Tag: tar sands
Federal Judge Blocks Construction Of Keystone XL Pipeline

Federal Judge Blocks Construction Of Keystone XL Pipeline

A federal judge in Montana blocked construction of the Keystone XL pipeline late on Thursday evening, ruling that the Trump administration’s decision lacked a “reasoned” explanation for allowing the controversial project, which would transport tar sands crude from Canada to Texas Gulf Coast refineries.

Judge Brian Morris wrote that Trump’s State Department ignored climate change concerns to advance the president’s wish to build the pipeline. By ignoring “facts” about climate and other concerns and using “outdated” or false information, its actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act, he said.

For Trump the ruling represents a major defeat of his anti-environmental agenda and his rollback of Obama administration initiatives. Last January, only two days after his inauguration, he signed an executive order reversing Obama on the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline.

The judge’s decision will not permanently block a permit, but forces the administration to restart the review process with greater attention to climate, Native American cultural impacts, and endangered species.

IMAGE: President Trump displays a signed executive order to advance construction of the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House in Washington January 24, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Canada Wildfire Explodes In Size, Approaches Oil Sands Project

Canada Wildfire Explodes In Size, Approaches Oil Sands Project

By Rod Nickel and Liz Hampton

A raging Canadian wildfire grew explosively on Saturday as hot, dry winds pushed the blaze across the enbpdergy heartland of Alberta and threatened to burn close to an oil sands project.

The fire that has already prompted the evacuation of all 88,000 people who lived in the city of Fort McMurray was set to double in size on Saturday, the seventh day of what is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in Canada’s history.

Provincial officials praised evacuees for their patience and, in a sign of how long the crisis could drag on, said the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, many hundreds of miles to the south, were the best place to receive longer-term support such as medical care and emergency payments.

Firefighting officials said the inferno, propelled northeast towards neighboring Saskatchewan by high winds and fueled by tinder-dry forests, was set to double in size to 740,000 acres – almost twice the size of Houston – by the end of Saturday.

Fort McMurray is the center of Canada’s oil sands region. About half of the nation’s crude output from the sands, or one million barrels per day, had been taken offline as of Friday, according to a Reuters estimate.

Officials said they expected the fire would burn up to the edge of a project operated by Suncor Energy Inc, but noted the site and others like it were resilient to fire damage.

“They are clear of vegetation and trees … they also have highly trained industrial fire departments that know how to respond to these incidents,” said Chad Morrison, the province’s manager of wildfire prevention.

At least 10 oil sand operators have cut production due to evacuations and other emergency measures.

Syncrude oil sands project said it would shut down its northern Alberta operation and remove all personnel from the site due to smoke. There was no imminent threat from the fire.

Morrison told a briefing that firefighters started tackling the fire as soon as it was spotted south west of the city at 6 p.m. eastern last Sunday. The blaze is now expected to reach the border with Saskatchewan, some 50 miles away, by the end of the day.

Cooler weather forecast for Sunday could then help keep the blaze under control, said Morrison, predicting that without substantial rain the fire might easily last for months.

The full extent of property losses in Fort McMurray has yet to be determined, but one analyst estimated insurance losses could exceed $7 billion.

Alberta’s Municipal Affairs Minister Danielle Larivee said the fire was still out of control and warned residents not to try to return.

“I know … how very hard it is to be patient and how difficult it is not to know so many things. I know what it’s like to wonder what is left from your home,” she told the briefing.

More than 500 firefighters are battling the blaze in and around Fort McMurray, along with 15 helicopters and 14 air tankers, the Alberta government said.

Police escorted another convoy of evacuees out of the oil sands region north of Fort McMurray on Saturday, on a harrowing journey through burned-out parts of the city and billowing smoke.

Around 25,000 residents who initially went north found themselves cut off in overcrowded conditions. Larivee said she hoped the entire group would have been moved south by the end of Saturday.

Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ruins, but most evacuees fled without knowing the fate of their own homes. The majority got away with few possessions, some forced to leave pets behind.

Stephane Dumais, thumbing through his insurance documents at an evacuation center, said he has thought about moving away.

“To me that’s like giving up on my city,” he said. “As long as it takes to rebuild it, let’s work together. It’s not going to be the same as it used to be.”

Quite how quickly Fort McMurray can recover is unclear. Earlier in the day Alberta premier Rachel Notley said the city’s gas had been turned off, its power grid was damaged and the water undrinkable.

Later on, Scott Long of the Alberta emergency management agency said planning had started for residents to return once the city was safe.

“There is no timeline on that but I am not looking at months,” he told the briefing later on Saturday.

 

(Additional reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto and David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Writing by Jeffrey Hodgson and David Ljunggren; Editing by James Dalgleish and Diane Craft)

Photo: People wait at a roadblock as smoke rises from wildfires near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, May 6, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Wattie

The Fort McMurray Wildfire Shows The Future Of Climate Change

The Fort McMurray Wildfire Shows The Future Of Climate Change

Temperatures in Fort McMurray, the epicenter of an epic wildfire sweeping through Alberta province in Canada, topped 90 degrees earlier this week.

Fort McMurray isn’t all that far, relatively speaking, from the Arctic Circle. This is May. This is insane.

Temperatures have never topped 90 degrees in this part of the world at this time of year. That’s 40 degrees above average.

