Your (Regina Leader-Post’s) editorial rightly highlights the danger of transporting oil by rail. But the Energy East pipeline – which would transport 1.1 million barrels of oil per day past the growing Harbour Landing subdivision – is not safer. According to U.S. data, rail incidents happened twice as often as pipeline spills from 2004 to […]
Comment: “Tar Sands” or “Oil Sands” you decide
If you’ve ever watched the opening scene* of the 1981 Canadian horror movie called Scanners, you know what happens to a typical advocate of wide-open development of Alberta’s vast bituminous sands if you happen to use the term“tar sands.” This makes it almost too much fun not to say “tar sands”every time you have the […]
David Schindler weighs in on Roland Hall’s recent oil sands study
In our last podcast we told you about a study done by scientist Roland Hall suggesting that the oil sands industry is not polluting the Athabasca river and delta. Not surprisingly the conclusions have been met with a healthy measure of skepticism by some. One of those people is David Schindler. An acclaimed scientist in […]
Roland Hall found some interesting results in Alberta’s Oil Sands
Review of oil sands ops not needed
It was a unanimous decision. NAFTA’s North American Free Trade Agreement) environmental commission will not be looking into the oil sands tailings ponds. The decision came despite the fact staff with NAFTA’s Commission on Environmental Co-operation (CEC) recommended doing the opposite. In a written ruling, the CEC stated the reason there will not be an investigation is because of […]
Independent numbers indicate oil sands may have a wider benefit for Canada
Peter Howard, President of the Canadian Energy Research Institute discusses their report on the oil sands, and what the independent data they utilized indicates.
One researcher’s innovative tailings pond solution is getting some attention
Rob chats with University of Alberta Professor Mohamed Gamal El-Din about their research into faster, better tailings pond reclamation.
Comment: Hypocrisy at the EU
Environmentalists on both sides of the Atlantic are aghast at the news the European Union (EU) is proposing to scrap a mandatory requirement to label tar sands crude as highly polluting. It’s a triumph of five years of lobbying by both the tar sands industry and the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which […]
Campaign pushes for stiffer penalties in environmental disasters
A global campaign to make “ecocide” a crime under international law is an attempt to outlaw the worst kinds of environmental destruction. A grassroots movement called End Ecocide on Earth is seeking to have the wholesale destruction of ecosystems ranked alongside offences such as genocide and war crimes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) would then […]
Oil sands product finds way into Europe
The European Commission released a proposal requiring energy suppliers to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels by 6 percent by 2020 as well as disclose those products’ greenhouse gas emissions. That falls short of a previous plan that would have labeled fuels from oil sands processed in Canada and elsewhere as “dirty.” “It is […]