. . . 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.
. . . I believe, and the federal government fears, that given the opportunity the public of British Columbia will massively reject this insult to their province. We have one of the most beautiful jurisdictions in the entire world. Once we get started on pipelines other similar projects will follow. We will become an industrial jurisdiction and the term "Beautiful British Columbia" will be a joke...
Twenty-eight individual First Nation bands and three Aboriginal organizations have signed to a letter announcing its intention to fight the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal through legal battles. The federal government approved the project today, despite heavy opposition from BC.
"I've never seen a list of First Nations like that," Haida Nation president Peter Lantin (Kil tlaats’gaa) said, speaking of the number of First Nations signed on to challenge the Northern Gateway pipeline in court.
Imagine a world where the Northern Gateway pipeline doesn’t get built. With the federal government’s curiously tepid approval in hand, Enbridge Inc. sets to work trying to chip away at the dozens of conditions it must meet before it is allowed to fire up its trenching equipment. First Nations opposed to the project dig in for lengthy court battles and noisy demonstrations, arguing that an oil sands pipeline threatens long-held rights and title to their lands and that they were inadequately consulted.
The fossil fuel industry is aggressively pushing for a 700% increase in the amount of climate pollution flowing through BC's economy. Seven times more fossil carbon in just a single decade. As my chart below shows, eighteen fossil fuel mega-projects are currently proposed for BC. Twice as much coal. Ten times more fracked natural gas. Five times more tarsands. The resulting climate impact of this carbon tsunami could exceed 1,200 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year.
