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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Portrait of a boomtown

Portrait of a boomtown
Oil-sands projects bring big money, big headaches to remote Alberta city
By ED KEMMICK Of The Gazette Staff [Montana]

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta - On the outskirts of this town in northern Alberta, a billboard is plastered with the logos of a dozen or more trade unions. Underneath it reads: "This is what a union town looks like. Welcome to Fort McMurray."

This is also what a boom town looks like: heavy traffic everywhere, buildings going up all over town, help-wanted signs on every other marquee. Some people have taken to calling it Fort McMoney.

Montana businesses will feel economic impact from Alberta tar sands industry

Montana businesses will feel economic impact from Alberta oil-sands industry
By ED KEMMICK
Of The Gazette Staff

Financial ripples from the multibillion-dollar oil-sands industry in the Canadian province of Alberta are already being felt in Montana, but few businesses will benefit from the development as directly as Berry Y&V Fabricators in Billings.

Industry minister: Canada could build gas pipeline first

Well, this article is wrong three times. A) The MGP would not negate the Alaska Pipeline. B) The MGP would not feed the lower 48 States, but instead feed production of dirty tar sands crude. C) Natural Gas is another fossil fuel and the combination of both climate change and peak oil make it impossible to see natural gas as "...the only option for a long term energy solution."

Other than that, the article is great!

--M

Industry minister: Canada could build gas pipeline first
by Ted Land
Monday, September 22, 2008

EnCana, ConocoPhillips proceed with refinery expansion

The Canadian Press

September 24, 2008 at 7:06 AM EDT

CALGARY — — EnCana Corp. [ECA-T]and partner ConocoPhillips [COP-N] said Wednesday they are starting construction this month on an expansion at the Wood River refinery in Roxana, Ill.

The coker and refinery project is expected to cost $3.6-billion (U.S.) over three years, half from each company, to increase bitumen-based production for the U.S. Midwest market.

Alberta's oil was coveted long before it was extracted

Alberta's oil was coveted long before it was extracted
Tue. September 23, 2008; Posted: 02:43 PM

Sep 21, 2008 (Billings Gazette - McClatchy-Tribune News Service via COMTEX) -- HBC | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Sep. 21--Although large-scale exploitation of northern Alberta's oil sands is a relatively recent phenomenon, people have known for nearly 300 years that the region was rich in an unconventional kind of oil.

Now Is the Time to Resist Wall Street's Shock Doctrine

Now Is the Time to Resist Wall Street's Shock Doctrine
Published on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 by the Huffington Post
by Naomi Klein

I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock. Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place...).

Sarah Palin's Pipeline to Nowhere

Aside from the horribly racist tone to the description of nations demanding consultation or free, prior and informed consent-- this is really good news.

--M

Risky Business: Palin's pipeline may never get built
By Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 20, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008

A sea change in immigration, met by silence on the hustings

Nicholas Keung
Lesley Ciarula Taylor
Immigration Reporters // Toronto Star

When politicians talk about temporary foreign workers, which isn't often,
the Conservatives see them as the SWAT team of the global economy, the
Liberals as not conducive to nation-building, and the New Democrats as
migrants whose wages are exploitative and families fractured.

But no less than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development has decided temporary labour migration is the global issue of

Protesters Disrupt "Spirit Train" Sendoff: Two arrested, festivities cancelled

Protesters Disrupt "Spirit Train" Sendoff
Two arrested, festivities cancelled
September 21, 2008
by Dawn Paley - The Dominion

About 50 people showed up to protest the "Canada Pacific Spirit Train"
event Sunday in the Vancouver suburb of Port Moody. Taking a position
in front of the main stage, the group carried signs and placards, and
a large banner that read "Resist 2010: No Olympics on Stolen Native
Land."

While demonstrators banged on pots and pans, Gord Hill, speaking on
behalf of the Olympics Resistance Network, announced, "We want homes

Protesters disrupt Olympic Spirit Train kickoff

Protesters disrupt Olympic Spirit Train kickoff
By Ian Austin, Vancouver Province
Published: Sunday, September 21, 2008

Police arrested two people Sunday as protesters armed with placards, air horns and megaphones overpowered the kickoff of the Canadian Pacific Spirit Train in Port Moody.

Shouting "Homes, no games!" and drowning out the scheduled entertainment, the noisy protesters chanted for more than an hour. The performers continually turned up the volume, but were eventually unable to proceed.