The battle over the operation of the multi-national Enbridge Line 5 pipeline appears to have no end. American anti-energy activists—invigorated by their victory in shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada—have set their sights on Line 5 and won’t quit until the line is shut down one way or another. Cross-border pipelines could soon be a thing of the past, and Canada’s energy security is vulnerable due to this.
Bowing to anti-nuclear fears, New York chose to shut down a reliable and safe source of energy—and now burns more fossil fuels than before.
Two years ago, on April 30, 2021, the final reactor at New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant ceased operation. This final closure (the plant’s first reactor was shuttered in 1974, the second in 2020) brought to an end a decades-long saga over the 2,000-megawatt behemoth on the Hudson River. New York’s then-governor, Andrew Cuomo, touted the shutdown as a major victory for state residents, “ending the threat the plant has long-posed to an area that is vitally important to our state, the nation, and the world.”
WASHINGTON – Canada’s embassy in Washington says it is “extremely concerned” about the fate of the Line 5 cross-border pipeline.
A court hearing Thursday in Wisconsin could determine whether the pipeline, owned and operated by Enbridge Inc., is allowed to continue operating.
“The energy security of both Canada and the United States would be directly impacted by a Line 5 closure,” the embassy said in a statement.
Why am I starting to believe this may really happen?
The overbudget Trans Mountain expansion project owes its lenders at least $23 billion and is looking to take on more private debt as the federal government shuts its wallet and construction costs skyrocket.
CBC News has reviewed newly released documents from Trans Mountain and another federal government entity. They show the expansion project is burning through cash and needs to borrow billions of dollars more to finish the work, which the company says was almost 80 per cent complete as of March.
“The business is significantly leveraged with debt,” Trans Mountain’s updated corporate plan says.
The controversial Canada-U.S. oil and gas conduit known as Line 5 could be facing its toughest challenger yet: the very watershed the pipeline’s detractors are trying to protect.
Spring flooding has washed away significant portions of the riverbank where Line 5 intersects Wisconsin’s Bad River, a meandering, 120-kilometre course through Indigenous territory that feeds Lake Superior and a complex network of ecologically delicate wetlands.
This could prove disastrous.
On a visit to the site of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in Japan in February, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York did something refreshing: She discussed radiation exposure and nuclear waste without fanning fear. The radiation she got from her visit — about two chest X-rays’ worth — was worth the education she received on the tour, she told her 8.6 million Instagram followers. She then spoke admiringly of France, which, “recycles their waste, increasing the efficiency of their system and reducing the overall amount of radioactive waste to deal with.”
A line must be drawn between obtuse environmental orthodoxy and the rational need for responsible energy development
Led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) recently announced a million-barrel-per-day reduction in oil production, action only cartels can take to limit supply in order to raise prices — the cost to the global economy be damned. It will inevitably lead to higher North American gasoline prices as refineries gear up for peak-driving summer months. Even more damning is that it exposes the inherent fallacy of the anti-energy policies of Canada and the United States, which have two of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet. Their determination to squelch oil and gas development in the name of climate change gives Saudi Arabia, Russia and other OPEC members the whip hand on prices for key energy supplies and stimulates already high inflation rates. Canada and the U.S. together unwittingly surrender leverage about the price of a resource vital to our economy. Does this make any sense?
Bavarian Premier Markus Söder on Sunday proposed that his southern German state could assume control of the Isar 2 nuclear power plant, which was permanently taken off the grid, along with two other remaining power stations shortly before midnight.
Söder, who has been a staunch critic of Germany’s decision to transition away from nuclear energy, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the move would require an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act to hand control of nuclear power from the federal to the state level.
It was a monumentally stupid decision to shut down the reactors.
On the other side of the Gate, there were protests, as demonstrators marched against the closure of Germany’s three remaining nuclear power stations.
By midnight on Saturday, Isar 2, Emsland and Neckarwestheim 2 had all gone offline.
At the Brandenburg Gate, where the Wall once divided Cold War Berlin, nuclear energy is an ideological fault-line that splits the country. It is an issue that is emotionally charged like few others. And particularly now as war in Europe again looms large.
At the end of March, Germany’s Environment Minister Steffi Lemke of the Green Party used just a few words to put an end to the dispute that has kept the country in suspense for years: “The risks of nuclear power are ultimately uncontrollable; that’s why the nuclear phase-out makes our country safer, and avoids more nuclear waste.”
Idiots.
America and the world are experiencing heightened energy insecurity. Nuclear power provides a reliable and clean source of energy — if the government lets it.
Something big has happened in the realm of nuclear power, strengthening the case for the energy source. Vogtle Unit 3 began supplying its first electricity to the grid on April 1. It’s the first truly new reactor in the U.S. since 1996, 27 years ago.
Unit 3 is scheduled to enter commercial operations by the middle of this year, with the nearby Unit 4 projected to be complete later this year. Together, the new units will provide electricity to half a million homes and businesses in Georgia.
When the power started going out daily in South Africa, the lights also went out on Lungie Klaas’s coffee shop. He and his wife had poured in £14,700 of savings to get their business off the ground, and their hard work had been rewarded with a decent trade among the morning commuters in their Cape Town suburb.
That was until relentless rolling blackouts started hitting each day at their busiest time. At a stroke, coffee machines could not work during their peak business hours and they lost three-fifths of their custom. Running a generator was too expensive, so they had to close. “That put four guys out of a job,” he recalls.
The phrase “evidence-based decision-making” was used a lot during the pandemic by government officials. “Following the science” was another common one.
It’s strange, then, that a government claiming to believe so deeply in rational thought has placed unverifiable spiritual belief at the core of how it judges the environmental impact of energy and other natural resources and infrastructure projects — and has shielded those beliefs from Canada’s transparency laws.
“Last summer, we looked at the collapse of the power grid in South Africa. The country which previously had the most economically stable and prosperous government in sub-Saharan Africa suffered waves of unemployment and looting as its economy buckled under the strain. They’ve managed to put together some foreign aid to apply patchwork fixes since then, but there are still rolling blackouts taking place on a regular basis. This winter, however, the power grid problems are spreading in one of the more underreported stories of the year.”
Oh great…
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Shortages of some fresh fruit and vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers could be the “tip of the iceberg”, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said.
Certain products are hard to come by in UK supermarkets due to poor weather reducing the harvest in Europe and north Africa, Brexit rules and lower supplies from UK and Dutch producers hit by the jump in energy bills to heat glasshouses.
The NFU’s deputy president, Tom Bradshaw, said a reliance on imports had left the UK particularly exposed to “shock weather events”.