The city’s entire population of 88,000 is being evacuated as Canada declares a state of emergency. Images of the blazing fire reveal an apocalyptic landscape, with parts of the city resembling “a war-torn corner of the world,” according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Wildfires are a normal part of life in Alberta. They happen every year, and indeed needed to sustain the forest. But there were real warning signs this year was different, there were more, and they started earlier, according to local reports.

A warm, dry winter, coupled with a warm, dry spring and temperatures that broke records even before this week left the ground bone dry early in the wildfire season. El Niño is to blame for some of the warm weather as well, this year and last.

To make matters worse, Fort McMurray, until recently a boomtown at the center of the tar sands oil industry — and, incidentally, where the Keystone XL pipeline was set to begin — is surrounded by forest.

The disaster has led some to suggest, if carefully, that we might finally be witnessing a catastrophic event in a western country that can be linked directly to climate change. At the very least, events like the Fort McMurray wildfire will happen more regularly in the future, and will be more fierce.

In an article published online by Scientific American Wednesday, author Brian Kahn writes: “What’s happening in Fort McMurray is a perfect encapsulation of the wicked ways that climate change is impacting wildfire season.”

Kahn also quotes Mike Flannigan, an expert on wildfires at the University of Alberta. “This [fire] is consistent with what we expect from human-caused climate change affecting our fire regime,” Flannigan said.

Canada’s Green Party leader, Elizabeth May was quoted as saying that this is “a disaster that is very related to the global climate crisis,” but after receiving some criticism, she walked back those remarks, a measure of how even those in the green movement have been moved to temper their thoughts.

“Some reports have suggested that the wildfires are directly caused by climate change,” May said. “No credible climate scientist would make this claim, and neither do I make this claim.”

But it’s beginning to feel like that point in a disaster movie, maybe a quarter way through, when the characters all realize that really bad things are actually really starting to happen, and they know it will only get worse.

At least a few characters in this movie seem to know what’s going on. Pew Research released Thursday its latest polling results that show fully 81 percent of liberal Democrats view global climate change as a major threat to the U.S., compared to 18 percent of conservative Republicans.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a superb — a classic — London-set, near-future sci-fi disaster movie from the early 1960s.

The film’s premise, daft on its face but reflective of the fears of its time, is that the two superpowers set off two huge nuclear weapons simultaneously. This knocks the world slightly off its axis, out of its orbit, causing cataclysmic climate change that affects different regions of the earth in unique ways.

London swelters, burns, and then begins to melt. It’s global warming on steroids and speed.

When told that the cataclysmic climate changes to the planet are man made, a veteran newspaperman, played by Leo McKern, delivers this denunciation: “The stupid, crazy, irresponsible, bastards — they have finally done it.”

Such a singular, shining, realization is unlikely in Planet Earth: The Movie — run time about 100 more years.

Photo: Officers look on as smoke from Fort McMurray’s raging wildfires billow into the air after their city was evacuated, May 4, 2016. REUTERS/Topher Seguin

State Department Cozies Up To Oil Lobbyists In Tar Sands Pipeline Deal

The construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline is looking increasingly likely, despite fervent protests from environmental activists. As new correspondence shows, the government’s decision to support the massive pipeline project might be based more in close ties to oil lobbyists than in an independent analysis of risks and benefits.

The pipeline would transport difficult-to-extract oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. The State Department, which would give final approval to the TransCanada company project, has released reports in favor of the pipeline, claiming there are no significant environmental risks. Activists, meanwhile, have opposed the pipeline’s construction, arguing that the oil from the tar sands has a higher carbon output than conventional oil and that the pipeline bears a considerable risk of spills and accidents.

Now, newly released emails between the State Department and TransCanada suggest that the government might have too close a relationship with the oil company, increasing skepticism about the State Department’s objectivity in its decisions and support for the pipeline project. The activist group Friends of the Earth received the emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, and the correspondence reveals a blatant pro-pipeline bias the activists have long feared as the approval inches forward.

One senior State Department employee, Marja Verloop, writes “Go Paul!” to pipeline lobbyist Paul Elliott after hearing that TransCanada has Sen. Max Baucus’ support. Their emails indicate a close friendship, involving invitations to July 4th parties and a shared understanding that the pipeline project should go through. Other exchanges reflect TransCanada’s intention to obtain special permission to pump oil through the pipeline at higher-than-usual pressures — but the company will request this permit after the pipeline is already constructed as a means of avoiding protests. This revelation, although disturbing to people who have raised concerns about the risks for accidents with the pipeline, seems to not bother Verloop, who continues her regular banter with the TransCanada lobbyist. Elliott’s cozy relationship to the State Department is already a matter of concern, since he was previously a top Clinton campaign aide. Other email exchanges raise further questions about whether the government is carefully considering the potential negative impact of the project or whether they are unquestioningly bowing to oil industry interests.

“You see officials who see it as their business not to be an oversight agency but as a facilitator of TransCanada’s plans,” said Damon Moglen, the director of climate and energy project for Friends of the Earth.

Clearly, the State Department isn’t making its decisions solely on the basis of what is best for the environment and the American people. While it isn’t surprising that the government has overly friendly ties to oil companies, the released emails show a particularly egregious level of bias — one that could have a significant impact on the construction of a controversial pipeline.