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Gore urges Obama to block pipeline for 'dirtiest source of fuel on the planet' By Andrew Restuccia - 09/01/11 10:08 AM ET Former Vice President Al Gore called on President Obama late Wednesday to reject a pending permit application for a controversial pipeline project, calling the oil that it would carry “the dirtiest fuel on the planet.” “The answer to our climate, energy and economic challenges does not lie in burning more dirty fossil fuels —instead, we must continue to press for much more rapid development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies and cuts in the pollution that causes...

Actress Daryl Hannah has been arrested in front of the White House along with other environmental protesters who oppose a planned oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The sit-in Tuesday involved dozens protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. It would go through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas.Before she was arrested, Hannah told The Associated Press the protesters want to be free from dependence on fossil fuels. The group calls for clean energy investments instead. Hannah says they hope President Barack Obama will not bow to oil lobbyists.Hannah...

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug. 29, 2011 - America's top climate scientist and a large group of religious leaders were arrested at the White House this morning with 140 other Americans to push President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. "If Obama chooses the dirty needle it will confirm that the President was just green-washing all along, like the other well-oiled coal-fired politicians, with no real intention of solving the addiction," said NASA's Dr. James Hansen, who was arrested at the White House this morning. President Obama must decide whether or not to grant a "presidential permit"...

Environmentalists are staging a two-week oil-pipeline protest outside the White House to boost their importance to President Barack Obama’s political calculations in the 2012 election season. But there’s little evidence so far that progressives’ disappointment with Obama’s environmental policies threatens to reduce their turnout on election day, or that it pressures White House officials to make additional concessions to environmentalists during a political season dominated by the public’s demand for additional jobs. Monday’s colorful, TV-ready protests against the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil fields to U.S consumers took place in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House. The...

Liberals are getting pretty desperate on the global warming/climate change debate. But you have to give them high marks for creativity. As one of our contributors Marita Noon mentioned the other day, enviros are switching to supposed health risks associated with fossil fuels since politicians and the general public don’t buy the carbon-hates-us argument anymore.   And lacking little evidence that many of the natural disasters that were predicted by the global warming “model” that the high priests of their religion constructed years ago, one economist has come up with a new disaster, this one wholly civil. And the media are...

United States Park Police arrested another gaggle of protesters outside of the White House Monday. The protesters were participating in an ongoing demonstration against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Police arrested 52 protesters for blocking the sidewalk in front of the White House, the third round of mass arrests since the protests began on Saturday. The protesters are calling on President Barack Obama not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline — a proposed expansion of an existing line that would transport crude oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, and down to...

Sixty-five arrested outside White House in oil pipeline protestBy Ben Geman - 08/20/11 02:55 PM ET Police arrested 65 environmentalists outside the White House Saturday as they staged a demonstration urging President Obama to block a proposed pipeline that would bring oil from Canada’s oil sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries. The civil disobedience launched two-weeks of White House demonstrations – with more arrests to come – as activists seek to increase political pressure on Obama over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The Obama administration is weighing TransCanada Corp.’s proposed $7 billion, 1,700-mile line to bring crude from Alberta’s massive...

A 4-by-8-mile pit deep in the wilderness of northwest Canada is taking center stage in America’s energy debate. The Athabasca tar sands in Alberta Province is the largest mine in what is the second largest oil reserve in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia. The United States gets 20 percent of its imported oil from Canada, about half of it coming from the vast Athabasca tar sands. And now there are plans to more than double the oil sands production and pipe nearly all of the oil through a new pipeline that would take it to refineries in Texas. Recovering...

Angry leftists stormed the Montana capitol on Tuesday demanding that Schweitzer end his support for the Alberta oil pipeline that will carry crude oil from the Alberta tar sands through Montana. He wouldn’t. They were arrested. The Billings Gazette reported: About 70 protesters thundered into the state Capitol on Tuesday, banging on plastic pails and chanting slogans in opposition to the planned Keystone XL pipeline — slated to carry crude oil from the Alberta tar sands through Montana — and the “megaloads” of oil drilling equipment destined for Alberta. The group pushed its way into the outer offices of Gov....

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a personal pitch Friday for President Barack Obama to support a controversial $7 billion pipeline that could double the amount of Alberta oilsands crude exported to the United States. Harper confirmed he pressed Obama on Calgary-based TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline during the two leaders' hour-long meeting at the White House. The planned 3,200-kilometre pipeline, which would run from Hardisty, Alberta to the Gulf Coast of Texas, is currently in limbo as the State Department weighs whether to grant a presidential permit allowing construction to begin. In a question-and-answer session with reporters, Harper was asked...

