. And a new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, seems to have confirmed some of their worst fears.

National Institute of Standards and TechnologyJust call it PFTBA.

Scientists at the University of Toronto studied one such compound, perfluorotributylamine, and concluded that it could persist in the atmosphere, trapping heat here on Earth, for more than 500 years. Not only that, but the scientists concluded in their paper that it has the “highest radiative efficiency of any compound detected in the atmosphere.”

Researcher Angela Hong said that over a century a single molecule of PFTBA, as it is catchily called, has an “equivalent climate impact” of more than 7,000 carbon dioxide molecules.

Next up: Figuring out what the other perfluoroalkyl amines are doing to the climate, and searching for climate-friendlier chemicals that could be used instead. As Hong and her colleagues dryly note in their paper, “Detection of PFTBA demonstrates that perfluoroalkyl amines are a class of [long-lived greenhouse gas] worthy of future study.”

UPDATE, from The Guardian:

Concentrations of PFTBA in the atmosphere are low — 0.18 parts per trillion in the Toronto area — compared to 400 parts per million for carbon dioxide. So PFTBA does not in any way displace the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal as the main drivers of climate change.

Dr Drew Shindell, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said: ”This is a warning to us that this gas could have a very very large impact on climate change — if there were a lot of it. Since there is not a lot of it now, we don’t have to worry about it at present, but we have to make sure it doesn’t grow and become a very large contributor to global warming.”


Source
Perfluorotributylamine: A novel long-lived greenhouse gas, Geophysical Research Letters
New long-lived greenhouse gas discovered by University of Toronto chemistry team, University of Toronto
Newly discovered greenhouse gas ‘7,000 times more powerful than CO2’, The Guardian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How to clean a lake with an unstoppable oil spill: Drain the lake

by rakil23 Posted on September 26, 2013

How to clean a lake with an unstoppable oil spill: Drain the lake

By

Photograph obtained by the

Toronto Star

Oil polluting the ground at Cold Lake in Alberta.

We told you in July that tar-sands oil had been leaking into the Canadian wilderness from a drilling site for well over a month — and that nobody knew how to stanch the flow.

It would be nice to update you on how that leak was finally fixed. No such luck: The oil is still leaking.

More than 12,000 barrels of leaked bitumen has been mopped up, but at least 100 animals have died at the Canadian Natural Resources’ Primrose oil extraction site. So much bitumen has flowed into a 131-acre lake that Alberta’s environment department has ordered the company to drain it and dredge it before the waterbody freezes over. From Reuters:

The leak, one of four on the sprawling project site, sprung up from an oil sands reserve produced by a process that melts bitumen with high-pressure steam so that it can be moved and processed. The leak has yet to be stopped, and has become the latest focus for environmentalists concerned about the impact oil sands production.

“The Alberta government should, at a minimum, put a hold on approving new underground tar sands operations until we understand how these leaks are happening and if other sites could run into similar problems,” Mike Hudema, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Canada, said in a statement.

The order says the company must pump the water from the area of the lake that is in the vicinity of leak into the third of the lake where it can be contained by a road that cuts across the water body. Then the cleanup of the spill site can be completed.

The drill-happy province says the massive spill has not affected water quality in the lake. That’s wonderful news, because it means that this is a lake visited by dragon-slaying unicorns that lap up tar and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carrying them to another planet where they won’t do any harm. Also, magic is real.


Source
Canadian Natural told to drain Alberta lake due to oil sands leak, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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How to clean a lake with an unstoppable oil spill: Drain the lake

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