Oil - Pipelines

The dramatic crash in the price of oil is rewiring the circuits of global capitalism by creating enormous volatility in the world's stock exchanges, hammering banks that made billions of dollars in loans to energy firms, and ravaging the budgets of the world's largest oil-producing countries. Today, oil is trading at around $30 a barrel – roughly 75 per cent below its price of $114 a barrel in the summer of 2014 – that is, a year and a half ago. The collapse has been as sharp as it has been sudden, confounding economic analysts, energy producers and global financial centers.

Burnaby residents could “suffer extreme consequences” if a major earthquake were to hit the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tank farm, according to a group of local citizens against the pipeline expansion.

Burnaby Residents Opposing Kinder Morgan Expansion (BROKE) presented its final argument to the three-person National Energy Board panel on Thursday, at the Delta Burnaby Hotel and Conference Centre. 

“A major earthquake in this region is not a remote possibility,” said BROKE’s lawyer Neil Chantler. “It’s not a question of if, but when.”

TransCanada Corp put “substandard materials” — made by Quebec manufacturing company, Ezeflow — in an Alberta natural gas pipeline that blew up in 2013, Canada’s pipeline regulator said on Friday as it finally responded to a four-year old warning from a whistleblower with a new industry-wide safety order.

NAIROBI – The idea that oil wealth can be a curse is an old one – and it should need no explaining. Every few decades, energy prices rise to the heavens, kicking off a scramble for new sources of oil. Then supply eventually outpaces demand, and prices suddenly crash to Earth. The harder and more abrupt the fall, the greater the social and geopolitical impact.

I have two Canadian updates this week. The first is from Nora Loreto on what’s happening in Quebec after the fall’s anti-austerity strikes. Nora is a Quebec City-based journalist and labour activist. She gives an account not only of what happened during the strikes in Quebec, but also what to expect in their wake (see the previous podcast, from just before this strike wave, here).

Lawyers representing the City of Vancouver told the National Energy Board Friday that they are opposed to the proposed expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline.

...Today, the BC Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU) signed a Solidarity Accord affirming its support for the Save the Fraser Declaration, an Indigenous law signed by representatives of well over 100 First Nations banning tar sands transp

Oil, the industry that threatens us with destruction, is being bailed out with public money

Fastest way to transition Canada to a green economy? Quit the giveaways.