Vancouver Marches National Energy Board into Court

The City of Vancouver is going to court.  It's goal is to get an order requiring that climate change impacts be considered by the ersatz-National Energy Board hearings on Kinder-Morgan's pipeline expansion application.

The city will ask the Federal Court of Appeal on Friday for a judicial review of the National Energy Board process for the project.

Vancouver officials already asked the board to take climate change into account, but the regulator decided in July it would not.

Kinder Morgan's Bold Play

Kinder Morgan has dropped a bomb.   The bitumen pipeline trafficker wants to triple its existing pipeline capacity.   From Island Tides:

Citing ‘additional customer support’, Kinder
Morgan recently announced that it intends to
increase the capacity of its proposed new ‘twin’
oil pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby.
 
The current capacity of the existing Trans
Mountain pipeline is approximately 300,000
barrels per day (bpd). While the pipeline
capacity in the original expansion proposal was
750,000bpd, this updated proposal brings the
capacity of the two pipelines, existing and
proposed, to 890,000bpd.
 
The diameter of the new twin pipeline was
previously proposed to be 30 inches. It will now
be 36 inches–a 44% increase in capacity. The
cost estimate for the project has also
increased–from $4.1 billion to $5.4 billion.


Kinder Morgan expects to file the formal
application to build the pipeline in late 2013.



Kinder Morgan says that with the enlarged
pipeline, an increase from one loading berth to
three, and increased storage and pumping
capacity, they expect to load over 400 Aframax
tankers per year, or at least one daily. The City
of Vancouver and the Tsleil-Waututh First
Nation have both registered their objection to
increased oil shipping.

Increased capacity of the pipeline is expected
to result in an even greater increase in the
number of tankers exporting crude bitumen
from the Westridge Terminal in Burnaby.
In addition to crude bitumen for export, the
pipeline currently transports oil to Vancouver area
refineries, particularly the Chevron
refinery in North Burnaby. However, increased
shipments of crude bitumen, instead of
conventional oil, have recently threatened local
refinery supply.

Wow.  It seems Kinder Morgan figures Ottawa's in the bag on this one.   And it probably is, no matter who wins the next election.

Taking the Fight to Them

It's time to do what they fear most - connect the dots.   That means linking bitumen trafficking to the plight being inflicted on the poorest and most vulnerable peoples on Earth due to global warming.  It's a link that is irrefutable.

We know that the climate change the world is now enduring is anthropogenic, man-made.   We know that the rapidly changing climate results from warming of the atmosphere, global warming, through burning fossil fuels which generates atmospheric carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

We know that all fossil fuels are not created equal.   Some, such as natural gas, are less carbon-intensive than others.   Others, such as coal and bitumen, are highly carbon intensive and, as such, contribute proportionately far more to anthropogenic global warming.

We know that talk of carbon capture and sequestration remains, after decades of rambling, just that - talk, empty promises.   We know that, despite industry's abject failure to deliver on its carbon capture promise, the federal and Alberta governments are determined to facilitate the rapid and massive expansion of production and export of Athabasca bitumen, one of the world's very worst carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

We know that around the world the poor and vulnerable are being beset by climate change impacts, particularly floods and drought, that bring famine, pestilence, armed conflict, displacement and, to some, death.   And we know this is just beginning.   This is suffering of a degree and on a scale we cannot imagine.

We know that already known fossil fuel reserves exceed the amount remaining that can perhaps be safely burned by a factor of five to one.   In other words, if our civilization is to survive this century - our children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, eighty per cent of those fossil fuel reserves will have to be left in the ground.   This utterly discredits anyone promoting the exploitation and consumption of the worst, most carbon intensive fossil fuels.   The planet has more than adequate stocks of relatively clean, conventional fossil fuels.   There is no moral case for exploiting high-carbon intensive unconventional fossil fuels.

We know that the fossil fuel industry behaves as any other corporate entity.  It serves the interests of its investors and shareholders.   It does not serve those interests by voluntarily incurring expenses that are not mandated.   Hence, until carbon capture is mandated and industry is compelled to act, it will not act.  The promise of carbon capture, advanced by industry and our governments, is a shameless hoax.

