An oil spill recovery vessel ran aground en route to a federal announcement on oil tanker safety in Vancouver on Monday, officials have confirmed.
The vessel was making a 12-hour trip from its base in Esquimalt to Vancouver for a tanker safety announcement by Federal Transport Minister Denis Lebel and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver when it struck an uncharted sandbar near Sandheads at the mouth of the Fraser River near Steveston.
. . . I believe, and the federal government fears, that given the opportunity the public of British Columbia will massively reject this insult to their province. We have one of the most beautiful jurisdictions in the entire world. Once we get started on pipelines other similar projects will follow. We will become an industrial jurisdiction and the term "Beautiful British Columbia" will be a joke...
Twenty-eight individual First Nation bands and three Aboriginal organizations have signed to a letter announcing its intention to fight the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal through legal battles. The federal government approved the project today, despite heavy opposition from BC.
"I've never seen a list of First Nations like that," Haida Nation president Peter Lantin (Kil tlaats’gaa) said, speaking of the number of First Nations signed on to challenge the Northern Gateway pipeline in court.
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity
The fossil fuel industry is aggressively pushing for a 700% increase in the amount of climate pollution flowing through BC's economy. Seven times more fossil carbon in just a single decade. As my chart below shows, eighteen fossil fuel mega-projects are currently proposed for BC. Twice as much coal. Ten times more fracked natural gas. Five times more tarsands. The resulting climate impact of this carbon tsunami could exceed 1,200 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year.
The federal government has approved Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline, subject to 209 conditions recommended by the National Energy Board and more talks with aboriginal communities. Enbridge wants to build the pipeline from Bruderheim, Alta., to Kitimat, B.C. The federal approval is one more step in a long line of permits necessary for Enbridge to get access to the Pacific coast to ship crude to Asia. The federal regulatory process began in May 2010 when Enbridge submitted its application to the National Energy Board.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly” – 1 Corinthians 13:12, The Bible. There is no doubt about it. Premier Christy Clark wants a drastic re-ordering of our provincial economy. In her keynote speech to the Second International LNG conference on May 22, 2014, she declared that the provincial government is looking at “every decision we make through the lens of whether or not it furthers our purpose in creating an LNG industry here in BC … This is our central preoccupation.”
If you want jobs, you need to pump and transport oil and gas, albeit as safely as humanly possible. That's been the mantra from B.C. premier Christy Clark -- a key, many would argue, to her surprise victory in the 2013 provincial election. It's a message one might assume resonates with organized labour in B.C., given that resource extraction has been vital to the province's economy. But union support for Clark's agenda is more complex and even fragmented. The arguments within, and among, unions turn on a couple of debates...
