Hippies attack Shell site near Edmonton

[starseed]

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/st...l.html?ref=rss

About 20 Greenpeace activists stormed a Shell Canada upgrader expansion site in a suburb northeast of Edmonton on Saturday. The protest in Fort Saskatchewan is the latest attempt by Greenpeace to shed light on what it calls the "climate crimes of the tarsands."
The group says activists from Canada, France, Brazil and Australia have scaled an under-construction upgrader, which upgrades heavy oil into a lighter synthetic oil that can be refined into gasoline and other products.

Since when does Alberta have tar sands?


Do they really think that this will have some sort of impact? This is the most constructive way of working against the Oil industry that they could come up with?






The only reason I spammed the board with this thread is to post that image.

[DOK]

The worst is that they are self admittedly not there to upset the oil companies, but to get the attention of the governments around the world.

They need to do something more productive.

[Mad Mel]

Originally Posted by starseed

Do they really think that this will have some sort of impact? This is the most constructive way of working against the Oil industry that they could come up with?

I had to deal with protesters when I worked in the Carmanah and Walbran, and yes... it is all they've got. On Monday, the kids will have to go back to university anyway, so the problem goes away.

[HPLovecraft]

Hey, it got in the newspapers, didn't it?

[killer_carlson]

can someone explain to me where the money comes from?

How do these people put food on the table? How do they get the time off of their work?

[HOZ]

When it gets cold enough they will leave

[bigalspratty]

Have I ever mentioned that I hate hippies.
I HATE HIPPIES!

[Devils'Advocate]

Originally Posted by starseed

Since when does Alberta have tar sands?

I'm confused over this "tar sands" vs "oil sands" thing. I've seen that used interchangeably in journals and the media. I realize wikipedia isn't pure fact, but it does show that the two are commonly going to be used to refer to the same thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

If you believe
-that global warming is man-made
-the "oil sands"/"tar sands" are contributing to global warming
- that the oil companies will act like capitalists do in trying to produce their product at the lowest possible cost

Then
- isn't your best bet to try to make some noise, get into the newspapers and draw attention to the issue?

I suppose they could do what I've done. Cynically give up and fiddle while Rome burns.

[The Special One]

What do you want them to do? Sit back and let oil companies destroy the environment? I applaud them for taking the time to protest against this kind of thing.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by The Special One

What do you want them to do? Sit back and let oil companies destroy the environment?

Why, no. By all means I expect them to do the right thing, and burn hundreds of litres of fuel oil per person to fly their worthless arses from all over the world to bite the hand that feeds them, all for the sake of a cheap photo opportunity that will change nothing.

After all, if the world is burning too much oil, it's obviously the fault of the evil oil companies. It can't possibly be the fault of all the people who go around wasting fuel.

[The Special One]

Yes, it is the fault of the evil oil companies. They are hugely influential by ways of campaign contributions in all political races. They make sure their agenda gets served. Do you really believe that cars today are a fuel efficient as they could possibly be? Why do you think they are not? Because we can fly a man to the moon but can't figure out a way to get around on vegetable oil?

[burn_this_city]

There is no alternative to oil thats even remotely viable. Biofuels are a farce, it takes NG to produce fertilizer and you could use every inch of farm land on the earth and never come close to the 80,000,000 barrels the world consumes everyday. Oil companies meet demand, and what do they have to do with fuel efficiency of vehicles? They dont produce cars.

[Devils'Advocate]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

After all, if the world is burning too much oil, it's obviously the fault of the evil oil companies. It can't possibly be the fault of all the people who go around wasting fuel.

Aye.

"It's not the fault of the people because people want to be environmentally conscious, but only if industry would give them choices that allowed them to be."

and

"It's not industry's fault because the people choose to be wasteful."

Therefore it's nobody's fault and all the protesters should just shut up and everything will work out just fine.

[Devils'Advocate]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

There is no alternative to oil thats even remotely viable. Biofuels are a farce, it takes NG to produce fertilizer and you could use every inch of farm land on the earth and never come close to the 80,000,000 barrels the world consumes everyday. Oil companies meet demand, and what do they have to do with fuel efficiency of vehicles? They dont produce cars.

I've not read Greenpeace's policy demanding an immediate worldwide end to oil production.

"They want us to live in caves! Caves I tell ya!"

There needs to be political pressure to make oil production, and particularly the oil sands, less environmentally damaging. Saying that does not mean that we want people to live in caves. Oi.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by The Special One

Yes, it is the fault of the evil oil companies.

