The oil companies pressuring for the building of the Keystone XL Tar Sands pipeline do not care about your health
The toxic chemicals that will flow through Keystone XL haven’t been disclosed to emergency first responders.
Tar sands crude is thicker, more corrosive, and more abrasive than conventional crude, so it has to be mixed with chemical diluents, then pumped at high pressures and temperatures to make it flow through a pipeline. The State Department’s environmental review of Keystone XL hasn’t analyzed what’s in these mixtures, claiming it’s “proprietary information.” The Environmental Protection Agency critiqued this, saying that such analysis is “important to establish the potential health and environmental impacts of any spilled oil, and responder/worker safety, and to develop response strategies.” The Yellowstone and Kalamazoo River spills demonstrate why this is important. In both cases, confusion ensued about how to respond because no one knew what chemicals were spilled.
The oil companies threatening to build the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline do not care about your home
Warnings that the pipeline could worsen the state's already potent refinery emissions and threaten water supplies have riled up people not normally inclined to cotton to environmentalists; TransCanada's heavy-handed approach to obtaining easements through rural property — a mix of dickering and threats of eminent domain — has populated the Sierra Club's recent meetings with rural residents in denim shirts and silver belt buckles whose political inclinations lean more toward the "tea party" movement than eco-activism.
The oil companies wanting to build the Keystone XL Tar Sands pipeline do not care about our future.
We can't develop the unconventional fossil fuels and tar sands being the first example and have any hopes of stabilizing climate in the foreseeable future
What the oil companies do care about is that the demand for oil has diminished and they have oil refineries on the Gulf Coast that they need to keep supplied with oil or they will have to close or sell off the refineries. Already the market for oil refineries is at a low level.. So don't take all the destruction and loss personally this is just a business decision. It's all about the bottom line.
Please sign the petition in the box below asking President Obama to stop the Tar Sands pipeline. It's all in his hands. Important to let him know you oppose the pipeline.
And please sign up to join Bill McKibben in civil disobedience August 20-September 3 in front of the White House.
Meteor Blades and PDNC organized this blogathon for August 14-19 before he took a "leave of absence" from Daily Kos last week. For now, this will be the last of many projects, blogathons, and diary series that the two of them have done over the years on environmental, climate change, human rights, and political issues.
In honor and respect for our dear friend and project partner, this blogathon is dedicated to Meteor Blades by our blogathon team of PDNC, rb137 and JekyllnHyde.
"Stop Tar Sands" Blogathon: How You Can Help
Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse has coordinated this blogathon with Bill McKibben, who is one of the organizers for a civil disobedience action in DC from August 20th to September 3rd to urge President Obama to not give a presidential permit for the proposed tar sands XL pipeline from Alberta down to Texas. This civil disobedience action is modeled on one that the group Transafrica used outside the Washington Embassy in the 1980s: Nelson Mandela said it played a key role in raising awareness about apartheid. The plan is for a new group of people each day of the two weeks to trespass on the sidewalk in front of the White House.
This is not a protest of President Obama. As Bill McKibben noted, the protest is designed to show President Obama the "depth of support for turning down this boondoggle" as it will be the "biggest civil disobedience protest in the environmental movement for many many years."
We know what the future will look like with the XL pipeline.
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