Marathon Refinery Fire Illustrates How Industry Goes Quiet During a Crisis. Recent industrial disaster at Louisiana’s Marathon refinery shows how difficult it is to get information during dangerous events. Thick black smoke billowed and flames rose from two chemical storage tanks at the Marathon Petroleum refinery between Reserve and Garyville, Louisiana, on Friday. Geraldine Watkins saw the towers of smoke through the passenger seat window of a car that morning, while she was on her way to a court hearing about whether another tract of land in St. John the Baptist Parish, where Garyville is located, would be zoned for heavy industrial use. Despite the alarming view, no community-wide alarms had sounded when a naphtha leak started a fire at the refinery earlier that morning. While parish officials declared amandatory evacuation for all residents within two miles of the refinery, including two nearby schools, DeSmog’s Julie Dermansky got inside the two-mile evacuation zone across the river from the plant without encountering a road block. Cars continued to pass by the facility and workers at the neighboring Cargill plant stood on the Mississippi River levee and recorded the scene live on Facebook for more than an hour. .Beyond immediate health concerns like asthma, Watkins and others in the community had concerns about longer-term health risks from the fire. Naphtha is a colorless flammable mixture distilled from crude oil to make solvents and gasoline. Exposure to this kind of hydrocarbon mixture can cause headache, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Repeated exposure to naphtha has been linked to nervous system damage in automotive workers. And naptha isn’t the only chemical of concern in an incident like this — others, including benzene, aknown human carcinogen, need to be tested for, experts say. However, both during the fire and in the days following, neither Marathon, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, nor the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have answered repeated questions from residents and reporters about which chemicals are being tested for. In the absence of information, residents struggle to assess the potential impacts to their health.      https://www.desmog.com/2023/08/30/marathon-refinery-fire-illustrates-industry-goes-quiet-during-crisis/    

For nearly a decade, the Trudeau government has been accused of playing a bad game of three-dimensional chess as it tried to balance the urgency of the climate crisis with the stridency of the fossil fuel lobby and its political enablers. But gradually, the federal climate and energy strategy has begun to look more like a game of poker—in which case it must be the highest-stakes game in history, with hundreds of millions of tonnes of emissions on the table. With the release of the federal Clean Electricity Regulations this week, Ottawa is finally showing its hand.  “These leaks represent the tip of the iceberg of methane emissions, the super-emitters, for which there is no justification – these could be radically reduced at little or no net cost,” said Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defence Fund.    If the crowds aren’t going wild, they probably should be. And, weirdly, we may just look back one day and force ourselves to thank the fossil lobby for setting its own trap.  Playing a Longer Game.....limate strategy first began to emerge, it seemed as though Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers were trying to please everyone but satisfying no one. They introduced a price on carbon pollution, but then sent billions of taxpayers’ dollars to a company in Texas tobuy us all an oil and gas pipeline, a sprawling construction megaproject whose price has since ballooned from $7.4 to $30.9 billion. While all of that was going on, Trudeau told the big CERAWeek oil and gas conference in Houston that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” They introduced a price on carbon pollution, then sent billions of taxpayers’ dollars to a company in Texas to buy us all an oil and gas pipeline, a sprawling construction megaproject whose price has since ballooned from $7.4 to $30.9 billion. While all of that was going on, Trudeau told the big CERAWeek oil and gas conference in Houston that “no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.” Ottawa announced a groundbreaking phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, but didn’t exclude fossil companies from the public financing available to any industry—even though no other line of business accounts for 28% of the country’s carbon emissions or leads all sectors in annual emission increases. (Surely some smart federal analyst could have figured that one out?). The net result: It’s always easy to find climate hawks who mistrust and reflexively criticize anything Ottawa says or does. Even though direct authority over natural resources lies with the provinces, and as Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault observed earlier this year, provincial obstruction is the biggest obstacle to ambitious climate strategy. But if you’ve been keeping score, the picture began to shift nearly 18 months ago......read on   https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/playing-poker-with-power-plants?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email       

Canada’s Tar Sands: Destruction So Vast and Deep It Challenges the Existence of Land and People. Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways. By Nicholas Kusnetz November 21, 2021  Oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil and the Canadian giant Suncor have transformed Alberta’s tar sands—also called oil sands—into one of the world’s largest industrial developments. They have built sprawling waste ponds that leach heavy metals into groundwater, and processing plants that spew nitrogen and sulfur oxides into the air, sending a sour stench for miles.  Canada’s Tar Sands: Destruction So Vast and Deep It Challenges the Existence of Land and People. Oil companies have replaced Indigenous people’s traditional lands with mines that cover an area bigger than New York City, stripping away boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways. Scientists say oil production must begin falling immediately. Canada’s tar sands are among the most climate-polluting sources of oil, and so are an obvious place to begin winding down. The largest oil sands companies have pledged to reduce their emissions, saying they will rely largely on government-subsidized carbon capture projects.Yet oil companies and the government expect output will climb well into the 2030s. Even a new proposal by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to cap emissions in the oil sector does not include any plan to lower production.  Some lawyers and advocates have pointed to the tar sands as a prime example of the widespread environmental destruction they call “ecocide.” They are pushing for the International Criminal Court to outlaw ecocide as a crime, on a par with genocide or war crimes. While the campaign for a new international law is likely to last years, with no assurance it will succeed, it has drawn attention to the inability of countries’ existing laws to contain industrial development like the tar sands, which will pollute the land for decades or centuries.
   https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21112021/tar-sands-canada-oil/

 Greenhouse gas emissions from the global energy industry are still rising – report.  Greenhouse gas emissions from the global energy industry hit new highs last year “despite record growth in wind and solar power”, the Guardian reports, covering the “statistical review of world energy” formerly produced by oil giant BP. The paper says emissions climbed 0.8% last year, quoting Juliet Davenport, president of the Energy Institute which now leads the production of the report, saying: “Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again. We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris agreement.” The newspaper continues: “Solar generation climbed by 25% in 2022 while wind power output grew by 13.5% compared with the year before. However, the renewable energy boom was eclipsed by a modest rise in global energy consumption of 1.1% last year – compared to a 5.5% increase in 2021 – which meant more oil and coal was burnt to meet demand, the report found.” The Times reports the figures under the headline: “World struggles to kick fossil fuel habit.” It says: “Oil, gas and coal together accounted for almost 82% of global primary energy consumption last year, barely down on the previous year, according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.”                       https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-global-energy-industry-still-rising-report/