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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Tar Sands send Loonie Past Dollar

"The rise in value of the Canadian dollar "is an energy story," said Busch. With crude oil futures trading at more than $83 U.S., investment capital is pouring north to help extract oil from so-called tar sands, also known as oil sands, in the province of Alberta.

"The average cost to produce a barrel from tar sands is $40 to $45," Busch said. The current world oil price "puts oil development from tar sands on steroids."

Go crazy: Dollar sinks below loonie
Bill Barnhart | Market report
September 21, 2007

TransCanada Defends Keystone Pipeline, Disputes Union Claims

It appears here the one being less than honest below is this Robert Jones-- shipping bitumen that has been "blended" with a Kerosene like by product called diluent that is needed to make the bitumen flow in a pipe is not refining. The refining process, and this is exactly the purpose of the Keystone-- will take place "downstream"(as the industry likes to call it) in Illinois. In other words, this press release on his part is Jones, working for TransCanada, trying to count on ignorance among people who would be aghast if they understood the facts. Disinformation is not a military policy only.

Keystone Pipeline gets Canadian approval

We have to wait and see what the CEP and the AFL do to tackle this horrible (yet predictable) news... their campaigns against the pipeline has been in the forefront, and had it prevented the pipeline was also preventing the delivery of up to another half million barrels a day-- approximately the production of either the Suncor or Syncrude plants. Fight on all fronts!

--M

Keystone Pipeline gets Canadian approval

Sep 24, 2007 - 11:24:21 CDT
By the Associated Press

Closing Edmonton's Tent City

EDMONTON — It’s a difficult feat to be homeless but still have a space that feels like a home, but that’s exactly what life in Edmonton’s tent city has felt like for Claude Parisee over the past month.

Surrounded by the books he reads to pass the time, and secure in the knowledge that guards watched his belongings and kept unwanted troublemakers from causing a stir, the former resident of Hull, Que., said life has largely been good in the makeshift community, which was set up in May and at times swelled to 80 tents and up to 200 people.

Wildcat Strikes Continue to Sweep Across Alberta

Booming Alberta crippled by wildcat strikes by frustrated tradesmen
September 16, 2007

EDMONTON (CP) — Alberta's booming construction landscape is being disrupted with pickets and protests as a complicated labour law that hobbles building trade unions from striking is being attacked by hundreds of workers.

The giant Petro-Canada upgrader project in Edmonton was crippled for several days last week after unionized workers refused to cross picket lines set up by carpenters and other tradesman seeking higher wages but unable to stage a legal strike.

Peak Oil and Gender

Jon Lebkowsky
September 17, 2007 8:27 AM

Kurt Cobb at Energy Bulletin wonders whether peak oil is a gender issue or, as he says, a "guy thing." (Thanks to Paul Robbins for the pointer.)

A peek at the peak oil problem

A peek at the peak oil problem
By The Mogambo Guru // Asia Times Online

There are a few people who ask me to rebut the argument that oil will go down in price, thanks to a slowing world economy and the increased use of alternative energy resources and the "fact" that the world has zillions of barrels of oil still waiting to be pumped. By now, my response is automatic; "Oil go down in demand or price? What a load of hooey! You're a stupid freaking moron!" To which they always bizarrely reply, "Oh, yeah? Well, screw you!"

"Tar sands are the enemy of the planet"

Tar sands are the enemy of the planet
Posted by Jon Rynn at 12:35 PM on 14 Sep 2007

Our civilization's addiction to oil is being displayed in all its nefarious glory in the tar sands of Canada. According to Chris Nelder:

Workers Defying "Cease & Desist" Order

Pickets vow they will ignore order to stop
Jamie Hall, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Friday, September 14

EDMONTON - Undaunted by the prospect of arrest and fines, scores of protesters vowed Thursday to continue a crusade that has disrupted work at more than a dozen construction sites and cost oilsands contractors millions of dollars.

Union members who again formed "information lines" early Thursday were served with copies of a cease-and-desist order issued on Wednesday night, which bars picketing at any construction or maintenance site.

CNRL Abandons Newfoundlanders in Northern Alberta

Newfoundlanders claim company has left them stranded in Alberta
JAMIE BAKER
The Telegram

What was supposed to be a tasty piece of the Alberta employment pie quickly turned into a sour serving of severance for a small group of Newfoundland workers who found themselves on their own in the oil-rich western province with no job and no way home.

The group had been working on a 20 days on, eight days off schedule for one of the many contractors at the huge Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL) Horizon oil sands project near Fort McMurray.