tar sands
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Critical List: Tornado hits Massachusetts; wild lands policy dies an early death
At least four people died after a tornado touched down in Massachusetts. That E. coli strain that's killing people in Europe? Yeah, it's a terrifying, never-been-seen-before mutant. Can the world stop pretending it's in a Robin Cook thriller now, please? The World Bank is going to help cities around the world finance projects that reduce […]
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Canada omitted 20 percent increase in oil-sands emissions from U.N. report
Canada reported to the United Nations that the country's greenhouse-gas emissions were dropping, down 6 percent in the last year. But the government left out one teensy little detail in its report. The emissions from the oil-sands industry, which extracts hard-to-reach oil from tar sands, increased by 20 percent in 2009. Pollution from the oil […]
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Critical List: No more nuclear power in Germany; angry moose attack
Germany plans to close its nuclear reactors by 2022. Electricity generation in 2010 created more carbon emissions than ever before. Canada just looooves tar sands. So much that the country sorta kinda forgot to mention to the U.N. that pollution from the oil-sands industry increased by 20 percent in 2009. European countries are banning imported […]
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Cycling survivor: A post-crash meditation on what really matters
Be more human, less of a machine. Also, wear a helmet.Photo: Jorgen SchybergI was badly injured in a bike accident on April 13. Eyewitness reports differ, but it’s likely that a car ran over my head, and it’s more than likely that the helmet clasped around my head saved my life. The temporal bone on […]
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Keystone pipeline spilled tar-sands oil 11 times in past year. Do we really want to supersize it?
The routes of the existing and proposed Keystone pipelines. Image: RL MillerThe State Department is currently weighing whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar-sands oil some 2,000 miles southward, from Alberta, Canada, to Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. It would be an expansion of the now-operational Keystone pipeline that goes as […]
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First tar-sands mine approved in U.S.
They’re on their way.Photo: ShellThe Canadian tar-sands industry is invading the United States. Alberta-based Earth Energy Resources has won all necessary permits to excavate tar-sands oil from a 62-acre site in Uintah County, Utah. And that’s just the start. Earth Energy has 7,800 acres of Utah state land under lease and plans to acquire more. The company estimates […]
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Are Canada’s disastrous tar sands coming your way?
Alberta’s scenic tar sands.Photo: Suncor EnergyThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. For years, “not in my backyard” has been the battle cry of residents in Cape Cod who stand opposed to an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The giant turbines will forever mar the beauty […]
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Environmentalists stand up to Obama, win big
Under intense pressure from green groups and their members, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) announced Friday that Republican proposals to gut the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were off the table in budget negotiations. “Neither the White House nor Senate Leaders is going to accept any EPA riders,” Reid said. Reid’s pledge […]
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Montanans rally against mega-loads to the tar sands
Activists in Montana and Idaho are fighting back against these monstrosities.Iconic authors and outdoorsmen David James Duncan and Rick Bass have an important new book that they wrote in response to the notorious “haul” this month of gargantuan machines (“mega-loads”) to Alberta, Canada, constructed in South Korea for use in the tar sands. Besides the […]
