Related Posts

  • Canada to step up Tar Sands 'monitoring': Output set to double by 2020 - greens worried

    Canada will boost monitoring of pollution from its oil sands projects, hoping to speed up U.S. approval of a pipeline to transport crude to the Gulf Coast, Environment Minister Peter Kent said on Thursday.

    Green groups have long campaigned against developing the oil sands of northern Alberta -- the world's third largest petroleum reserve -- on the grounds that development produces unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gases and other toxins.

    Kent unveiled a C$50 million ($53 million) a year plan to start monitoring air and water quality in northern Alberta as well as the effects of oil sands development on biodiversity.

    "It will provide the facts and the science to defend the product, which some abroad are threatening to boycott. There is already a great deal of disinformation and misinformation," Kent told a news conference.

    Output from the oil sands is set to double to 3 million barrels per day by 2020.

  • Tar Sands Update

    Demonstration planned for Nov. 6 in Washinton.

    Make History on November 6  
    We're about to ask you to do something extraordinary. Something world changing. Something righteous. Something to use up those frequent-flier miles.

    On November 6, meet us in Washington, D.C., to join hands in a ring around the White House. Together, thousands of us will send President Obama a message he might overlook on his Blackberry: We want clean energy. Tar sands oil is not in our national interest. And the Keystone XL pipeline must neverget a presidential permit. 

  • Hydraulic fracturing can contaminate drinking water: study

    As the Nova Scotia (N.S.) government conducts a review of the environmental effects associated with hydraulic fracturing, a new study by scientists at Duke University found that the drilling technique, which is used to free natural gas trapped in shale rock formations, can contaminate drinking water.

    The study - "Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing" - collected data from groundwater tests conducted at 68 private drinking water wells in the Marcellus and Utica shale drilling areas from 36- to 190-m deep in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York State.

    Of those 68 wells, 60 were tested for dissolved methane. (All wells were analyzed for, among other things, dissolved salts, water isotopes and isotopes of dissolved constituents - carbon, boron, and radium.)

    The study found methane concentrations in 51 of the 60 wells.

  • Demonization of environmentalists stifles debate

    On Jan. 9, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver penned an open letter to Canadians that lumped environmental organizations and advocates with un-named "other radical groups." The letter came three days after Prime Minister Stephen Harper parroted the aggressive oil lobby, suggesting that public hearings reviewing the Enbridge pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to the British Columbia coast at Kitimat and coastal crude oil tankers were being "hijacked" by "foreign interests."

  • Sierra Club joins wind debate

    Sierra Club joins wind debate. Sierra Club Canada, an environmental education and advocacy organization, has posted an online web form for readers to send Wainfleet Township council their concerns over the proposed moratorium on wind turbines in the township. So far more than 800 e-mails had been sent to township staff. A Canadian environmental advocacy group has taken to the Internet to let Township council know how they feel about wind turbines.

    Sierra Club Canada recently posted an entry on its website (www.sierraclub.ca) urging readers to let Wainfleet township council know how they feel about Ald. David Wyatt’s motion calling for a moratorium on a wind turbine project in Wainfleet until further information on health, economic and environmental impacts the machines have can be gathered.

    The moratorium call has been put on hold pending an open house on the matter at township hall Feb. 23.

  • Harper and the Big Oil Party of Canada

    Where will you be and what will you be doing when the first giant oil tanker (there will be two every three days), carrying over 200,000 gallons of tar sands goop diluted with solvent, spills its load into the pristine waters of the northern B.C. coast?

    We often remember catastrophic events by recalling exactly what we were doing and where we were when we first heard the news, I guess because they were so unthinkable they brought us to a halt, emotionally and psychologically— time stopped. I was driving down a street in Waterloo, Ont., when I heard the news of the Montreal Massacre, and I can still vividly recall my stomach turning as disbelief turned to revulsion. I will never forget that moment. And you will never forget the oil spill moment, if we let it happen.

  • Global Warming Could Cost Canada Billions, Study Warns

    A report by an advisory board to the government of Canada estimates that the effects of global warming will cost the country’s economy 5 billion Canadian dollars a year by 2020 and that those costs will rise substantially afterward.

    Unlike earlier studies, the report does not examine the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions; it looked at the economic consequences of global warming.

    “The costs we could incur from climate change are the costs of continuously adjusting to changing conditions,” the advisory board, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, said. “Although harder to calculate and less immediately apparent, they are real and significant and bear understanding.”

  • Vancouver filmmaker Damien Gillis takes aim at Enbridge pipeline in Oil in Eden

    When local filmmaker Damien Gillis took his equipment up to B.C.’s north and central coast and got to witness firsthand the humpback whales swimming freely, he almost got a lump in his throat. And that’s hard to do to the burly 31-year-old who looks like a rugby forward and has a baritone voice made for broadcasting.

    “I love this province, and my primary function is to serve, through my media work, to highlight issues that I see as being the biggest threats to the environment and public interest in B.C.,” Gillis told the Georgia Straight by phone on February 10. “Along with [long-time radio broadcaster] Rafe Mair, through our new organization [Common Sense Canadian], we are touring the province and really talking about rivers, salmon, and oil tankers and oil pipelines.”

    Read the entire article and view these spectacular photos at the link below.

  • A Dire Dilemma
  • Wind power could blow Hudak away

    On the surface, it’s easy to interpret Energy Minister Brad Duguid’s move to make it difficult for a future Tory government to kill some 1,800 pending wind energy projects as an attempt to entrench Liberal policies ahead of a defeat.

    But it’s just as likely part of the Liberals’ search for a wedge issue like the one they exploited so well in 2007, when then-Progressive Conservative leader John Tory lost his grip on the campaign over his promise to extend funding to faith-based schools.

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