Philosophy Now Forum

‘They screwed up our lake’: tar sands pipeline is sucking water from Minnesota watersheds
Will Parrish

Along the eastern boundary of the White Earth Indian Reservation in north-western Minnesota, Indigenous Anishinaabe wild rice harvesters Jerry and Jim Libby set down a row of wooden pallets into the mud just beyond the dock of Upper Wild Rice Lake. It was a clear day, and tight, lush clumps of green rice heads were visible across the lake’s horizon.

In a typical year, the entrance to this – one of a long necklace of wild rice lakes in northern Minnesota to which the region’s Indigenous people flock every year in the late summer – would be covered in at least two feet of water. But now it is composed of suspended sediment as solid as chocolate pudding, through which the Libbys need to create a makeshift ramp simply to carry their canoe out to the waterline.

Minnesota is weathering an historic drought, but there is another problem beyond the weather: Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline has taken a substantial toll on watersheds in the region, including through a permit to pump five billion gallons of water for construction. In the case of Upper Wild Rice Lake, a road construction contractor named Knife River Construction stuck a pump directly in the lake this past June, sucking out an unknown quantity of water, which locals suspect was related to the use of heavy trucks for the pipeline.

Low water levels mean rice harvesters can’t paddle their canoes to their traditional harvesting areas.
“As far as I’m concerned, Enbridge screwed up our lake, and they’re taking money directly away from our families,” Jerry Libby says. “It makes us feel anguished – this is our staple food, you know.”

The Indigenous-led struggle against Line 3, which seeks to move 930,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen daily from Alberta to a shipping and refinery hub in Superior, Wisconsin, has been the biggest environmental and Indigenous land protection campaign in the US this summer. More than 900 people have been arrested opposing the pipeline, including nearly 70 who were kettled in late August during protests outside Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s residence in Minneapolis.

Branded as a “replacement” project, the new pipeline would double the old Line 3’s capacity to carry tar sands bitumen. Enbridge, a Canada-based energy company, has announced it will begin sending oil through the pipeline next month.

The processing and combustion of bitumen for the pipeline would release greenhouse gases equivalent to 50 coal plants, according to analysis by the nonprofit Oil Change International, thereby significantly contributing to the global climate crisis. But one of the pipeline’s most immediate impacts is on wild rice harvesters such as the Libbys, for whom the annual harvesting season began in late August and runs through much of September.

Wild rice – known to many Anishinaabe people as “manoomin,” or “the food that grows on water” – is a dense, nutritional grain that grows naturally in the abundant lakes and rivers in Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of Canada. Thousands of Anishinaabe people continue to harvest it with the same traditional methods used for generations, by propelling a canoe or small boat through the rice beds with a long pole.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/th ... d=msedgntp

What Are Tar Sands?
Tar sands are an increasingly common—but expensive and dirty—source of oil.

Published Dec 18, 2013 Updated Feb 23, 2016


Tar sands (also known as oil sands) are a mixture of mostly sand, clay, water, and a thick, molasses-like substance called bitumen. Bitumen is made of hydrocarbons—the same molecules in liquid oil—and is used to produce gasoline and other petroleum products.

Extracting bitumen from tar sands—and refining it into products like gasoline—is significantly costlier and more difficult than extracting and refining liquid oil.

Common extraction methods include surface mining—where the extraction site is excavated—and “in-situ” mining, where steam is used to liquefy bitumen deep underground. The largest deposits of tar sands are found in Alberta, Canada.

While tar sands have been in production since the late 1960s, and currently account for about 5 percent of all U.S. gasoline, production has been scaling up—which could have serious consequences for the air, water, and climate.

Environmental impacts of tar sands

On a lifetime basis, a gallon of gasoline made from tar sands produces about 15% more carbon dioxide emissions than one made from conventional oil. This important difference is attributable to the energy intensive extraction, upgrading, and refining process.


Mining versus in situ tar sands extraction.

Unfortunately, the carbon emissions associated with extracting tar sands could increase over time, as in-situ mining—which creates more emissions than surface mining—is used to extract bitumen located deeper and deeper in the earth.

Tar sands also impact water supplies. For every gallon of gasoline produced by tar sands, about 5.9 gallons of freshwater are consumed during the extraction, upgrading, and refining process. That’s roughly three times as much as used for conventional oil.

Much of this water is polluted by toxic substances harmful to human health and the environment. When surface mining is used, the wastewater ends up in toxic storage ponds. These ponds can cover over 30 square miles—making them some of the largest man-made structures on the planet.

When in-situ mining is used, wastewater is stored in the same well the bitumen is extracted from—risking contaminated groundwater if a leak occurs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjPZAFriAlk&t=128s

The main obstacle to hydrogen becoming the green fuel of the future is cost – but maybe not for long
Marco Alverà

Hydrogen is essential to get us to our goal of “net zero” emissions. And the hydrogen strategy published recently by the UK government brings us that much closer to using the resource to achieve that target.

Renewable electricity will be a big part of our net zero world, as solar and wind power generation ramps up. The total share of our energy consumption that will come from renewable power in a fully decarbonised system will be well above 50 per cent. But there are some sectors of our economies which will be technically challenging or extremely expensive to fully electrify.

Electricity cannot be used for industrial processes and it is expensive to use to generate the high heat that is often needed for production of materials like glass and ceramics, for instance. Batteries are heavy in proportion to the amount of energy they can store, which makes it hard to imagine direct electrification of long-range ships, aircraft and trucks. And winter heating requires storing energy for months at a time and on a grand scale – a challenge for which electricity doesn’t have a solution. Batteries were never designed to hold energy for long periods of time.

