A county government in Oregon is suing more than a dozen fossil fuel companies for the costs it incurred in a 2021 heat emergency that killed at least 69 of its residents, in a move that could help prepare the ground for similar legal action in Canada.
TC Energy, in the construction of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline (CGL) has been reported by the Narwhal and a Citizen Monitoring Group as “having committed numerous environmental infractions, including slope failures, flooded worksites, and sediment entering wetlands and waterways.”
This post originally appeared on Rolling Stone and was published January 21, 2020.
In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man named Peter took a job trucking waste for the oil-and-gas industry. The hours were long — he was out the door by 3 a.m. every morning and not home until well after dark — but the steady $16-an-hour pay was appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. “This is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the state’s rural southeast corner. “Throw a little money at us and by God we’ll jump and take it.”
In 2018, Husky Energy asked Stephen Mason, who has years of experience developing oil and gas projects on the African continent, to get First Nations together to put in a bid to buy the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) Pipeline. Husky, which has since been bought by Cenovus, had already booked space on the yet-to-be-built pipeline to get its oil from Alberta to the Pacific coast, where it could sell at higher prices.
