A recent change to Bill C-69 increases concerns among Nova Scotia environmentalists about undue influence by the oil and gas industry on environmental approvals of offshore oil and gas projects in the Atlantic.
A documentary about whales and narrated by Ethan Hawke premiered this morning at a press conference in Halifax. Environmentalists are extremely worried about the damage done by offshore seismic blasting. We report on the press conference and include a link to the video and a full transcription of the remarks by Mi’kmaq film maker Eliza Knockwood.
Scott Neigh, through his weekly Talking Radical podcast, provides a centre stage to activists, their causes, and the how and why of their strategic approaches. Scott always kindly allows me to repost a podcast if it is of particular relevance to Nova Scotia Advocate readers. Earlier we featured his eye opening interview with El Jones on organizing vulnerable prison populations and the responsibilities that brings, and an interview with water protectors Dorene Bernard and Rebecca Moore on the mess that is Alton Gas. This week we present Scott’s interview with Marilyn Keddy and Peter Puxley of the Campaign to Protect Offshore Nova Scotia,, about the threat of offshore oil exploration to climate change and fisheries, and about the challenges of organizing in rural Nova Scotia.
Two things we can learn from that record-setting oil spill off the coast of Newfoundland. Storms in the North Atlantic are something else, and government oversight of the offshore in Newfoundland is very lax. The really scary part? Nova Scotia oversight is no different. And Newfoundland’s stormy ocean is Nova Scotia’s stormy ocean.
Earlier this month anti-capitalist activist Chelsea Fougere, a member of the Campaign to Protect Offshore Nova Scotia, took part in a series of public panels on the risks of offshore drilling in Halifax and Mahone Bay. This is her powerful opening statement.
Cory Levander writes about Wednesday’s panel in Mahone Bay about offshore oil exploration. Not worth the risk, was the consensus, ““You can’t eat oil. You can’t eat drilling mud… But you can eat lobster.”
Ahead of a major conference on ‘Canada’s East Coast energy future’, new polling indicates slightly more Nova Scotians are likely to oppose than support BP drilling offshore Nova Scotia.
Feeling the pressure of increased public scrutiny, the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (CNSOPB) met this afternoon with municipal councillors from western Nova Scotia, hoping to convince them that offshore oil exploration is safe. Don’t be fooled, says Marion Moore, of the Campaign to Protect Offshore Nova Scotia. “I would tell them that they’re being fed a big story from an organization that is completely captured by the oil industry,” Moore tells the Nova Scotia Advocate.
Giving BP, one of the world’s worst polluters, the go-ahead to resume drilling for oil along the Scotian Shelf, after it spilled 136,000 litres of synthetic drilling fluid, is the wrong decision. It ignores the event’s real lesson and takes us down the same reckless path.
“We are writing to you on behalf of the Offshore Alliance to urgently call on the Federal Government, in concert with the Government of Nova Scotia, to undertake a public inquiry into the environmental, socio-economic, and other impacts of offshore oil and gas exploration in Nova Scotia’s Offshore.”