The fight over the Alberta-to-Burnaby oil pipeline proposed by Kinder Morgan is shaping up as a political battle royale that will entangle all three levels of government. The $5-billion project to triple the capacity of the company’s existing pipeline is opposed by Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, and now Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan is turning up the volume. “This is the wrong place and the wrong time for them to put in this pipeline,” Corrigan told me, adding opponents of the project are even willing to break the law if it’s approved.
A new study out of Washington State University suggests the Fraser Surrey Docks coal terminal expansion project would have a major impact on the health of residents living near the facility.
And local academics say the study underlines the fact that approval of the Fraser Surrey Docks project will inevitably lead to increased levels of known carcinogens in the air – particularly in the neighbourhoods adjacent to the terminal.
The Mayor of Burnaby says that if Kinder Morgan’s application to expand their pipeline is approved without amendments, he’d stand in front of a bulldozer. “I know I’m [ready], I know that residents will stand there with me. I’m prepared to fight this out to the bitter end. I’m incensed with how we’ve been treated,” says Derek Corrigan, one day after Burnaby formally requested the National Energy Board reject the proposed expansion due to a lack of sufficient information.
Today, the City of Burnaby formally requested that the National Energy Board find that the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project application is incomplete and reject it on the basis that it contains neither the information needed for the NEB to make an informed decision nor sufficient information for the public to understand and analyze the impacts of the Project and does not comply with NEB rules. “We are extremely concerned about multiple aspects of this proposal that we know will have very negative impacts on our City,” says Mayor Derek Corrigan.
Lawyers working for Kinder Morgan Inc. have sent a letter to the National Energy Board proposing the narrowest interpretation of who can participate in a review of the company’s proposed twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline.
No one following the media coverage prior to the last provincial election could have overlooked the speculative nature of B.C. Liberal promises on liquefied natural gas. “When the gruel is this thin, fantasy looks like a good alternative: Liberals throne speech focused on dreams of riches from unbuilt LNG plants,” read one headline in this newspaper. “Fantasy gas fund built on shifting sands: putting faith in LNG is like counting your chickens before they hatch — or banking on a future that may never arrive,” read another.
A plume of radioactive contamination from the damaged Fukushima Nuclear plant in Japan has reached the coast of North America earlier than expected. But while concerns for the plume are making headlines, a far more serious effect of human activity is already having dire consequences for West Coast fisheries. Last August, about 250 tonnes of contaminated water - that had been sprayed onto the damaged reactors to keep them cool - leaked out of storage tanks into the ocean.
The anti-environment offensive by Canada’s fossil fuel industry and its flacks in government is radically shifting the political landscape of the country. Each day, it seems, brings some new announcement and outrage being committed against Earth and the humans. More pipelines to be built, and more leaks and cover-ups of existing oil and tar sands facilities that poison the land and water.
Ottawa has turned down the proposed New Prosperity mine in the B.C. Interior, marking the second time the federal government has rejected the project and rebuffing a last-ditch lobbying effort from B.C. to see it go ahead. In a statement Wednesday, federal Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq said she had concluded the mine is likely to cause “significant adverse environmental effects that cannot be mitigated” and that the government had determined those effects “are not justified in the circumstances,” thereby ruling out the project.
Ten million scallops that have died in the waters near Qualicum Beach due to rising ocean acidity are the latest victims in a series of marine die-offs that have plagued the West Coast for a decade. Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere are being absorbed by the ocean and may have pushed local waters through a “tipping point” of acidity beyond which shellfish cannot survive, according to Chris Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of B.C. Rising ocean acidity is a global phenomenon, made worse by higher natural acidity in local waters, Harley said.
