Oil Sands Truth: Shut Down the Tar Sands

Social Impacts

Social Impacts. Overnight injections of migrant workers will not build healthy communities and can have severely adverse impacts on existing communities, especially those of indigenous nations on their traditional lands. Such development brings vices and long term displacement too often. Drugs, alcohol and associated violence spreads. Hunting becomes difficult when the land is threatened, leading to a further loss of culture and tradition. In towns like Fort McMurray there is no planning for the future, but merely consumption in the present. However transient the individuals may be, the populations will not leave, as “development” takes on a logic all its own. All levels of run away development are subordinate to that development, not social need.

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Petrocan syndicate puts Fort Hills on ice

Petro Canada is the "official energy supplier" to the Olympics. Perhaps that could shelve that disastrous project as well?

--M

Petrocan syndicate puts Fort Hills on ice
Consortium shelves oil sands project, citing global financial turmoil, lower oil prices and high financing costs
NORVAL SCOTT
November 18, 2008

CALGARY -- The Fort Hills oil sands project was going to turn Petro-Canada into a contender.

Its 140,000 barrels a day of new crude output would end years of underperformance. No longer would Petrocan's share price lag those of its peers.

TransCanada invades Lubicon Territory

TransCanada Pipelines is an official supplier to the 2010 Games.

This pipeline will provide enough gas to *almost triple* current already
insane tar sands production levels.

Lubicon lands will be destroyed so that the speed with which the
destruction of the tar sands advances through towards Fort Chip and
elsewhere can go up massively and much faster.

Little Buffalo still has no running water.
The lake has not been potable for a few decades now.

--M

TransCanada invades Lubicon Territory
... in order to "meet the public interest"?
Now this deserves a response.

Facing Peak Oil in Motown

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (November 12 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

The weekend before the election, as I mentioned in last week's post
here, I went to Michigan to attend a peak oil conference: the Fifth
Annual Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions, to give it its
full moniker. In more ways than one, it provided me with a wide-angle
snapshot of one end of the peak oil movement; since the peak oil story
is as much about human responses to geological realities as it is about

Alberta Chiefs unanimously support Lubicon in dispute with TransCanada

November 16, 2008

The Assembly of Treaty Chiefs, representing the Chiefs from Treaties 6, 7 and 8 unanimously issued a formal resolution of support for the Lubicon Lake Indian Nation in their dispute with TransCanada Corporation.

Notably, Treaty 8 covers the lands surrounding Lubicon Territory through which the North Central Crossing Pipeline is also intended to pass -- meaning that Chiefs all along the pipeline route have declared their support for the Lubicon position.

Big Oil's Pipe Dream (Enbridge Gateway)

Big Oil's Pipe Dream
An interview with Dustin Johnson about the Gateway Pipeline
November 13, 2008
by Dawn Paley

The Dominion - http://www.dominionpaper.ca

PRINCE RUPERT and VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA–The Gateway Pipeline Project, proposed by Calgary-based Enbridge Gateway Pipelines Inc., would snake through the unceded territories of over 40 Native communities. If fully developed, the Gateway Pipeline would transport a half-million barrels of oil per day from Alberta's tar sands through sensitive ecosystems of BC's northwest coast.

World oil prices fall to $59

World oil prices fall to $59
Lisa Wright
Business Reporter

Oil prices fell below $60 a barrel yesterday – and gasoline prices are tumbling too – but you may want to hold off on celebrating those sweet savings at the pumps.

Economists warn of the gloomier big picture: namely, that we're far from out of the woods when it comes to the global financial crisis.

And with oil and our coveted tar sands crucial to Canada's economy and prices continuing to fall, things are likely to get much worse before they get better, they say.

Oil-shale projects are going ahead in Utah — for now

Oil-shale projects are going ahead in Utah — for now
By Jasen Lee
Deseret News
Published: Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008 12:09 a.m. MST

The falling crude-oil prices of recent weeks will have little impact on the current oil-shale and tar-sands boom going on in eastern Utah, according to companies now working to develop the resources in the Uintah Basin.

'They are flexing their muscles' [Tahltan Nation]

'They are flexing their muscles'

Companies want to mine a remote region of B.C., but, unlike some previous bands, the Tahltan insist on controlling access to the area

MARK HUME
mhume@globeandmail.com

September 27, 2008

VANCOUVER -- Between the abandoned mining town of Cassiar and the struggling port of Stewart, in the northwest corner of British Columbia, Highway 37 runs through one of the most dramatic and resource-rich landscapes in Canada.

Keep 'world's dirtiest fuel' out of Quebec, green groups say

Enbridge project. Tar sands oil would flow by pipeline from Alberta
The Gazette
Thursday, November 06

Environmental groups want the Quebec government to stop a plan that would ship the dirtiest kind of oil from Alberta's tar sands projects through Quebec to the U.S. East Coast and on to Texas - with some possibly being refined in Montreal's east end.

Harper Pledges Cooperation With Obama on Credit, Climate, Oil

By Greg Quinn and Theophilos Argitis

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's victory this week ``historic'' and pledged to cooperate with him on issues ranging from the financial crisis to climate change.