Congratulations: Ignorant Statement #1. If you knew anything about the oil companies and the people who actually work for them, you might be less glib about applying adjectives like 'evil' to them. But it's always easier to maintain a proper level of righteous rage against your opponents if you can pretend they are less than human — isn't it? You evidently ought to know.

They are hugely influential by ways of campaign contributions in all political races. They make sure their agenda gets served.

Ignorant Statement #2.

Yep, they are so sure their agenda gets served, there are tens of billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. alone that they are not allowed to drill for because offshore drilling, among other things, has been banned. I guess the oil companies would rather pay $80 a barrel to the Saudis and Iranians than produce easily available reserves themselves and keep the profits of production?

Do you really believe that cars today are a fuel efficient as they could possibly be? Why do you think they are not?

Ignorant Statement #3.

There are many reasons why cars are less fuel-efficient than they could be. One is the insistence of governments on obsolete and fuel-wasting emission-control devices. Equipping a car with a catalytic converter, for instance, lowers its fuel economy (and is also the biggest drain on the world's scarce and precious reserves of platinum), while better results can be achieved by simply building more efficient engines. But the law happens to require catalytic converters, even if cars can meet or beat emission standards without them. Thanks to legislative fiat, we're stuck using 1970s technology in the 21st century. It's as if some government yahoo had passed a law requiring all computers to have 5-1/4" floppy drives, and then complained because the industry couldn't build a laptop lighter than 10 pounds.

Another problem is Western safety standards. You want a fuel-efficient car, go to India and buy a Tata. The trouble is, you can't drive one here: they're not street legal. Between airbags, 'passive restraint systems', space-frame roll cages, crumple zones, and all the rest of it, safety laws add hundreds of kilos to the curb weight of every vehicle manufactured. This saves thousands of lives per year, but wastes millions of barrels of oil. Between you and me, I'll take the lives.

A third problem is that the most fuel-efficient vehicles are inevitably the smallest, but many people can't or won't use them. It's no use telling a soccer mom with four kids to drive a Prius; she needs a car big enough for her family. And if you want to tell a farmer or a plumber that he has to give up his pickup truck and drive a Smart Fortwo instead, I want to be there; I can sell tickets to it as a comedy act.

Because we can fly a man to the moon but can't figure out a way to get around on vegetable oil?

Ignorant Statement #4.

You know what happened a year or so ago, when the U.S. government mandated that a certain percentage of motor fuel had to come from vegetable oil? The world price of corn shot sky-high — more than double, as I recall. That meant that the price of meat shot up, as livestock eat corn. It also meant that the price of other foods rose sharply, as people who could no longer afford corn bought those other foods instead. It meant that millions of people in poor countries all over the world had to go hungry, because they had barely been able to pay for food before the price increases; thousands of people, especially children, died of diseases caused by malnutrition, and others simply starved to death. All this to meet (if I recall correctly) a mere 10 percent of the demand for gasoline in the U.S. alone.

The kicker is that demand for oil did not go down, because that quantity of corn can only be grown by the use of oil-based chemical fertilizers and diesel-powered farm machinery. No, organic farming is not an option: it produces about one-third the yield per acre of 'factory' methods, and is essentially a luxury for the latte-sipping rich.

Biodiesel or ethanol made from sugar cane would have produced some reduction in oil demand. However, sugar cane can only be grown in tropical climates — i.e., in the most densely populated and hungry parts of the world. Brazil could conceivably grow enough cane to replace all its demand for oil, but only at the cost of destroying the rest of the Amazon rain forest to put enough land under the plough. Again, killing off the rain forest in order to kill the oil companies is not a trade-off I'm willing to make.

There is simply not enough cropland in the world to grow the amount of vegetable oil (or sugar cane) that would be needed to replace the world's present oil consumption. And there are too many people in the world to be fed, housed, given medical care, transported, or employed without massive expenditures of energy. Nuclear energy is the best option for supplying that energy without using fossil fuels, but people like you have effectively prevented that option for the last 30 years.

In fact, you can choose between 'evil oil companies' and mass starvation. And if you prefer the mass starvation, I think I can tell who in this picture is really evil. Hint: it isn't ExxonMobil.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate

Aye.

"It's not the fault of the people because people want to be environmentally conscious, but only if industry would give them choices that allowed them to be."

and

"It's not industry's fault because the people choose to be wasteful."

