The Keystone XL pipeline will enable a carbon bomb that is the Alberta Tar Sands. Right now it's about the size of England and growing. The Alberta Tar Sands is the worst ecocide in the world and it is expanding fast. All the big oil companies in the world are invested in this project. Each of them owns a piece of the Tar Sands. These companies bring in their own guest workers whose entry into Canada is fast-tracked by our fossil-fuel government. At the same time, they claim that the Tar Sands is an employment opportunity for Canadians. They are competing with each other to extract and clean the dirtiest oil in the world to satisfy their investors. Billions of dollars have been sunk into this ecological disaster. This short video describes the area before and after the Tar Sands development. He tells how a beautiful boreal forest and wet land, a carbon sink for the environment has been turned into the world's largest and most polluting site.
Don't buy the term "Oil Sands" that's like calling every tomato "ketchup." Tar sands were created millions of years ago from ancient marine life, algae, dead plants and creatures. It's black goo that contains sulphur, nitrogen, heavy metals, clays, resins, asphaltenes. "It's tar on a cold day."
To move in the pipeline it has to be diluted into "dilbit" with benzene. When it spills in waterways, it sinks to the bottom. For an example of damage a leak can do, look at what happened in Michigan.
Meanwhile, [3 million liters of dilbit] oil gushed into Talmadge Creek and eventually the Kalamazoo River. Almost 4,000 animals were affected and 320 people reported symptoms consistent with crude-oil exposure. Cleanup efforts are ongoing and related costs have exceeded $767-million.
A survivor of the Kalamazoo spill speaks at the hearings for the proposed Enbridge pipeline that would go right across British Columbia from the Tar Sands to the west coast.
Freelance photographer Michelle BarlondSmith was living with her husband in a trailer park along the Kalamazoo River in July, 2010 when an Enbridge pipeline burst, leaking 3.3 million litres of diluted bitumen into the water. “My home sat less than 200 feet from the oil, and I was told I would be bought out and taken care of,” she testified in front of the Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel in Vancouver on Wednesday. “I walked away from my home last year, and I testified before U.S. Congress. I was told I would be made whole. Trust me when I say, you will never be made whole.” BarlondSmith, who described herself not as an environmentalist but as an “accidental activist”, said she travelled all the way from Michigan to speak at the hearings because she believes Canadians need to know the human costs of an oil spill.
Support for the Keystone XL Pipeline is support for this "carbon bomb."
Excellent Action Video in the comments posted by joe shikspack. February 17, 2013, remember that date.