There are people in British Columbia ready and willing to go to jail in their fight against twining the Kinder Morgan pipeline to Burnaby, B.C. It is an abomination that must be stopped. In turning his back on the environmental concerns, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is guilty of hypocrisy. He has betrayed B.C., he has betrayed Canadians and Liberals.
Canada’s tar sands are a range of threats to the environment. As about 80 per cent of tar sands bitumen is deep below ground and the only way to bring it to the surface is to pump heated water down to the layers of bituminous tar, liquefying it and forcing it up relief pipes to the surface. The sand, sulphur, heavy metals and bitumen contaminated water is then separated and run into tailing ponds that can be lethal to the wildlife of the area. This is just environmental failure number one.
The next problem is that Albertans do not want to destroy their own environment by processing the bitumen into synthetic oil. Attempts at processing have resulted in both excessive pollution and in huge quantities of what is known as bitumen slag. This bitumen slag is carbon, light in weight and will blow away in a wind. You can burn it but it just throws more carbon into our atmosphere.
The easy solution is to dilute the bitumen with hydrocarbons, heat the mixture and force it through pipelines at high pressure. This is how Kinder Morgan hopes to move the bitumen to the ocean port at Burnaby. The question everyone can ask is not if the pipeline can rupture but when?
And cleaning up a diluted bitumen spill is an impossible task. Just ask people in Michigan who tried to save the marine life in the Kalamazoo River. Or ask the people in North Battleford and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan whose drinking water was cut off from the North Saskatchewan River and the farmers who could not let their cattle drink from the river.
But sending our Canadian bitumen to third world countries to be turned into synthetic oil is the greatest failure of all. For Justin Trudeau to posture for the Paris Conference on the Environment and then want to add to the destruction of our environment is hypocrisy.
But about that second front: Are you prepared to take the fight to Parliament Hill? We will need to coordinate with our friends in B.C. but when they block the pipeline in the Rockies, we need to symbolically block the Parliament grounds. Let’s get ready.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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