Therefore it's nobody's fault and all the protesters should just shut up and everything will work out just fine.

You're being wilfully obtuse. The oil companies do not dictate what vehicles the auto industry manufactures, or what vehicles customers choose to buy. If you think people are burning too much fuel in their cars, put the blame on the industry that deserves the blame.

Meanwhile, I don't think the protesters should shut up. But their right to free speech stops well short of trespassing on private property to shut down other people's equipment and prevent other people from doing their jobs and earning their living.

[Devils'Advocate]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

You're being wilfully obtuse. The oil companies do not dictate what vehicles the auto industry manufactures, or what vehicles customers choose to buy. If you think people are burning too much fuel in their cars, put the blame on the industry that deserves the blame.

So it is your opinion that it is the USERS of oil that need to be environmentally aware, but the oil producers do not? Or you believe that they already are doing everything in their power to protect the environment out of their own free will? Because the oil companies are made up of only the most pure and good people?

[Traditional_Ale]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

There is no alternative to oil thats even remotely viable. Biofuels are a farce, it takes NG to produce fertilizer and you could use every inch of farm land on the earth and never come close to the 80,000,000 barrels the world consumes everyday. Oil companies meet demand, and what do they have to do with fuel efficiency of vehicles? They dont produce cars.

You forgot to mention wind energy and solar. For under 20,000 dollars every last residential and light commercial property in Calgary could be entirely self-sufficient. Yes I have worked out the costs of materials and installation. The problem is everyone seems to think windmills are ugly, or at least the dinosaurs in charge do. In Calgary windmills are not allowed. Instead I think it would be a pleasant reminder of doing your part. 25 feet in the air is free power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This to charge your battery-powered car (because producing an appropriate cell is less energy/waste than refining oil) and all of a sudden there is a whole lot less burning oil going on.

Just saying, if you're going to say "no viable alternative" then maybe cover all your bases.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate

So it is your opinion that it is the USERS of oil that need to be environmentally aware, but the oil producers do not? Or you believe that they already are doing everything in their power to protect the environment out of their own free will? Because the oil companies are made up of only the most pure and good people?

None of the above. Oil does not hop out of the ground and into your gas tank of its own accord. Like most human activities, extracting oil is a dirty business and cannot be done without some effect on the environment. When the world demands 80,000,000 barrels of oil per day, and then declares significant reserves off-limits for political reasons, the world must expect some of that oil to come from sources that are unusually difficult and messy to develop.

Oil-sands extraction is not a matter of drilling; it's essentially an open-pit mining industry. If these Greenpeace fellows are truly sincere, they should be protesting at coal, iron, and copper mines as well as oil sands. But it's easier to get cheap publicity by exploiting the existing bad reputation of Big Oil — just as it's easier to get cheap publicity for conservation efforts by exploiting the cuteness of pandas and baby seals, even though many other species of wildlife are more in need of help.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Traditional_Ale

You forgot to mention wind energy and solar. For under 20,000 dollars every last residential and light commercial property in Calgary could be entirely self-sufficient. Yes I have worked out the costs of materials and installation. The problem is everyone seems to think windmills are ugly, or at least the dinosaurs in charge do. In Calgary windmills are not allowed. Instead I think it would be a pleasant reminder of doing your part. 25 feet in the air is free power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Except that its not 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When the wind stops blowing, you have no power.

Electrical utilities have learned the hard way that if they are going to rely on wind generation, they have to have coal-fired, hydro, or nuclear plants on standby as a backup. I believe the figure used in the industry is 97 percent: i.e., for every 100 kilowatts of wind power, you need 97 kilowatts of reserve capacity from other sources.

And it's not free, either. The capital cost of building windmills is significant, and the cost of collecting and transmitting that power is often prohibitive. (The biggest single drain on our supply of electricity is induction loss in the power lines, and that can't be prevented unless ALL power is consumed right at the point of production.) If you have to have a backup for 97 percent of your windmills, it's generally cheaper to simply have 100 percent backup, pay for fuel, and not have the windmills at all.

EDIT: By the way, windmills in residential areas are a first-class Bad Idea. Have you ever seen what happens when a windmill fails in operation? Either the blades shear off, or the generator goes foom — and in neither case do you want to be within a city block of the wreckage. You may object that such incidents are rare. So are sour-gas blowouts, but it is still illegal to build housing within a certain radius of a producing sour-gas well.