Thu, 2013-05-16 11:24Kevin Grandia
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10 Reasons Canada Needs to Rethink the Tar Sands

alberta tar sands oil sands

As a Canadian it blows my mind that we can have the second largest deposits of oil in the world, but our government remains billions in debt and one in seven Canadian children live in poverty.

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Wed, 2013-05-15 16:01Brendan DeMelle
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Climate Denial's Death Knell: 97 Percent of Peer-Reviewed Science Confirms Manmade Global Warming, Consensus Overwhelming

A new survey conducted by a team of volunteers at Skeptical Science has definitively confirmed the scientific consensus in climate science literature - 97 percent of peer-reviewed papers agree that global warming is happening and human activities are responsible.  

It does not get any clearer than this. It should finally put to rest the claims of climate deniers that there is a scientific debate about global warming. Of course, this bunch isn't known for being reasonable or susceptible to facts. But maybe the mainstream media outlets that have given deniers a megaphone will finally stop. 

The peer-reviewed survey, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, was published today in the peer-reviewed Environmental Research Letters, a publication of the Institute of Physics (IOP).

The citizen science team looked at some 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers and found a 97% consensus that humans are causing global warming. The work expanded upon an earlier survey of the literature by Naomi Oreskes, published in 2004, as well as an informal review conducted by James Powell, published on DeSmogBlog in November 2012. 

Lead author John Cook created a short video summarizing the findings of the new survey:

Head over to TheConsensusProject.com and follow their Twitter for further updates.

Read more: Climate Denial's Death Knell: 97 Percent of Peer-Reviewed Science Confirms Manmade Global Warming, Consensus Overwhelming
Wed, 2013-05-15 05:00Steve Horn
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Faulkner County: ExxonMobil's "Sacrifice Zone" for Tar Sands Pipelines, Fracking

There are few better examples of a "sacrifice zone" for ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel industry at-large than Faulkner County, Arkansas and the counties surrounding it. 

Six weeks have passed since a 22-foot gash in ExxonMobil's Pegasus tar sands Pipeline spilled over 500,000 gallons of heavy crude into the quaint neighborhood of Mayflower, AR, a township with a population of roughly 2,300 people. The air remains hazardous to breathe in, it emits a putrid strench, and the water in Lake Conway is still rife with tar sands crude.

These facts are well known.

Less known is the fact that Faulkner County - within which Mayflower sits - is a major "sacrifice zone" for ExxonMobil not only for its pipeline infrastructure, but also for the controversial hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") process. The Fayetteville Shale basin sits underneath Faulkner County. 

ExxonMobil purchased XTO Energy for $41 billion in Dec. 2009 as a wholly-owned subsidiary. XTO owns 704,000 acres of land in 15 counties in Arkansas. Among them: Faulkner. 

"Private Empire" ExxonMobil is now the defendant in a class action lawsuit filed by the citizens of Mayflower claiming damages caused in their community by the ruptured Pegasus Pipeline. ExxonMobil's XTO subsidiary was also the subject of a class action lawsuit concerning damages caused by fracking in May 2011 and another regarding fracking waste injection wells in Oct. 2012. 

This isn't the naturalist novelist William Faulkner's Faulkner County, that's for certain.

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Tue, 2013-05-14 11:46Ben Jervey
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Pegasus Pipeline Spill: Mayflower Residents Find Conflicting Advice from Arkansas Agencies

It’s been over five weeks since ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst beneath a Mayflower, Arkansas subdivision, spilling diluted bitumen born of tar sands throughout the neighborhood. Five weeks later, and still the air carries noxious fumes. Residents complain of headaches, nausea, and worse.

Meanwhile, these residents of Mayflower are getting mixed signals from various state agencies, as well as the EPA and ExxonMobil.

While Exxon, the EPA, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ), and the Arkansas Department of Health are assuring the community that the air is safe, Arkansas’s Attorney General Dustin McDaniel isn’t so sure.

“As we met with residents and groups that represent them, like Remember Mayflower, I heard time and time again about their health, especially the health of their children,” McDaniel said last week. “Many continue to suffer from headaches and nausea and air sampling continues to show that the carcinogen benzene remains in the air.”

Read more: Pegasus Pipeline Spill: Mayflower Residents Find Conflicting Advice from Arkansas Agencies
Mon, 2013-05-13 15:05Farron Cousins
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Could NAFTA Force Keystone XL On United States?

As the public anxiously awaits the U.S. State Department’s final decision on the fate of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the discussion has largely ignored the elephant in the room: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)

Thanks to NAFTA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, the State Department will likely be able to do little more than stall the pipeline’s construction. In its simplest form, NAFTA removes barriers for North American countries wishing to do business in or through other North American countries, including environmental barriers. The goal of the agreement was to promote intra-continental commerce and help the economies of all involved in the agreement.

Read more: Could NAFTA Force Keystone XL On United States?

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