America: Third-World Hellhole for Tar Sands

Yeah, looks like our refusal to join the world's other industrial nations by enacting strong environmental protections against fossil-fuel giants, combined with our historical tendency to dump our unwanted shit on countries whose environmental protections are even weaker than ours, has come back to bite us.

Charles Pierce:

One of the regular complaints we have here about building our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the tube that will bring Canadian death-syrup down the spine of our country, edging across the Ogallala aquifer, until the death-syrup gets to Texas, whence it will be shipped to China, is that the Canadians want to ship the death-syrup through our country because they don't want to ship it through their own. Case in point: over the weekend, the province of British Columbia decided that it wanted no part of another pipeline built by another company because it didn't trust the other company worth a damn.

The B.C. government has officially expressed its opposition to a proposal for the Northern Gateway pipeline project, saying it fails to address the province's environmental concerns..."British Columbia thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and submissions made to the panel and asked substantive questions about the project, including its route, spill response capacity and financial structure to handle any incidents," said Environment Minister Terry Lake. "Our questions were not satisfactorily answered during these hearings." Lake said the province has carefully reviewed the evidence presented to the panel. "The panel must determine if it is appropriate to grant a certificate for the project as currently proposed on the basis of a promise to do more study and planning after the certificate is granted," Lake said. "Our government does not believe that a certificate should be granted before these important questions are answered."    

And how did British Columbia come to this conclusion, you ask? Well, it decided not to bet on a 90 percent risk.

A new report from Simon Fraser University claims there is at least a 90 percent probability of an oil tanker spill if the Enbridge plan for the Northern Gateway pipeline goes ahead. But the president of the Northern Gateway Pipeline project is dismissing study as flawed, saying it doesn't reflect the new technology proposed for Northern Gateway. The report's lead author is Tom Gunton, director of the resource and environmental planning programme and former deputy environment minister for Mike Harcourt's NDP provincial government. Gunton said his team used a standard model used by the U.S. government for projecting spill risk - and the new numbers are much higher than those used by Enbridge.

And that's just at the tanker end. Remember that TransCanada wants to build a pipeline through the U.S. because Canada takes its environmental regulations -- and the rights of its indigenous people -- more seriously than we do. They look at the U.S. the way that the oil men in the U.S. look at, oh, Nigeria. (Erik Loomis over at LG&M is really good on this, by the way.) They want to build it here because the Canadians don't want to build it there, and also because of, you know, the Canadian Rockies. So the next time some congresscritter tries to sell you this lemon, remind him that our destiny really shouldn't be as a pipeline colony for Canada.