Gunter Makes the Case For No Oil Tanker Terminal in BC

I know he didn't mean to warn us about the Athabasca Tar Sands but the Edmonton Journal's Lorne Gunter has never been the sharpest pencil in the box. In his latest drivel piece on the Deepwater Horizon debacle, Gunter defends offshore drilling platforms as inherently safer than oil tankers when it comes to spills:

According to a study by the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, offshore drilling remains less damaging than shipping oil by tanker.

"Since 1991, oil tankers have still spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms and more than twice as much as pipelines."

So there you have it, courtesy of CanWest's own Lorne Gunter. Bad as offshore oil rigs are, they're nothing compared to oil tankers when it comes to oil spills. Ergo, thanks to Lorne, no oil tanker terminal on the BC coast should be built to ship Tar Sands oil to Asia, right?

Of course this is just another example of Gunter getting tripped up by his rank ideology. Tankers may have spilled three times as much oil as offshore platforms but that's peanuts when you compare the amount of oil they deliver from the oil fields of the Middle East to the piddly amounts produced by our local, offshore rigs. Gunter is comparing apples to oranges but handily making the case against a BC oil seaport anyway.

The man may not be sentient but, at times, he's damned handy.