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The case for constructing more pipelines from the Alberta Tar Sands Kill Our Biosphere Extravaganza to the rest of the world weakened when a new pipeline, armed with state of the art accident notification system quietly ruptured and had the never not to notify anyone until a couple of football fields worth of sludge poured out.
“Nexen is apologizing for a pipeline break that leaked five million litres of bitumen, sand and water at its Long Lake oilsands facility in northern Alberta this week.
The spill was discovered Wednesday afternoon at Nexen Energy’s oilsands facility near Long Lake, south of Fort McMurray.
The material leaked through what Bailey says was a “visible burst” in the pipeline. a double-walled, high-pressure line installed in 2014. Bailey said the line was shut down immediately after the leak was discovered.
The detection system did not work in this case, so it isn’t known how long the substance was leaking. A contractor walking along the pipeline discovered the spill.”
Well it’s only FIVE million litres of liquid petrochemical death being splashed around. How bad could that be?
“A spokesman for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said a spill this big will have an “extremely serious” impact on the muskeg, which is home to aboriginal medicines, berries and wild game.
“There is no way to clean or reclaim the muskeg,” said Eriel Deranger in a news release Friday. “Destruction and contamination like this that directly affects a key component of our ecosystems is affecting First Nations’ ability to access lands and territories for hunting, fishing, gathering and trapping rights, rights protected by both the Constitution and our treaties.”
Chief Allan Adam said the spill is “dangerously close” to the Clearwater River, which flows directly into the Athabasca River.
“The repercussions from the incident could potentially be felt far and wide by those that rely on the Athabasca basin,” he said.”
Fascinating stuff.
I’m thinking that we need less pipelines and infrastructure that caters directly to the destruction of our biosphere. This is another warning, in a long list of warnings, about how badly we need to divorce ourselves from fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry.
The funny-sad notion is that with current technology in renewable energy production, we can lessen and then eventually eliminate our dependence on dirty energy. The government, backed by the people, needs to stop all the subsidies to oil and gas industry and redirect investment into renewable energy solutions. This is not a job for the free market because the free market gives exactly no fucks about the our future climate or well-being. This is not the time for cap and trade or any other ‘market based solution’ – because profitability will always trump environmental stewardship.
It is time to make the stewardship of our ecology the number one priority, for the sake of the future and our continued existence on Earth because the Earth’s climate, like Free-Marketers, gives exactly no fucks about the future of humanity.
Lesson one in Alberta politics – Don’t fuck with private oil revenue.
Lesson two in Alberta politics – There is no lesson two, please refer to lesson one for all concerns about governance.
Full marks to Ed Stelmach for attempting to get the public’s meagre spoon into firehouse of wealth that is flowing out of this province. He had a Royalty Review and everything. It cost him his job because he violated rule Number 1.
“Now Arb,” says the gentle reader, “Why are you talking about Ed Stelmach and the Royalty Review in a post with Danielle Smith in the title?”. And I say here, “Eager padawans be patient – to understand the present, one must look to the past.
Alberta politics, like most politics, are insipidly structured to make the average person not want to care about what happens as long as the status quo is maintained. The status quo in Alberta is structuring the laws and society around the model that makes it easiest for the oil companies to extract wealth from the province. The oil companies make out like Scrooge McDuck taking their heady profits out of province and straight to the offshore bank accounts while leaving the population scratching in the tailings-pond for the pittance we call “royalties” here in Texas North. This state of affairs is nothing new (see Lesson One) in Alberta.
What amuses me is when Ms.Smith of the oh so populist corporatist Wild Rose Party finds a microphone (usually the Sun chain of media, as they do their best to be fox news north) and goes after the government for its spending. Ms. Smith says:
“The PC legacy of waste and mismanagement is everywhere. Huge salary hikes, new MLA offices, handing corporations billions of taxpayer dollars, and accepting paychecks for doing no work are only some instances in the long list of PC waste that has come to define this government as out of touch and only out for themselves.”
So, Ms.Smith is going after the government for handing corporations billions of dollars when it was those same corporations that gave her so much darned money in the first place. Getting all sanctimonious about the corporate pigs at the trough is rich irony as the Wild Rose Party exists to make said trough wider and deeper as soon as they are “elected”. The Socialist Bullet puts is succinctly with regards to recent election in Alberta:
“The Globe and Mail editors were reflecting the point of view of big sections of Corporate Alberta. Those who travelled in the rarefied air of that section of Alberta, were very comfortable with a victory by either Wildrose or the Tories. Both parties received corporate donations running to the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the case of Wildrose almost reaching one million dollars. […]
Individual voters take our vote very seriously. We care which party is elected – which is why, of course, there are election campaigns in the first place. Very few people walk about the streets sporting buttons for two parties. People pick one, and cast their ballot. But corporate Alberta had a sweet situation. A victory by either the Tories or Wildrose would be fine. Under either party, it would be business as usual.”
Business as usual. That folks is the core of why the Wild Rose Party of Alberta is stuck. It is because their plan is just more of the same (with double plus exploitation of the public trust and resources), but with Bigotry and Lakes of Fire. How do you make selling the people of Alberta down the river more palatable to your “populist base”? You go after government waste and corruption. Going after Alison Redford’s sister and Ms.Redford’s expense accounts makes for great media attention, and might just distract people from the fact that the Wild Rose Party would fleece the people of Alberta for the benefit of the oil companies at a rate that makes any personal expense oversights of the Redford’s laughable in comparison.
