The U.S. Eastern Seaboard is being opened to offshore oil and gas exploration for the first time in decades with the Obama administration's approval Friday of sonic cannons that can pinpoint energy deposits deep beneath the ocean floor.
The decision dismays environmentalists worried about the immediate impact of the sonic cannons, which shoot sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine through waters shared by whales and turtles.
Saving endangered species was their best hope of extending a ban against offshore drilling off the U.S. Atlantic coast.
Enbridge is facing a startling number of new First Nations lawsuits, challenging the constitutionality of the Harper’s government decision in June to approve the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline.
Eight First Nations -- from Haida Gwaii to Yinka Dene territory west of Prince George – have launched legal challenges, since Friday. Nine more, were launched earlier this year, said the West Coast Environmental Law organization.
Fort Chipewyan, Canada - Dr. John O'Connor is the first physician to speak out about a possible adverse link between the oil sands and human health. While working in Fort Chipewyan, he became increasingly concerned about the growing number of rare cancers he saw among his patients in Fort Chipewyan.
The B.C. government has written directly to about 60 hereditary chiefs of the Gitxsan First Nation, outlining a multimillion-dollar gas-pipeline benefits deal.
In the letter, the government offers the Gitxsan about $12-million, plus a signing bonus of over $2-million, if it will allow two pipelines to cross territorial lands.
The recent shelving of the Joslyn mine oilsands project in Alberta is a reminder of the fragile economics of the oilsands. No economic formula could be found to make the $11 billion project work and it has been put on hold indefinitely.
. . . For more than 40 years, Canada has been a wellhead of Koch’s burgeoning fortune in oil, refineries, pipelines, petroleum products and financial trading as well as an expanding list of diverse interests — producing an estimated $115 billion in revenues last year, according to Forbes.
New scientific research has found that wild-caught foods in northern Alberta have higher-than-normal levels of pollutants the study associates with oil sands production, but First Nations are already shifting away from their traditional diets out of fears over contamination.
The research, to be officially released on Monday, found contaminants in traditional foods such as muskrat and moose, and that aboriginal community members feel less healthy than they did a generation ago, according to an executive summary obtained by The Globe and Mail.
A chorus of critics that includes the province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver claim that Kinder Morgan has failed to answer many of the questions put to the company through the regulatory review process for its proposed Trans Mountain pipeline.
The City of Vancouver submitted 394 written questions as part of the National Energy Board's regulatory review process, covering everything from emergency management plans to compensation in the event of an oil spill, but said the Texas-based company did not respond to 40 per cent of them.
. . The decision prompted one Tsilhqot'in tribal leader to say Northern Gateway is dead, while another said Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) proposals may be sorely affected too.
. . But drama over the pipelines obscures a larger problem — a broken policy process. Both Canada and the United States treat oil-sands production, transportation, climate and environmental policies as separate issues, assessing each new proposal in isolation. A more coherent approach, one that evaluates all oil-sands projects in the context of broader, integrated energy and climate strategies, is sorely needed.
