This compelling four-minute video produced by our Portland allies highlights plans to export dirty U.S. coal to Asia. Local voices from Longview, Bellingham, Hood River, and Portland share how coal trains and terminals could harm their communities. Footage captures the filth of coal and the spirit of people who know we can do better.
On Tuesday evening, November 29, the contracted hauler Mammoet will transport six megaloads of Alberta tar sands equipment on Highway 95 for ExxonMobil’s Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil. If Idaho weather and citizens again abet ecological destruction and Native genocide in northeastern Alberta, three shipments each weighing 80,000 pounds and measuring 80 to 110 feet long will leave the Port of Lewiston after 8 pm. These 14- to 15-feet high, 24-feet wide, rolling roadblocks will travel independently except when they huddle against Moscow protesters as a single convoy escorted through town by sold-out flaggers and pilot vehicle drivers and our corporate co-opted state police. Continue reading
There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”
Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.
Read more: Capitalism vs. the Climate
(By Naomi Klein, The Nation)
(Link provided by Rob Briggs)
After the November 8 rear-end collision on Highway 95 between Shawn Dewitt of Princeton, who had voluntarily stopped to ask a megaload flagger how to proceed, and tribal member Frank Bybee of Desmet, who rear-ended Shawn’s stopped vehicle, a Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) facebook friend contacted us to relate that Frank had said that the multiple convoy lights had distracted and blinded him and that no visible flagger had directed the situation. Predictably, Idaho State Police Captain Lonnie Richardson recounted the incident differently for the November 10 Moscow-Pullman Daily News article, stating that “It had nothing to do with the loads or being confused by the lights. It was just driver error.” Continue reading
On October 27, my wife and I were driving from the Lewis-Clark Valley to Moscow. At about 8-8:30 p.m. we came over the top of the hill by Johnson Trucking doing the speed limit of 60 mph. A few seconds after coming over the top of the hill we were surprised by dozens of pylons – maybe hundreds – across all lanes of the highway. There was no warning, no signage to explain how to get through this mess, and no Idaho Transportation Department employees. Images of a collision rushed through my mind. There was a lone worker by a nonstate of Idaho truck along the side of the road. He made no effort to direct or assist us. We did not know how to get through this massive obstruction and were somewhat panic stricken. We made it through the pylons somehow but it all happened so quickly I don’t recall how we did it. Continue reading
1) “Across a range of clean energy projects, including renewable energy, transportation, and energy efficiency, for every million dollars spent, 16.7 green jobs are created. That is over three times the 5.3 jobs per million dollars that are created from the same spending on fossil-fuel industries.”
Searching for Green Jobs for the Coalfields
2) “Despite generating $546 billion in profits between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP together reduced their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees during that time.”
Big Oil Companies Make Huge Profits with Taxpayer Support but Cut Jobs Anyway
3) Researchers at Cornell University put a lot of time and energy into examining the subject of jobs and the Keystone XL pipeline. Share their findings by downloading a free pdf document from this page:
Cornell University Economists Debunk Keystone XL Economic Claims
(Information compiled by Sharon Cousins.)
1) We have so much oil that the USA is exporting oil. If we need more, we can export less.
U.S. Awash in Oil and Lies, Report Charges
For more in-depth information, click on “new report” to download a detailed pdf document.
2) We may not need dirty oil from the ground at all pretty soon. We can pull excess carbon dioxide out of thin air and recycle it into carbon neutral fuel.
Enzyme Holds the Key to Renewable Hydrocarbons
3) We can also have ethanol without starving Africa or triggering frenzied corn speculation. Many plants that can grow on land not suitable for major food crops can be used to make ethanol. Agave is just one of them.
Mexico & Agaves: Moving from Tequila to Ethanol
4) Hemp offers many possibilities for cleaner and sustainable fuels.
(Information compiled by Sharon Cousins.)
Filmed at TEDxVictoria on November 19, 2011, photographer Garth Lenz shares shocking pictures of the environmental devastation of Alberta tar sands mining projects and the beautiful and vital ecosystems they jeopardize. For almost twenty years, Garth’s photography of threatened wilderness regions, ecological destruction, and impacts on indigenous peoples has appeared in the world’s leading publications. His recent images from the boreal region of Canada have helped lead to significant victories and large new protected areas in the Northwest Territories, Quebec, and Ontario. Garth’s major touring exhibit about the tar sands premiered in Los Angeles in 2011 and recently appeared in New York. Garth is a fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers.
[Thursday transports postponed: see note below.] Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night seems to stop the incessant onslaught of tar sands construction traffic through Moscow. Why would it, when ExxonMobil, one of the largest corporations on Earth, has never played by Nature’s rules, not to mention the weather restrictions of its Idaho Transportation Department permits. But with a 50 to 100 percent chance of one to two feet of snow and/or rain predicted for the megaload parking/staging area near Lookout Pass during the rest of the week, the three mini-megaloads each on Tuesday and Thursday nights, weighing between 55,000 and 85,000 pounds, could soon upend into the ditch as easily as a recent Lochsa highway fuel truck. Continue reading
Two Idaho men were released from the hospital following a rear-end collision Tuesday night near Viola on U.S. Highway 95 that law enforcement claims occurred when one driver stopped to talk with a flagger awaiting Imperial Oil shipments bound for the Idaho/Montana border.
According to the Latah County Sheriff’s Office, Shawn Dewitt, 36, of Princeton, stopped his vehicle on the highway to investigate flashing lights belonging to a flagger awaiting three shipments of refinery equipment and ask how he should proceed. Continue reading
Wild Idaho Rising Tide 