U.S. President Barack Obama said this week the federal government is considering rerouting the controversial Dakota Access pipeline. This is big news.
The nearly $4-billion (U.S.) project has been enveloped by a protest that looks and feels a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the centre of the demonstrations are the Standing Rock Sioux, whose ancestral territory the pipeline crosses. They have been joined by activists from around the United States.
For weeks a lot of international attention has been focused on North Dakota, where hundreds of protesters backed by more than 1.4 million online supporters are supporting the Sioux’s bid to stop construction of a pipeline.
Arrests, tear gas, violence and even a herd of buffalo showing up may be the reasons behind the global interest. Because if the news hook is indigenous people defending their land from the impacts of resource development, there’s a much bigger story in northeast B.C.
Ministerial Panel report raises serious questions about Kinder Morgan’s pipeline and tanker project
VANCOUVER, BC, Coast Salish Territories – A report released today by the Ministerial Panel that conducted recent public meetings on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker proposal must lead to a rejection by Federal Cabinet, say environmental lawyers.
We were said to have left behind the relics of a decade of environmentally gutted Conservative leadership. That scrapped environmental legislation, heavy collusion between politicians and the fossil fuel industry, diluting credibility of Canada's National Energy Board (NEB), and murky masses of fossil fuel subsidies were remnants of the past. Instead, the Liberal era would be one of climate hope, of revamped environmental assessments, tossed pipeline proposals, fossil fuel subsidy phase-outs, and renewable energy landscapes.
Please view Concerned Professional Engineer’s (CPE) 2 minute animation regarding the possibility of tanker collisions with Vancouver’s Second Narrows Bridges.
[Webpage editor: The author below is not happy with a recent negative report (see here) about BC's carbon tax. A proposed carbon tax in neighbouring Washington has divided environmentalists in that state.