Energy: The environmental lobby has thus far blocked tapping the oil reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Canada draws oil from a remote and frozen region and sells it in the U.S....Though we already get 2.1 million barrels a day from Canada, oil from northern Alberta's oil sand fields has rarely reached southward beyond Chicago. That changed last week when crude from those oil sand reserves were piped to Oklahoma, from where they will be sent to refiners that had long been getting their crude from other sources, particularly the Gulf of Mexico.It was a landmark day when...

A wilderness and ecology guide believes Bigfoots by the dozen could be roaming the wilderness of southern Alberta and parts of British Columbia. Todd Standing says he has photographic proof that such creatures exist after snapping a photo of something in the Banff area with human-like features on its hairy face.

Fort McMurray, Alberta—This is the second dispatch from my oil sands tour. The first dispatch yesterday focused on the oil sands mining. After our Suncor oil sands mine tour, our band of flacks and hacks were bussed back to our motel for cocktails and dinner with various Canadian oil sheiks, including Alberta’s Minister of Energy Ronald Liepert, TransCanada Pipeline vice president Robert Jones, and ConocoPhillips Canada senior vice president Nick Olds, among others. In the fashion of such tours, we sat around a conference table listening to the concerns of our hosts, which in this case, mostly involved activist opposition...

Fort McMurray, Alberta—Standing on the edge of the immense and spectacular pit of an oil sands mine for the first time last week, I was surprised by a sense of exhilaration. Later, seven stories up, equipped with earplugs, and clad in bright blue overalls, I marveled at the cascades of black bitumen froth bubbling over the sides of a separation cell like a giant witch’s cauldron. The scale of the enterprise and the sheer ingenuity involved in wresting value and sustenance from the hands of a stingy Mother Nature provoked in me a feeling close to glory. Yet as I...

Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta have confirmed that Winnipeg Jets forward Rick Rypien, 27, was found dead in his home in Crowsnest Pass, AB, on Monday. According to a report in the Toronto Globe and Mail, RCMP officials confirmed the death was not of a suspicious nature. National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman issued the following statement regarding the death of Rypien: "The National Hockey League sends its deepest condolences to the family, friends and teammates of Rick Rypien, who played the game with so much energy and emotion and whose passing fills us all with a sense of...

Energy: While the U.S. dithers with concerns about "dirty oil" from Alberta's rich tar sands, energy-hungry China makes Ottawa an offer it might not refuse. Memo to Washington: Pipelines can run west as well as south. When President Obama pledged to wean us off foreign oil, we hoped he didn't mean our friendly ally to the north, Canada. Granted, it doesn't have beaches like Rio, where we're helping the Brazilians drill offshore, but we had hopes nonetheless. Together, the U.S. and Canada have enough oil and natural gas locked up in shale formations, tar sands, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic and...

Thousands of people have fled their homes in northern Alberta where two out-of-control wildfires breached a town's defences and have burned down hundreds of buildings, including the town hall, police station and the radio station. The RCMP said the Town of Slave Lake is on fire and many homes have burned down. The fire is apparently out of control, engulfing about half of the town.

This is an attempt to force the french language down the throats of non-french Canadians. Geographically and culturally, Alberta is about as far removed from Quebec as you can get. Caron's intentions - like many of the minority french Canadians - is to use all means possible to entrench their language, and by default their culture - into the lives of the Canadian English. The tactic is suspiciously similar to that used by other groups such as the followers of Islam and their attempts to install Sharia law on the majority. Great company to keep, Gilles.

EDMONTON, Alberta, The city of Edmonton, Alberta, is writing off nearly $13 million worth of speeding tickets because the reliability of cameras came into question. Crown Prosecutor Steven Bilodeau said he petitioned the provincial justice ministry to nullify the tickets as people were receiving tickets for impossible infractions, the Edmonton Journal reported. In one case on Jan. 12, a camera snapshot alleged a driver was traveling at 89 mph on a city street, but the video showed all the other vehicles around it moving at the same speed, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. Bilodeau said all 141,729 tickets issued by...

Looking good is what Avon is all about, so it's not surprising that a cosmetics giant with annual revenues of $10 billion is concerned about its image. That, after all, is the motive behind Avon's boycott of fuel derived from Alberta's oil sands -- looking good. Never mind that oil banned from Alberta -- the most regulated and transparently sourced oil on the planet -- will have to be replaced by oil from some despotic regime but, hey, maybe you can put lipstick on a pig. "Avon recognizes its responsibility to the environment and the world's forests," said Tod Abreast,...