Invisible Danger

I want to talk about the miracle scenario painted by the warm and fuzzy propaganda campaign being drummed into the people of BC 24/7 365 days a year, where a pipeline doesn’t leak into our rivers and pollute and poison the land which is a statistical and physical impossibility and there are also no supertanker catastrophes or leaks to destroy our beautiful BC coastal environment and kill millions of aquatic and forest creatures which is a statistical and physical impossibility also, and make no mistake it would only take one to destroy thousands of jobs, millions of wildlife creatures not to mention destroying BCs coastal environment for decades even centuries to come.

What no one is talking about is a serious pollution consequence no one is even talking about or telling us about, catastrophic  amounts of air pollution from Supertankers. Kinder Morgan 400 a year, into Vancouver harbour and Burrard inlet, I have hit bottom of my sailboat miles off UBC in the spring with a 5 ft 2 in draft keel an obstacle not on any chart because it will be gone by fall, Northern gateway 240 Supertankers a year and from the proposed LNG plant in Kitimat up to 7-8 supertankers a day all the way up 240 Km of the 4th most dangerous waterway in the world. Lets not forget the Supertankers that will be hauling all that coal from at least 3 BC coal ports, even the Americans won’t  let them ship from American ports, it is to dirty and from what I understand they are none to happy that Canadians are allowing it, because of the inevitable accidents Americans will likely suffer as much damage as we do. 

Here is the problem Supertankers burn Bulk crude which is the sludge that is left over after the oil refining process, you can literally walk on it when it is cold it is basically asphalt (much like dilbit), It has up to 4500 times as much sulphur in it than the diesel that you put in your car, these floating pollution factories pump out  260 times as much sulphur dioxide than all the cars in the world put together, not to mention CO2, heavy metals and all the other pollutants generated by burning this cheap extremely dirty fuel.

The motors that burn this bulk crude are 5 storeys high with 14 cylinders 3ft 2in diameter pistons and a 8ft 2in stroke and they burn about 37,000 litres an hour or about 20 tons of this crude a day, just one of these behemoths emits as much as 5000 tons of sulphur a year. 

There it is just 16 of these supertankers produce more pollution than all the cars in the world, is it any wonder that our oceans are dying with over 500 super tankers and super cargo carriers plying our oceans and more being built every day, is it any wonder that a cites ports are the source of most pollution and the cause of the many health problems the people exposed to this pollution suffer from, in fact it is estimated that over 90,000 people a year die as a direct result of living in coastal areas where this poison is concentrated, so you could say yes it is a cheap fuel to move product around the world but health wise and environmental costs are astronomical. Do you consider that cheap?

A while back Canada stopped America from building a natural gas power plant at Sumas, gas a comparatively clean fuel on the BC border because of the resultant unacceptable pollution hazard and the fact that it would have been like putting another 500,000 cars on our roads, and the fact is pollution from these giant oil bombs will dwarf that pollution and nobody is even talking about this aspect of this lose-lose disaster for the people, animals, environment and economy of BC.