June 29, 2018, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Effects
Eight years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, scientists uncover an ugly truth: it's having long-lasting effects on even the smallest organisms in the Gulf of Mexico.
The B.C. government is poised to give an effective veto to First Nations over fish farm tenures in their territories, a historic concession that reaches beyond the traditional court-ordered requirement that Indigenous groups be consulted and accommodated on resource decisions on their lands.
Federal government officials spent two days denying the findings of a scientific paper exploring research into the effects of oilsands pollution in the ocean, a week before the Trudeau Liberals gave the green light to the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to the west coast.
Lost in the heated arguments over Kinder Morgan's proposed Trans Mountain pipeline is this simple fact: more than a quarter of the bitumen flowing through it will end up as pollution spilling into our oceans — one way or the other.
All the bitumen that doesn't spill from pipelines or tankers gets burned, ending up as carbon pollution dumped into our environment. Over one quarter ends up in the oceans, acidifying them for millennia to come.
It's an oil spill the size of Paris. But only now is the world's attention catching up with the vast scale of the disaster in the East China Sea — the largest tanker spill in decades.
The crash itself happened weeks ago when an Iranian tanker called the Sanchi collided with a Chinese freighter on January 6 and burst into flames, later sinking. Thirty-two crew members are presumed dead.
Shortly before 4 p.m. on November 26, 2017, a U.S. barge carrying 3.5 million litres of diesel to Alaska broke free from its tugboat, the Jake Shearer, off the rocky shore of British Columbia’s Goose Island. Westerly winds were blowing at 45 knots while rain all but sandblasted the side of the barge, now anchored precariously in rough waters. The Canadian Coast Guard vessel deployed from Prince Rupert, approximately 300 kilometres away, wasn’t expected to reach the stranded barge until 7:30 p.m. at the earliest.
