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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Kitimat: Enbridge Revives Gateway, Looking to Super Tanker Tar Sands Bitumen to Asia

Pipeline to B.C. back on track
Asian demand for Alberta crude makes 1,300-km route to B.C. port feasible, Enbridge president says
Gordon Jaremko, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Saturday, December 29 2007

Courses are being charted for supertankers to fetch Alberta oil for Asia from a new British Columbia terminal planned for Kitimat.

Engineers are designing tunnels to put a new pipeline beneath the mountains between Edmonton and the Pacific Ocean without scarring alpine scenery or wildlife habitat.

More on the Social Meltdown of Fort McMurray

Oilpatch braces for new arrivals
Dec 04, 2007 09:07 AM // Dean Bennett
THE CANADIAN PRESS

FORT McMURRAY, Alta. – Fifty-seven year old Gerald Morrison has only 18 months to go before he can "get out of Dodge" and retire to Port Hawkesbury, N.S.

But until then, the Syncrude refinery technician has to get a roomie to meet the $2,950 monthly rent on a three-bedroom apartment north of the downtown core, which comes complete with leaks in the ceiling, frosted-over panes and window sills spongy with rot.

North Dakota: TRANSCANADA KEYSTONE PIPELINE: Looking north

A very significant statement, buried within the article below, produced for a North Dakota audience, in that is shows basically why EVERY SINGLE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT is a crock of doo-doo. Cumulative Impacts are measured, or there is nothing to look at within a report. It's really quite simple-- if the report does not factor in all the ways in which the environment is impacted by development, then you don't have an impact of development to the environment report. Everything else then, is a smoke and mirrors game.

Peak Oil And Dunbar's Number

Peak Oil And Dunbar's Number
By Peter Goodchild
29 December, 2007 // Countercurrents.org

Alta. road dubbed Death Highway

Alta. road dubbed Death Highway
Jim Farrell, CanWest News Service
Published: Friday, December 28, 2007

EDMONTON -- Lucille Cloutier says her brother would still be alive if the road to Fort McMurray, Alta. had been twinned in the past year.

"Last year they only put one construction crew on to work on 240 kilometres of road," said Cloutier, whose 41-year-old brother Guy was killed Nov. 8 while trying to avoid an out-of-control vehicle. "If they had put 10 road crews on the job, it would be twinned by now and my brother would still be alive."

Canadian National acquires tar sands rail line

Canadian National acquires oil sands rail line

Canadian National Railway (CN) has acquired the Athabasca Northern Railway in Alberta for $25.3 million and plans to invest as much as $136 million to upgrade the rail link to the oil sands region of Northern Alberta. Athabasca Northern, which runs from Boyle, Alberta, to near Fort McMurray, Alberta, had been owned by Cando Contracting, but Reuters reports it was threatened with abandonment because of deteriorating tracks.

Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going

December 28, 2007
Greenwashing Energy Crops
Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going

By JIM GOODMAN

After The Techno-Fix

After The Techno-Fix
by Peter Goodchild
Countercurrents.org (December 22 2007)

"Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans
attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress:
eco-villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on.
Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems
maladaptive." -- Dmitry Orlov, "Our Village"

The path beyond petroleum begins by considering five principles: that
alternative sources of energy are insufficient; that hydrocarbons,