Luck was in abundance on Friday in Mosier, Oregon where the latest Bakken oil train derailed and erupted into flames near a 50-home residential area and a school. 

As Mosier Fire Chief Jim Appleton said, “Mosier really dodged a bullet in the last 24 hours.”

“I hope that this becomes death knell for this mode of shipping this cargo. I think it’s insane,” Appleton said. “I’ve been very hesitant to take a side up to now, but with this incident, and with all due respect to the wonderful people that I’ve met at Union Pacific, shareholder value doesn’t outweigh the lives and happiness of our community.”

It's a familiar story to those following the Bakken oil “bomb train” saga — luck.

“If I had been there another second, it’d probably have killed me,” Bounds said. “Glass was flying everywhere behind me. The walls were caving in. I hadn’t run like that in years.”

That was Morris Bounds describing to The Spokesman Review how he barely escaped the derailing Bakken oil train that destroyed his home in Mount Carbon, West Virginia in February 2015. He literally saw the train derailing and ran out his front door as the train wiped out his house behind him. 

You don’t get much luckier than Morris Bounds. Or his wife, who happened to be in the hospital that day instead of at home. 

Later that year when another Bakken oil train derailed in a residential neighborhood in Watertown, Wisconsin but did not ignite, Sarah Feinberg, the head of the Federal Railroad Administration, declared, “We feel we got really lucky.”  

In his May 23 opinion piece, Tim McMillan, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, claimed that “New pipelines will help connect Canada’s landlocked oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, to tidal ports and from there to global markets where demand for oil is growing.” 

First the good news:

After spending months ignoring the recommendations put forward by British Columbia's Climate Leadership team, Premier Christy Clark has finally found someone to take charge of this very important file.  

For all the political noise coming from municipalities and provinces in opposition to various pipeline projects, in reality they may lack any legal leverage to stop the projects or insist on conditions.

If you’re trying to figure out how Alberta’s already hurting budget is going to get battered by the Fort McMurray wildfires, don’t get too bogged down in the reports of massive losses in oil production shutdowns. You’re better off keeping an eye on the way the oil price responds to the drama playing out in the Alberta oil patch.

April 13, 2016 - When Rachel Notley's NDP came to power last spring in Alberta, Gordon Laxer's book, After the Sands: Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians, on ecological renewal and Canadian petro-politics was already at the publisher. And so, he was given a week to do some major rewriting because he had not foreseen this political earthquake in the making.

[Webpage editor's introduction: Below are three articles about the Leap Manifesto and the NDP, first from the Jacobin.]

The impossible Dream

By Todd Gordon, Jacobin, April 15, 2016 

[Four articles on the reaction to the Leap Manifesto, first from Rabble]

Rather than fearing the Leap Manifesto, let's bring on the debate

That silly Leap Manifesto -- giving itself away right in the subtitle, which calls for "a Canada based on caring for the Earth and one another." No wonder it provoked fury and outrage.

It may scare some New Democrats, but this sketchy recipe for fighting climate change is not particularly left-wing.

The short document, available on-line, can arouse fierce passions.