90%? You underestimate by 9.99% IMO.

I’ve seen assaults. I’ve seen disturbing the peace in residential neighborhoods 24/7 for weeks on end. I’ve seen what amounts to kidnapping (trapping people in their cars on the street and blockading them in).
BTW, we aren’t India, more money was lost at this one crossing than if you blockaded all of India for the same timeframe. In America, we don’t just let other people block our borders….that’s our thing!

No, the bridge was not part of a recent past long term blockade, no farmer blockade shut down auto manufacturing on both sides of the borders or weeks. You are incorrect.

Protests are acceptable, even if they cause inconvenience. Protests without an issue that last for weeks-months with the only intent being causing economic damage aren’t protests, they’re tantrums. These protesters didn’t know why they were there besides getting the liberal out of power through any means.

These “protesters” deserved nothing but ridicule, their anti vax position is ridiculous, they know it, and it’s moot because the mandates change with the severity of the outbreak, and are from both sides of the border….Trudeau can’t force America to drop our mandates, and border crossers must be vaccinated….period. Notice when the mandates being lifted soon was announced they didn’t leave but just changed their demands. It’s not a protest, it’s an economic blackmail attempt.

The problem there is most of the violence was not part of the BLM protests (despite the lies right wing media produced all 2020), they were often nearby, taking advantage of the lowered police presence outside the protests, and often was violence directed at BLM, not coming from them. The people terrorizing and inciting violence, shooting crowds, planting bombs, lighting fires, shooting police, etc were Proud boys and Boogaloo boys…far right anti protesters. The idiots carried their manifestos explaining the false flag operation when they committed their crimes, and were caught repeatedly.

They should have simply used tow trucks, confiscating every truck involved to be sold at auction to pay for some of the exorbitant costs, far more than all summer of BLM and anti BLM protests, btw.

This was a threat to your sovereignty, and wasn’t being addressed by other laws or means (sounded like the police chief was a fan).

Seizure is perfection, but should include oversight (I bet it really does, you aren’t America where we’ve made it legal for police to commit armed robbery with no oversight). Note- seizure is different from forfeiture. They’re likely freezing accounts, not seizing the funds, right? Details matter.

It’s not just what they’re protesting, they don’t even know that themselves, it’s how and where. That said, the total lack of support among the population counts. I would expect any protest protesting against it being illegal to eat live babies to get shut down fast, no matter how civil they were on the streets.

Lemme guess, a pipeline crossing sovereign native lands under protest? Going over aquifers? Through preserves? Pumping tar sands no one really wants?
Millions in damages are an hour of the truck protests. They’re designed to cost tens of millions per day…costing everyone not just the target of their protest.

No known connection to protesters, but you want there to be one and are upset they didn’t just fabricate one? It sounds incredibly likely they’re involved, but without evidence one shouldn’t assign culpability.

They have the right to say anything, they don’t have the right to silence all other discussion and action while they ramble and party for weeks-months because they have nothing to say, but are loving the disruption they’re causing. A strong democracy doesn’t support one tiny group negating the entire continent’s voice for months. That’s what this is, they said their peace by day 2, now it’s not a protest, it’s an economic attack trying to blackmail a country (nearly a continent) into abandoning public health for a TINY minority of morons who want special privileges.

What are you talking about? You think Conservative politicians are good?

Here's the Conservative logic:

You a rich guy who's fucking over your workers by not paying them a living wage? Have a tax break, oh and thanks for the campaign contributions we'll find more tax breaks for you.
Oh look, those workers you aren't paying a living wage to need food stamps, let's cut food stamp funding then we'll be able to give you rich people more tax breaks.
Oh, you are moving those jobs overseas so you can keep more of the profits for yourself? Great idea, more money for you. We'll blame those jobs going overseas on the government and everyone will believe it and not blame the rich guy who moved the job overseas because being rich is good (despite what Jesus whom we pretend to like said) and government is bad.
We'll have the churches turn their backs against the teachings of Jesus and convince millions of Americans that Jesus meant the opposite and they'll vote for us thinking they are doing the Christian thing. Sure one or two people will lose faith and hate Christians [your's truly included, even if He is real, I'd rather be in Hell than be around Him or His people] because of it, but most of the faithful have been taught to accept anything the church says, so they'll all go along with the plan to fuck over the working class so that you rich people can have your great life.
We'll keep building more and more prisons, we'll turn them into profit making centers and incarcerate more people than any other nation for the good of corporate profit.
Let's make a pipeline filled with highly pollutive tar sands that will create 35 permanent full time jobs so that we can export a great deal of that oil. We'll tell people it's about "energy independence"and about all the jobs it'll create for the couple years of it's construction. We'll ignore the fact that upgrading our nations infrastructure would create far more jobs not only in the long term, but significantly more jobs in the short term as well., and that's just upgrading our electrical grid, not counting upgrading our freeways, bridges, dams, railways and the like.
Let's make more and more war, because war profits off killing a bunch of what we'll sell as savages is really good money for the rich.

Both sides have good and bad... well the left have good and bad. The right has people brainwashed into thinking they are doing good and the Lord's work...even though it's 100% opposite of what He taught... I hate myself for having ever voted and arguing for Conservative or even Libertarian "logic".

OK there Midnight Oil, I wasn't even born yet when that all happened.

But the tar sands, you betcha, that's on my shoulders.

I hear they add way too much oil to their asphalt recipe. The roads are slick as shit and you will crash if you drive fast. It makes the roads less tar sands and more light sweet crude. No kidding!

Arguably, we've already passed peak oil.

Hence, the sudden increase in offshore oil expeditions and tar sands operations.

