You could watch this excellent 16 minute doc from Damien Gillis just for the beauty alone.
It is BC's bad luck to lie between the bitumen of the Alberta tar sands and its final destination in China and the US. It is especially bad luck for the coastal peoples and the Great Bear Rainforest :
"The plan is to pump over half a million barrels a day of unrefined bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands over the Rockies, through the heartland of BC - crossing a thousand rivers and streams in the process - to the Port of Kitimat in the Great Bear Rainforest. From there, supertankers would ply the rough and dangerous waters of the BC coast en route to Asia and the United States. Dubbed the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the project is of concern for three main reasons:
1. It would facilitate the expansion of the Tar Sands, hooking emerging Asian
economies on the world's dirtiest oil;2. the risk of leaks from the pipeline itself;
3. the danger of introducing oil supertankers for the first time to this part of the BC coast."
More at Pacific Wild. Pass it on.
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5 comments:
Thanks for posting this Alison. It wasn't really covered in the film, but there's risk of forest fire and siesmic activity along the pipeline route. The route falls on the lower end of the earthquake risk scale, but it wouldn't take much movement to rupture a pipeline. Fire...I have no idea how pipelines are managed in fire-prone areas, but I can imagine that they wouldn't fair well. I'm going to have to do some reading on this...
Earthquake risk map:
http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/environment/naturalhazards/earthquakes/majorearthquakes
Thanks, Alison - Passing it on as we speak . . . .
Yes, the forest fire issue is huge, given the standing dead pinebeetle killed issue up north. Keep in mind that pine sap is basically kerosine. This issue has not been covered substantively.
A slurry of natural gas and bitumen running through forest fires and possible earthquakes? Holy crap! Thanks, guys, will write to this later.
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