WALLACE — The city is discussing the idea of a megaload staging area that would be set up in the parking lot across from the visitors’ center.
During a special city council meeting Thursday, members unanimously gave Mayor Dick Vester the authority to enter into a contract to use the space for megaload parking and maintenance for six months. Continue reading
Created by Powderhouse Productions in 2005 for the National Geographic Channel’s MegaStructures series, this 48-minute reasonably neutral documentary reveals an intimate view of on-site tar sands extraction and transportation, facilities construction, and bitumen production processes at Syncrude’s vast mine near Fort McMurray in northeastern Alberta, Canada. Many of the structures visible during development of a competing Shell Oil upgrader plant reflect Korean-made ExxonMobil/Imperial Oil components currently moving as megaloads through the U.S. Northwest.
(Link provided by Ethan Nilsson)
Please listen to between 9:59 and 5:54 to learn about how Idaho bureaucrats dissuade government access, endanger highway travelers, and sell us and our public resources cheaply.
Listen to: Fracking Rules
(By Leigh Robartes, KRFP Radio Free Moscow Evening Report)
On Thursday, December 1, the Four Worlds International Institute, the Wilderness Committee, and Hereditary Chief of the Yankton Sioux Tribe and Chickasaw Nation Phil Lane, Jr. will host a public forum about Alberta tar sands pipelines and tankers in British Columbia at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver and via global internet. The live streamed program will begin at 6:30 pm with the Oceanside Dakota Drum and a 7 pm welcome from Ruben George, the Sundance Chief of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the indigenous peoples of Burrard Inlet who are opposing oil tanker traffic there. Next, Chief Jackie Thomas of the Saik’uz First Nation, representing the Yinka Dene Alliance of five nations, will discuss the declaration and campaign to stop the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline. Rex Weyler of Tanker Free BC and Greenpeace will talk about the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline to Vancouver and dredging to accommodate 300 tar sands super tankers per year in Burrard Inlet. Melina Laboucon-Massimo, a Greenpeace tar sands campaigner from the Lubicon Cree First Nation will share her perspective on the Alberta tar sands. Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein will explore how the Keystone XL pipeline victory impacts BC and the international climate justice movement. Lastly, Hereditary Chief Phil Lane, Jr. will offer summary remarks. Please engage this great opportunity to learn more about these important issues and the role we can play alongside indigenous people stopping these related tar sands developments. Watch this historic event live on the homepage of Four Worlds International Institute at http://www.fwii.net/.
For more information, see The Tar Sands Stop Here!
Thanks to Jeremy Jenkins for filming Alberta tar sands equipment roaring through the gauntlet of Moscow, Idaho, opposition during our 24th direct confrontation with Highway 95 megaloads on Tuesday, November 29. If three previous transports stranded by weather at the milepost 405 parking area had also moved that night as planned, travelers could have encountered up to six rolling roadblocks on the 115 miles between Lewiston and Coeur d’Alene. Instead, the parked loads supposedly moved on Wednesday evening, November 30, when the Idaho Transportation Department postponed another three smaller modules scheduled for Lewiston departure. Several Tuesday protesters witnessed on-the-job flagger training as we stood at one of the busiest intersections in Moscow. One experienced flagger constantly yelled instructions to a neophyte just before ExxonMobil again plundered our consciences and risked our resources and lives with unprepared contracted personnel.
Wild Idaho Rising Tide (WIRT) organizer Robb Briggs is hosting a strategy session for the national group Tar Sands Action (TSA) at his Pullman home on Wednesday, November 30, starting at 7 pm. TSA was founded along with 350.org by Bill McKibben, the author of many excellent books, including The End of Nature, Deep Economy, and Eaarth, who visited the University of Idaho last spring and has emerged in recent years as our nation’s most prominent and effective climate activist. In August and September 2011, TSA organized the civil disobedience demonstrations at the White House that led to the arrest of more than 1,200 protesters (including Rob). On November 6, TSA led a rally that surrounded the White House and drew more than 10,000 participants. These efforts are widely credited with causing President Obama to delay a final decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline permit until after the 2012 election. WIRT extends this invitation and welcome to the newly formed Palouse Environmental Sustainability Coalition, WIRT members, and other interested local activists. Please view the following web link to optionally RSVP and for a map of the meeting location and additional information. A carpool to Pullman will leave the Tri-State parking lot after 6:30 pm. Contact Rob with your questions about this event.
For more information, see: Tar Sands/Climate Movement Strategy Session
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
Wild Idaho Rising Tide 