MONTREAL - A new report from Greenpeace says oil production in Alberta's tar sands has made Canada into a "global carbon bully."
Little has been done to tackle climate change in Canada, and the federal government has actively tried to block international agreements and laws targeting climate change, says the report, called Dirty Oil: How The Tar Sands Are Fuelling the Global Climate Crisis.
Less than two weeks after the State Department gave the go-ahead for
a major new 36-inch diameter pipeline to carry Alberta oil sands crude
into the United States, a network of environmental and Native American
groups filed a lawsuit
in a San Francisco court on Thursday, accusing President Barack Obama's
administration of significantly accelerating the importation of "dirty
oil" from Alberta.
The government is busy stemming the flow of immigration from Mexico,
but it's welcoming a different kind of flood from the north. The State
Department just approved a project to pipe some of the world's dirtiest
oil from Canada into America's fuel-hungry economy.
The world is heading for a catastrophic energy
crunch that could cripple a global economic recovery because most of
the major oil fields in the world have passed their peak production, a
leading energy economist has warned.
Higher oil prices brought on by a rapid increase in demand and a stagnation,
or even decline, in supply could blow any recovery off course, said Dr Fatih
Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency
(IEA) in Paris, which is charged with the task of assessing future energy
supplies by OECD countries.
The Avaaz Action Factory
is at it again. This time its target is Secretary Clinton; its quest is
to get her to stop a new pipeline that would send Canadian tar sands
oil into the US.
Yesterday, during morning rush hour, these young and creative
activists showed up at the State Department in full costume, complete
with a kiddie pool full of a tar sands mixture. Their banner read:
"Clinton be a Leader. Say No to Tar Sands, Stop Global Warming."
Canada has come last on a WWiF scorecard of G8 countries' efforts against climate change.
That news would once have elicited at least a slightly surprised
response. For several decades, Canada managed to present itself as the
friendly giant of environmental issues.
OTTAWA - The Harper government has named a former oil and gas industry executive who led a company active in the Alberta oilsands as a representative on a U.S.-Canada working group on clean energy.
Charlie Fischer, who until recently served as president and chief executive officer of Calgary-based Nexen Inc., will head up one of three working groups with American counterparts as part of the Clean Energy Dialogue, Environment Minister Jim Prentice has confirmed.
WASHINGTON - Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday unveiled draft climate change legislation to slash America's greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, setting the stage for a protracted and intense political debate in Washington that has potentially major consequences for Canada's energy industry.
The 648-page draft bill would establish a carbon cap-and-trade system to help industry achieve the greenhouse gas reductions, but sidesteps the politically explosive issue of how new emissions credits would be distributed to U.S. companies.
Calgary - The number of ducks that died in a tailings pond at the Syncrude oil sands mine is more than three times as high as first estimated.
A total of 1,606 ducks died in April last year, many of them after they dove into a pond containing bitumen and drowned north of Fort McMurray, Alta., Syncrude president and chief executive officer Tom Katinas said in a news conference Tuesday morning. The company initially said only 500 died.
OTTAWA - The House of Commons environment committee is wading into a raging public relations war over the Alberta oilsands with a study of the industry's impact on water resources.
The MP who proposed the study is Montreal-area Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia. In an interview, he said he assured Conservative MPs - sensitive about an industry in the heart of their political bastion - that the study "is not about a witch hunt" in a sector of the energy industry that some environmentalists are campaigning to have shut down.
