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Currently viewing articles tagged with Oil.
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When Will Alberta Stop Giving Away its Oil?
For too many years, successive Alberta governments have sold off Alberta’s oil at fire sale rates. In doing so, they have let the vast potential of our resource gifts slip through our fingers. Consider only the following: In 1978, Albertans received 40 percent of revenues from the oil patch, but by 2009, this had fallen to 10 percent.
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The Keystone XL Pipeline: Part II
Promises of great wealth and vast public benefits generously spread through the streets and into the domiciles of each and every resident are standard for the oil and gas industry when it is trying to wedge a massive new project, like the Keystone XL Pipeline, into the political and physical landscape.
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Disaster capitalism swoops over Libya
Think of the new Libya as the latest spectacular chapter in the Disaster Capitalism series. Instead of weapons of mass destruction, we had R2P (“responsibility to protect”). Instead of neo-conservatives, we had humanitarian imperialists.
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The Libyan Uprising: A View from the Middle East
At this point in the uprisings sweeping through the Middle East it is particularly important for the Left to develop accurate analyses of events in the region, since to be misinformed means to unwittingly oppose the very forces we should support.
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Resistance to Pipelines Heats Up in Northern BC
The explosion of oil production in the Alberta tar sands has created a new push to build pipelines throughout North America. In northern British Columbia, most of which is unceded indigenous land, there are overlapping proposals for new ports and pipelines to transport tar sands oil.
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The Real Price of Oil
From my window in Alameda overlooking San Francisco Bay, I watch hundreds of men and women in white suits, some with masks, busily uprooting slimy sea plants and gently grabbing birds with feathers coated in black grease. Abutting the public beach, this “bird preserve” became a disaster for the very creatures it was designed to protect. On October 30, a line broke during a fuel transfer, the Panamanian-flagged Dubai Star. Some 800 gallons poured into the Bay.
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Taking on the Tar Sands
In his first speech to a business audience after his election in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada was an “emerging energy superpower” signaled his government’s commitment to unflinching support for the relentless expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, primarily to supply synthetic crude oil to the United States. Since then, the tar sands have been the subject of extensive national and international media reporting, even receiving attention in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, where his staff disparaged the tar sands as “dirty oil.”
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Why We Need To Nationalize Oil and Gas
As most experts agree, the production of natural gas and oil is nearing its peak. At the same time, the demand for both commodities is rising — and rising rapidly — as both China and India begin to experience their industrial revolutions.
The first thing that this unprecedented new situation of approaching peak oil and gas has meant is that prices have gone through the roof. What’s more, it’s very likely that these prices are going to stay sky-high for the foreseeable future and beyond.
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The Party’s (Almost) Over
To the long list of wearying apocalyptic scenarios facing the future of humankind must, unfortunately, be appended yet another. One which, nonetheless, at least has the merit of focusing attention by virtue of its sheer immediacy.
According, then, to many of the world’s most prestigious (independent) oil geologists and institutions, not only is the era of cheap oil now almost certainly at an end, but by the end of this decade — and likely before — the price of a barrel of oil will rise well past $100, and will continue to climb quickly and inexorably thereafter.
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Northern Temperatures Rising
You’ve probably heard the old joke about Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory: it’s not the end of the world, but if you look hard enough, you can see it from here. These days, the joke isn’t quite so funny anymore. Climate change has arrived in the Yukon. And although climate change doesn’t actually herald imminent global disaster, it does have dark implications for existing Yukon ecosystems.
The Yukon is one of the planet’s climate-change hot spots, a fact that has attracted considerable interest in the academic research community. At the same time, the Yukon government is working hard to attract the interest of the oil-and-gas industry. Both exploration and research are touted by government as sources of economic diversity and job creation. The government argument is that work for Yukoners will be created by establishing an oil-and-gas sector. Perversely, too, the Yukon will create academic and industry opportunities in the study of—and adaptation to—climate change! This is ecological madness, sort of like paying someone to burn down their house in order to develop their firefighting skills.
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