Not to mention, Mexico - the U.S.'s third largest supplier - began running out of oil last year, 2011.

It's all downhill from here.

I live in Alberta. Thankfully, 800 kms south of this stuff. There is a huge drug problem in Ft. Mac as well.

Here is an interesting documentary that was produced by my friend's brother. It is called "Downstream" and speaks about the Aboriginal community of Fort Chipewyan that lives near the Athabasca River that flows through the Tar Sands. The entire thing is on Youtube if this site is region blocked or whatever.

http://intercontinentalcry.org/tar-sands-documentary-downstream/

We enjoy an advantage in Alberta for having such vast proven reserves. Some new technology that refines the sands "in situ" using steam-assisted gravity drainage with special catalysts looks promising, like at the Suncor Firebag site. I used to work for Suncor, and am happy to not anymore.

WhyatI never understand is why we have high gas prices here just like everyone else. You'd think since we make the stuff, we would give ourselves a little break at the pumps.

The giant trucks and huge scoops up there is quite interesting. Brobdingnagian.

Your video, Tar Sands Oil Extraction - The Dirty Truth, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^fissionchips:

Haha, great stuff, especially the surprise ending!


Yeah... apparently Chinese oil companies and investors own the majority of the tar sands projects. So when the U.S. buys oil from Canada, they're actually buying it from China.

ChasoEngine said:those that have disagree with you. Appeal to authority? Yes, but I wouldn't ask a climate scientist to write software.

I'd ask you to be very specific about what I've said which relevant experts disagree with me on. Go back and look at the very first article I linked to. It is the relevant experts on statistics disagreeing with and correcting the climate scientists that went off and tried to work too far outside their area of expertise and wound making a mistake that seriously altered their results. The short version is the method they applied was well known to be biased for zero if the constraints were not met, which in the situation used was exactly the case. It is EXACTLY why Mann's original hockey stick graph showed very flat temperature anomalies in his reconstruction from 1000-1800AD. You can verify this by using google scholar to look at Mann's own new work following some of the advice of the article I linked and applying a more appropriate method. It's flagged as the EIV line on the graphs, and it shows several times in the last 1k years where the temperature anomaly from the reference date exceeds what we've experienced recently.

Chaos Engine said:Emphasis mine. Do you have a source for that figure? I don't know if you read the link I posted but it would seem to contradict that figure. Besides, even if CO2 is a small contribution, sometimes a small sway can dramatically affect a system.

I'm glad to hear that you believe in reducing our dependence on coal and oil. Frankly, I think it will run out before we stop using it (and it will run out in my lifetime).

I can't find the article I went off originally but here's a different one. It does vary from the range I gave a little but I think it still is consistent with the spirit of everything I've said. It pegs H2O at 71% and CO2 at 29%, the consistent thing I've seen in the multiple journal based estimates I've seen though is that H2O at a minimum carries double the influence of CO2.

We aren't going to run out of coal anytime soon. Even oil we won't run out of soon. What we may run out of soon is cheap oil, but once a certain price point is hit up here in Canada we've got more oil than Saudi Arabia stored up in the tar sands. It's messy, dirty, expensive and a much greater concern to the environment IMHO than CO2 emissions, but it's a big supply. I am hopeful though, as I said before, that in 20 years nobody is going to want gas powered cars anymore because electric will be cheaper, more reliable, more powerful and basically better in every meaningful way.

@ghark and I think your urge to paint everyone with the same brush makes you miss the forest for the trees.

Forget for a moment about Democrats and Republicans, how should stuff like this work?

Canada has tar sands, and someone wants to extract the oil from them. Should they be legally forbidden from doing that, even if they legally acquire the rights to the land?

Once they extract the oil, it needs to be transported somewhere else to be refined. The biggest refineries are in Texas. Should they send it by boat? By truck? By train? Are those safer and less ecologically damaging than a pipeline? Should America legally forbid the importation of crude oil from Canada?

I'm definitely on the same side as the protesters when it comes to ecological concerns, but I don't see how blocking the construction of the pipeline itself solves any sort of ecological issue. The issue is that there's enough demand for oil that it's now profitable to extract it from fucking tar sands. The solution to that isn't to outlaw the extraction & transportation of that oil, it's to lower demand by taxing the bejeezus out of oil & gas, and use the revenue to subsidize alternative energies and/or public transportation.

Why is that an unthinkable, unmentionable strategy, even for environmentalist protesters?

A protest against Keystone XL only seems like something our corporate overlords would sponsor, so the conversation never moves on to substantive policy that would really make a difference.

That you (and other progressives) are treating opposition to Keystone as some sort of litmus test for who's "with us" and who's "against us" is just icing on the cake for them.

The more divided and demoralized we get, the easier it is for them to keep consolidating power.

In reply to this comment by enoch:
*promote

Thanks for the promote.

There are many more stories involving the Tar Sands projects that go unnoticed by the media in Canada.

I've recently watched H2Oil describing the problems that have arisen from pillaging the Canadian tar sands (I say pillage because if the companies behaved responsibly then they would have demonstrated a fair "give and take" approach instead of taking with little thought given to the people and wildlife affected). Going to give this one a viewing later this evening, will be interesting to see if there are any corporate cross-overs.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'oil, canada, security guards, tar sands, al jazeera' to 'oil, canada, security guards, alberta, fort mcmurray, tar sands, al jazeera, greenpeace' - edited by kronosposeidon

No problem man. I like Al-Jazeera, and I like exposing the tar sands even more.


In reply to this comment by geo321:
Thanks!
In reply to this comment by Throbbin:
In addition to this, the companies exploiting the tar sands get a $5 billion a year tax break, even though they are profiting in the billions.

*quality