Poetic Justice! Enbridge reports leak from U.S. pipeline as Northern Gateway hearings begin. This is nothing new for Enbridge, the leak, that is. They happen all the time. From 1999 to 2010 Enbridge had 804 leaks, spilling more than 16,000 barrels of hydrocarbons into the environment per year.
New research indicates that oil is a lot more toxic than we’d previously believed.
Bad news for the Gulf of Mexico: a study released in late December sheds new light on the toxicity of oil in aquatic environments, and shows that environmental impact studies currently use may be inadequate. The report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study, spearheaded by the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory in collaboration with NOAA, looked into the aftermath of the 2007 Cusco Busan spill, when that tanker hit the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 54,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay.
The key finding involved the embryos of Pacific herring that spawn in the bay. The fish embryos absorbed the oil and then, when exposed to UV rays in sunlight, physically disintegrated. This is called phototoxicity, and has not previously been taken into account when talking about oil spills.
Maybe that’s why the HarperCon spin machine has hit warp drive.
More likely, though, as David Suzuki suggests, it’s a matter of profit. “The only real argument for Northern Gateway is that it will increase profits for the oil industry, and hand over more of our resources and the associated profits and jobs to China,” he says. The only jobs we’ll get here will be short-term ones during the construction of the pipeline and maybe 30-40 long-term jobs in Kitimat.
So, wtf, Harper et al. When ya gonna come clean?