The Socialist bullet notes:
It is no exaggeration, then, to say that both parties are parties of big oil. For big oil, the key is continuing the rush to pull oil out of the mud of Northern Alberta, regardless of the environmental consequences. We dodged the bullet on a government of social conservative dinosaurs. But we entrenched in power another majority government enthusiastically committed to Alberta’s boiling mud economy, absolutely focused on a systematic increase in the exploitation of the tar sands.
Remember Lesson Number One. – Just a piece of advice Ms.Redford, because let me assure you Ms.Smith has it tattooed on her Executive Assistant’s forehead.
It is good to see yet another right wing fanatic has a crunchy crazy wing-nut history. Savor the irony when suddenly(?) they attempt to get all serious and try interacting with empirical reality. Ezra Levant has little traction with reality and seems to have more interest in keeping his oil friends happy and trying to convince you to do the same.
Lets take a look at how well EL-Douche’s latest work stand up to criticism from a writer in the U.K. –
“Apart from being based on a premise that is largely irrelevant to the concerns of tar sands critics (that the tar sands are by far the most energy intensive source of fuel around, that they are endangering the lives and livelihoods of first nations peoples, that the toxic waste is poisoning the water and local wildlife, that they are an incredibly inefficient use of Canada’s natural gas supply), Levant’s book is incredibly poorly researched. His references are from newspaper articles, blogs, press releases – hardly an academic journal in sight.” (emphasis mine)
You fail EL-douche… as usual. But, then lets see what someone who deals with reality has to say on the oilsands issue…
“Ripping a page — or the cover — from fellow Conservative and former tobacco industry lobbyist Ezra Levant’s book, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his new environment minister, Peter Kent, have taken to referring to the product of the Alberta tar sands as ethical oil.
The Prime Minister and Mr. Levant go back a long way. It was Mr. Levant who reluctantly stepped aside as the Alliance candidate in Calgary Southwest so that Mr. Harper could run in a by-election there in 2002. But the “ethical oil” argument they promote has holes as big as the ones in the ground around Fort McMurray.
To start, the logic is faulty. Just because a country or society is considered “ethical” does not mean everything it produces or exports is ethical. If we are going to delve into the ethics of the issue, we must look at the ethics of energy overall. That means considering the impacts of various energy systems on people and the environment.
Here, the science is troubling. It shows that the Alberta tar sands contribute to about five per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and are the country’s fastest growing source of emissions. To date, they have disturbed 600 square kilometres of boreal forest with little or no chance of true reclamation, use enormous amounts of water, and pollute the surrounding air and water.
This past summer, an independent, peer-reviewed scientific study showed that toxic byproducts from the tar sands extraction industry are poisoning the Athabasca River, putting downstream First Nations communities and the fish they eat at risk. Health studies show these First Nations communities already have elevated rare cancers associated with exposure to such toxins.
If this is the most “ethical” source of oil we can find, we need to ask other questions about the moral purity of our intensively processed bitumen. For example, if we sell the oil to countries with poor human-rights records, like China, does that affect the product’s “ethical” nature? And how “ethical” are the companies operating in the tar sands; for example, Exxon Mobil, well-known sponsor of climate-change disinformation campaigns; BP, responsible for last year’s massive oily disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; or PetroChina? There’s also the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our children and grandchildren, which to me is an intergenerational crime.
In this light, wouldn’t energy from technologies or sources that limit the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and that have a minimal environmental and health impacts be far more ethical than fossil fuels? And, from an economic perspective, wouldn’t these more ethical technologies or fuel sources be doubly attractive to foreign buyers if they came from an “ethical” country like Canada?
As award-winning Alberta author Andrew Nikiforuk has argued, with proper development, the tar sands could help provide Canada with the oil and money we need to shift to a low-carbon economy. But major changes are needed. Environmental regulation and monitoring must be strengthened. Pollution and related health problems must be addressed. More of the revenue must go to Canadians rather than fossil fuel companies. And a national carbon tax would help us move from oil to less-polluting energy sources.
The problem is, no matter what Ezra Levant and his friends in government say, oil has never been about “ethics”. It has always been about money. Those who argue the case for “ethical oil” should work to ensure that our energy needs are met in a truly ethical way, now and into the future. In the end, the only truly ethical solution is to phase out oil. The black eye that tar sands oil is sporting can’t be remedied with meaningless phrases such as “ethical oil”.
To be seen as truly ethical when it comes to energy policy, Canada must slow down tar sands development, clean up the environmental problems, implement a national carbon tax, improve the regulatory and monitoring regime, and make sure that Canadians are reaping their fair share of the revenues. We must also start taking clean energy seriously. Rather than subsidizing the tar sands and all the fossil fuel industry through massive tax breaks, we should be investing in energy technologies that will benefit our health, economy, and climate.
It might also help if Canada’s environment minister spent more time protecting the environment rather than appeasing the oil industry and its apologists.”
Thanks Dr.Suzuki for providing a reasonable version of what is actually happening in the Tarsands and what must be done.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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