We must accept that all of this knowledge supports certain, unavoidable conclusions.   Those who promote, enable, extract, produce and transport the most carbon-intensive, filthy fossil fuels are directly responsible for the disproportionate losses and suffering these unconventional fuels create even in distant corners of the world.    It is an immoral trade from which the riches we reap are paid for by those already impoverished and imperilled elsewhere.

Afghan heroin trafficking or Colombian cocaine trafficking inflicts social and economic devastation elsewhere.   It ruins families and destroys lives and we properly condemn it.   Canadian bitumen trafficking also ruins families and destroys lives elsewhere yet we pretend not to notice even as we move to massively ramp up production and export.

To date most opposition to Tar Sands exploitation has been focused on local outcomes - tailing ponds, destruction of the boreal forest, pipeline spills, tanker catastrophes - with scant attention to what Canada is doing to the rest of the world.   It's time that changed and time that the bitumen boosters in Ottawa, Alberta and elsewhere by tied tightly to the suffering they are causing and intend to continue to inflict.   They have to be held accountable.

Yes There Are Some Things That Should be Left In the Ground

Asbestos is one, that's a no-brainer.   We should not be exporting a product we prohibit from use at home.  There's no moral ambiguity there.

Bitumen is another.  With climate skeptic Professor Richard Muller's research so forcefully (and for him, surprisingly) confirming the reality of anthropogenic global warming, the consensus is overpowering and must be accepted.   The case is made for leaving the most environmentally degrading, carbon emissions intense, and dangerous fossil fuel in the ground.   Not forever.   Just for now.

For many years the governments of Alberta and Ottawa along with the Oil Patch have been assuring us that carbon capture and sequestration, CCS, is both technically and economically viable and just around the corner.   The idea is that the tar sands producers would capture the emissions from extraction and processing, and bury them safely and permanently underground.  We're still waiting.

An operational and effective CCS system would change the Tar Sands dynamic significantly.   With carbon capture and thorough upgrading or refining, Alberta bitumen could be transformed into something similar in emissions to conventional crude oil.   That wouldn't resolve the local and regional environmental hazards, such as tailing ponds, groundwater contamination and the constant threat to the world's third largest watershed, the McKenzie, but it would take a good bit of wind out of the sails of Athabasca's critics.   So where is it?   Why are we still waiting?

We're putting the cart before the horse on the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipeline/supertanker initiatives.  It's letting Alberta and Big Oil off the hook for their long-promised, never delivered environmental remediation.   If they won't make it happen now, why would anyone trust them to deliver afterward?

Let's face it.   The pipeline routes have been chosen because they're the most direct, the cheapest, not because they're the safest, the most easily monitored, the most accessible in the event of a pipeline failure.   They're the cheap and dirty option.   That's the one that Alberta and Ottawa and Enbridge, and the oil producers and the Chinese want rammed down British Columbia's throat.

And we know that there are no safe supertanker routes along British Columbia's rugged and treacherous coast.   We and the Americans recognized that a long time ago when we agreed that Alaska supertankers heading for the Lower 48 would stay well out to sea a safe distance from British Columbia waters.   Why would we think even larger tankers, Chinese owned and operated, would be safer than the American boats?

And then there's the thorny question all The Players want to duck, liability.   They know that Exxon got tagged for somewhere between four to six billion for the Exxon Valdez catastrophe.   And that was a ship much smaller than the tankers the players want to ply British Columbia's waters.   And the Valdez was laden with ordinary conventional crude.   Compared to a bitumen-laden supertanker tragedy, the Valdez was spilled milk.   The Players know it and they're not lining up to indemnify British Columbia for what is almost certain to befall us.   Those risks are way too high for them so they're ducking them through a variety of devices including shell companies and limited liability agreements.

What British Columbians are finally waking up to is the reality that these pipelines are about cutting corners, shaving costs, and ducking liability, all in the name of ever greater bitumen profits.  They're coming to realize that the greatest cost saving of all comes from not having to do the right thing and from offloading the liability on British Columbia.   That's treachery.

So go back to the drawing boards.   Get that CCS system up and running.   Take responsibility for transforming bitumen into the safest form of crude oil possible.   Then find the safest routes possible for your pipelines.   The safest, not the cheapest.   Point those pipelines to port facilities and coastal waters that are as safe as possible for tanker traffic.   The safest, not the cheapest.   And, if going the safest route is just too expensive for your already too expensive fossil fuel, that's tough.   Leave it in the ground.