There's No Selfie to Fix This One

When Justin Trudeau or one of his drones pimp pipelines they're sure to claim they're "following the science." Oh yeah, the science is on their side. Science says dilbit pipelines are safe. Science says so.

Question: who is this guy, Mr. Science? Maybe there's an Archibald Science or a Jean Luc Science, perhaps a Mary Francis Science? Because there's no actual science-science supporting Trudeau and Company's constant claims that bitumen is safe. None anybody can find. None that the Trudeau gang has been willing to produce.

The problem is that some scientists say the evidence flies in the face of what Trudeau called a safe project, the west-coast Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion. In fact, they say there is very little published evidence in the scientific literature about bitumen to back up the prime minister’s claims.

And one of the most glaring gaps of evidence, the scientists say, is the absence of any significant research on the effects of spills of bitumen — the heavy oil from Alberta’s oilsands industry that is expected to flow in the new pipelines — into the oceans.

A group of scientists from Canadian and American universities reached these conclusions after a comprehensive review of thousands of scientific papers on oil and the environment. They found literature on impacts of oil spills, but very little published research about how bitumen affects marine organisms, as well as how spill response would affect these organisms. Their findings were peer-reviewed and are scheduled to be published later this month in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

In an interview with National Observer, three of the scientists said they gave advance copies of their findings to Trudeau’s office and others in his cabinet on Nov. 21, but it’s not clear what the government did with that evidence.

“It’s hard to imagine that the federal government decision (to approve new pipelines) could be based on science, just when we’ve found that in many cases, there’s very little science to base those decisions upon,” said Wendy Palen, an associate professor of biological sciences at Simon Fraser University in B.C., and one of the authors of the paper.

But there's plenty of evidence that Trudeau is pulling a fast one. There's even a smoking gun. It was the Trudeau government's (not Harper's, Trudeau's) quiet decision to approve the truly hideous, thalidomide-grade chemical, Corexit, to be used if and when - or, when and when - there's a catastrophic dillbit spill on the West Coast. In case you haven't read my posts on Corexit over the past couple of years you can check them out here or here.

Or, you can watch this Vice News look into the impact of Corexit in the Gulf of Mexico.



Or this from Australia's 60 Minutes:



Keep in mind that the spills discussed by Vice and 60 Minutes Australia are just ordinary crude oil. Exxon Valdez grade stuff (by the way, Prince William Sound? still not clean). Bitumen is a different creature altogether. It's a heavier than water sludge that's chock full of acids, heavy metals, carcinogens, abrasives and other junk such as petcoke,  Once the diluent evaporates out, it slowly sinks to the bottom where all those nasties leach out presumably for generations devastating the marine ecology.  That "bottom" out here can be 600 feet down - or worse.

The last honest statement I can recall hearing out of Ottawa was from the Harper days. A reporter caught then enviromin Peter Kent off guard. Simple question - does the government have a way to clean up a dilbit spill. I can remember minister Kent's reply, verbatim - "Not yet but we're working on it." Those experiments must not have panned out very well if the Trudeau government has fallen back on Corexit 9500A.

And so Trudeau is going to take one ecological catastrophe, a major bitumen spill, and make it vastly worse by throwing Corexit 9500A on it, poisoning not just the marine life but any human unfortunate enough to get exposed to it, like all those folks on the American Gulf coast.