"Oil giant ExxonMobil faces mounting criticism of its clean-up efforts after one of its oil pipelines ruptured on Friday and leaked 42,000 gallons of crude oil into Montana’s Yellowstone River. The company initially downplayed the incident by saying it would only effect 10 miles of the river but state officials say the oil has already stretched over 240 miles to near the North Dakota border. The spill comes as the Obama administration considers a massive new oil pipeline called the Keystone XL that would carry corrosive tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The pipeline would cross the Yellowstone River as well as the Ogallala aquifer — the largest fresh-water aquifer in the U.S." (Democracynow.org)
The Keystone XL pipeline will carry 840,000 gallons of oil a day, as opposed to the 40,000 gallons carried by the ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline. "this pipeline would go over Yellowstone, the Missouri River, through the Ogallala aquifer, and cross nearly two thousand rivers and reservoirs across the United States". Trans Canada is building the pipeline. Their first pipeline, started last year, (Keystone1) has already logged 12 spills and is considered an "imminent threat to safety" by regulators.
The letter calls on citizens of the United States and Canada to block approval of this pipeline project, calling for civil disobediance if necessary. Signatories include: David Suzuki, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, and James Hansen.
Excerpt from letter:
As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.
And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.
These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.
The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every 7 years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.
And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s ‘inclined’ to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry. The US Chamber of Commerce—a bigger funder of political campaigns than the RNC and DNC combined—has demanded that the administration “move quickly to approve the Keystone XL pipeline,” which is not so surprising—they’ve also told the U.S. EPA that if the planet warms that will be okay because humans can ‘adapt their physiology’ to cope. The Koch Brothers, needless to say, are also backing the plan, and may reap huge profits from it.
So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington.
This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, till the administration understands we won’t go away. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision-makers need to know they’re being watched.
Twenty years of patiently explaining the climate crisis to our leaders hasn’t worked. Maybe moral witness will help. You have to start somewhere, and we choose here and now.
Read the entire letter, or more about the specific issues with the oil derived from tar sands, the environmental impacts of extraction, see what you can do: go to TarSandsAction.org
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The OSEI Corporation has alerted the federal on scene coordinators with the Coast Guard and EPA for RRT VIII there is enough OSE II to remediate approximately 1,000,000 gallons of fuel or oil in their Dallas warehouse. OSE II was successfully tested by Exxon for the Valdez spill and was recently successfully tested by BP for the Gulf, where BP has requested the implementation of OSE II on the Gulf spill. OSE II was successfully used by the US EPA on a similar spill on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, where a pipeline ruptured that crossed over the river. OSE II has successfully cleaned up over 16,000 spills since 1989, and can be used equally on fresh or salt water spills. OSE II was successfully demonstrated in Waveland Beach Mississippi on sensitive marsh grass, and OSE II cleaned up over a 5,000 gallon spill for Texaco on fresh water as well. OSE II is the non toxic first response clean up product that will quickly return the river banks to pre spill conditions.
ReplyDeleteSee link to EPA river clean up with OSE II http://osei.us/photoalbums/osage-indian-reservation-epa-cleanup