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.
A judge has dealt a blow to two northern British Columbia First Nations who hoped to challenge the province’s approval of the $9-billion Site C dam.
West Moberly First Nations and Prophet River First Nation have launched several challenges in both provincial and federal courts against a project that would flood nearly 10,000 hectares of their traditional territories. Both argued the province failed to consult them as required.
The Trudeau government has approved the expansion of a TransCanada fracked gas pipeline.
Reuters reports, "The Canadian government on Monday approved the $1.3 billion expansion of a natural gas gathering pipeline in western Canada belonging to a wholly owned subsidiary of TransCanada Corp, with 36 conditions attached. ...The current NOVA Gas Transmission Ltd (NGTL) System is a 23,500-km pipeline that gathers natural gas from the fast-growing Montney and Duvernay shale plays in northern Alberta and north-eastern British Columbia."
Crews fighting to contain fuel leaking from a sunken tug near Bella Bella, B.C., have had to deal with just the kind of conditions predicted in a spill response analysis filed with the National Energy Board in the Trans Mountain pipeline hearings.
That analysis warned that if an oil spill occurred on the West Coast during winter months, high winds, turbulent seas and delays in response time could combine to make it impossible for crews to recover more than 15 per cent of spilled oil.