Spaniards lining up at their local unemployment office. One out of four Spaniards are unemployed thanks to failed socialist economic policies
I tried posting this on Yahoo News in response to the article below. Unfortunately, Yahoo is not allowing my comment to remain in their comments section.....
Bill Whatcott
The article below is not news. The article left alot of facts out. First off, the Canadian oil industry is subject to environmental penalties and the oil companies pay 100% of the clean up costs for spills. Like I said, this article is not news, it is left wing, pseudo environmentalist, propaganda. The left wants to destroy our heavy energy and industrial sector and they are using the environmental movement to do it. These spills are unfortunate, but are really only localized and temporary problems. The nonsense about Canadians losing our drinking water, due to the creation of a pipeline is simply fear mongering that is completely devoid of fact. Sadly, this rubbish does get a lot of mileage from people who listen to the media and who do not understand hydrocarbons, the oil industry, or standard spill responses.
Destroying our oil industry will have far more serious consequences for ordinary Canadians than a few localized spills from leaking pipelines, here and there. You will quickly find out how much you actually benefit right now from our energy resources. Alberta gets over $9 billion in royalties annually. Those royalties create government jobs, fix our highways, helps pay for our healthcare, etc....
Spain went "green energy" in a big way with the election of a socialist government some years ago. Aside from the fact that the "green" windmills kill way more birds than our oil sands, the oil sands produce way more good paying jobs than those windmills do in Spain. Spain is lacking a reliable energy supply right now and their cities have to ration electricity, something we know nothing about. Imagine your computer going off for hours at a time, several times a week, because you have no energy to run it.
Here in Western Canada high school dropouts with criminal records are able to land entry level $20-$25.00 hour jobs in the energy sector with very little difficulty, if they are willing to work. Those same dropouts can work hard and if they show initiative they can turn into supervisors and skilled tradesmen. The average wage for a journeyman anything in Alberta's oil industry is $120,000 per year. These are not fat cat oil execs.The execs make millions. These are average men and women and in many cases these are folks with disadvantages, such as criminal records, past firings, etc.... who headed west and were able to build them selves up, thanks to the oil industry and labour shortage out here.
By contrast Spain has a 25% unemployment rate and many of their university graduates with impeccable resumes have to leave the country, as there is no jobs in their "green energy" sector, or any other sector; as their socialist government destroyed the real energy sector and bankrupted the country with $15 billion a year subsidies, promoting "green" energy windmills and solar panels that have simply killed birds and failed to sustain their nation's energy demands.
Bill Whatcott
Yet another Alberta oil spill raises questions about Keystone plan
By Nadine Bells
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybre ... 18574.html
On Thursday, Plains Midstream Canada was notified of an oil spill in Alberta's Jackson Creek, a tributary of the Red Deer River.
An estimated 1,000 to 3,000 barrels — or 160,000 to 475,000 litres — of oil spilled from a pipeline. The damage is expected to be significant, especially with the Red Deer River currently flooding and likely to speed up the spread of oil.
This isn't the first Albertan oil spill in recent memory, or even the second.
In late April of last year, 28,000 barrels of oil spilled on the Rainbow pipeline in northern Alberta. A welding crack was blamed for the "very significant" leak.
Critics argued that the province's aging pipe network was cause for serious concern. Earlier that month, another leak on an aging pipeline spilled a small amount of oil into an unnamed Alberta stream.
In May of this year, "less than 5,000 barrels" of light oil spilled north of Grand Prairie — considerably less than the early estimate of 22,000 barrels — from a hole in piping into into a water disposal well.
"What has this PC government done since last year to make sure spills like this don't happen?" Edmonton-Strathcona MLA Rachel Notley asked at the time.
"When we have old infrastructure, new operators, and industry self-monitoring, we have a recipe for environmental disasters across this province. This is not the way to establish international credibility on environmental management and sustainable development," Notley told QMI Agency.
And now with this latest spill, critics and environmentalists are against raising the alarm.
David Suzuki's solution? Get off oil.
"What we do know is that no matter how many times oil companies tell us that practices and technology are improving, we'll never stop having spills so long as we depend on fossil fuels and the devices — including pipelines — that move them between coasts, countries and continents," Suzuki wrote on his website.
In response to the huge 2011 spill, Suzuki urged Albertans to demand plans to protect the province — and to demand the cessation of taxpayer-funded subsided to oil companies — of their political leaders, and to get behind a shift to a clean-energy economy.
Enter the Keystone Pipeline System, a cross-border pipeline system designed to transport up to 590,000 barrels a day of synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from northeastern Alberta's Athabasca Oil Sands to multiple American destinations.
With Phase 1 already complete, US President Barack Obama has announced that the final decision on whether the pipeline is in the United States' national interest will be made in 2013, pending environmental review.
If elected, Mitt Romney claims he'll approve Keystone XL, the proposed expansion, on his first day in the White House.
"I will build that pipeline if I have to myself," he said in April, claiming that Obama missed creating thousands of jobs by not immediately approving it.
Environmentalists worry that the pipeline's extension will damage ecosystems and put others at risk, with part of it crossing an active seismic zone. There are also geopolitical arguments in defence of the pipeline: if the U.S. doesn't get its oil from Canada, it will just get it from the south, a less environmentally-friendly decision that would likely hurt the Canadian economy.
(Refuting this, Alberta's premier has acknowledged that the province is pursuing exports to Asia rather than solely relying on an unstable American market.)
Oh, and gas prices might rise.
These criticisms aside, what about leakage? What accountability is in place to ensure these "huge" Alberta spills don't happen again, possibly on even larger scales? Is the risk of losing drinking water one worth taking?
We may not be ready to live oil-free, but something needs to change in the way we transport it.