So that’s where we will need a clean molecule to substitute fossil fuels. And “green hydrogen” fits the bill. It is virtually limitless, because you can generate it by passing a (renewable) electrical current through water (H2O) and splitting it into its constituent parts. The fact that this is a scalable process is important because we are going to need a lot of hydrogen: around a quarter of our overall energy needs, by some estimates.

Hydrogen is also relatively easy to transport and store. In many cases, it is possible to retrofit existing natural gas transport pipelines to carry the gas, and it can be cheaply stored in salt caverns where these exist. You can also turn it back into electricity by using fuel cells.

The main hurdle to get hydrogen off the ground is cost. Today, despite the dramatic fall in the renewable power used to make it, the production cost of green hydrogen is unusually high at around $5/kg (£3.6/kg) – or $125/MWh (£90.7/MWh). That compares to around $40/MWh (£29/MWh) for oil, and around $60/MWh (£43.5MWh) for natural gas in Europe.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/th ... d=msedgntp

Moby, Joaquin Phoenix and Billie Eilish urge world leaders at climate talks to curb animal farming
Jane Dalton

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/mo ... d=msedgntp

These people are singers, apparently! People who earn a much better living than they deserve singing songs - calling for farmers to lose their livelihoods as a first port of call. They'd keep pumping oil, but put farmers out of work. Maybe they should stop jet setting around the world, putting on light shows and making an amplified din, because that really is something the world could do without. Animal agriculture, not so much.

"The celebrities – all on plant-based diets – warn that without large-scale change to animal farming systems, the world will fail to keep rising temperatures to 2C, as agreed."

Note they are not calling for global cooperation to develop magma energy, such that all human activities could be based on carbon free energy. They're virtue signalling vegetarians - using climate change to justify their life choices, to the detriment of farmers, and all the downstream businesses, employees and consumers.

It's not that animal agriculture doesn't contribute to climate change. It does, but it would change if we had magma energy to desalinate and irrigate, it would change our whole relationship to land. A few sensible measure like feeding cattle sea weed can reduce methane by 60% or more, and there wouldn't be any CO2 emissions because we wouldn't be using fossil fuels.

Cattle serve a purpose in nature. They trample grasslands and fertilise the soil with their dung. In a magma energy based, prosperous sustainable future, cattle would have a major role in resisting desertification. But the left have been using climate change as a anti capitalist political device in just this way, since the 1960's. And that has entrenched a false assumption that we must have less, pay more, tax this and stop that to secure the future. Not so. Just stop pumping oil, and drill for magma heat energy instead.

Climate pledges tough to secure before COP26 summit, PM warns
By Alex Therrien
BBC News

COP26
Boris Johnson

There is a "six out of 10" chance of getting other countries to sign up to financial and environmental targets ahead of November's key COP26 climate change conference, the UK PM has said.

Boris Johnson is in the US for a UN meeting where he will urge leaders to take "concrete action" on the issue. But he said it would be "tough" to persuade allies to meet their promise to give $100bn a year to developing nations to cut carbon emissions.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58620566

I wonder what the odds are they'll spend $100bn of tax payer's money per year developing magma energy?

I can't get my 1930's immersion heater replaced - under the government's so called boiler replacement scheme, but $100bn dollars a year handed to tin pot dictators who don't give a shit about their own people never mind climate change, that's money well spent!

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 9:02 am

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:56 am The important theme of doom and gloom from politicians shows that initiative must come from the hearts and minds of ordinary people. With the demise of religion we need a new myth.

I disagree entirely. A viable solution can only come from government, capital and industry.

I don't deny the hegemony of government, capital, and industry. In the absence of massive and expensive public indoctrination these powers rely on public assent to make real changes. People do not willingly change their minds unless their hearts are also involved.

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:56 am The important theme of doom and gloom from politicians shows that initiative must come from the hearts and minds of ordinary people. With the demise of religion we need a new myth.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 9:02 amI disagree entirely. A viable solution can only come from government, capital and industry.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:45 amI don't deny the hegemony of government, capital, and industry. In the absence of massive and expensive public indoctrination these powers rely on public assent to make real changes. People do not willingly change their minds unless their hearts are also involved.

Assuming so, are you saying that a prosperous sustainable future - as opposed to a crippling communist dirge of a future, isn't something that appeals emotionally? Think of the children!

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:59 am

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:56 am The important theme of doom and gloom from politicians shows that initiative must come from the hearts and minds of ordinary people. With the demise of religion we need a new myth.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 9:02 amI disagree entirely. A viable solution can only come from government, capital and industry.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:45 amI don't deny the hegemony of government, capital, and industry. In the absence of massive and expensive public indoctrination these powers rely on public assent to make real changes. People do not willingly change their minds unless their hearts are also involved.

Assuming so, are you saying that a prosperous sustainable future - as opposed to a crippling communist dirge of a future, isn't something that appeals emotionally? Think of the children!

It depends on how the narrative is told. Consider religions for instance. For an example a nomadic tribe needed the myth of a transportable god so they could more effectively undertake the dangerous trek to a good place to settle and farm their own land.

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:56 am The important theme of doom and gloom from politicians shows that initiative must come from the hearts and minds of ordinary people. With the demise of religion we need a new myth.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 9:02 amI disagree entirely. A viable solution can only come from government, capital and industry.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:45 amI don't deny the hegemony of government, capital, and industry. In the absence of massive and expensive public indoctrination these powers rely on public assent to make real changes. People do not willingly change their minds unless their hearts are also involved.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:59 amAssuming so, are you saying that a prosperous sustainable future - as opposed to a crippling communist dirge of a future, isn't something that appeals emotionally? Think of the children!

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:12 amIt depends on how the narrative is told. Consider religions for instance. For an example a nomadic tribe needed the myth of a transportable god so they could more effectively undertake the dangerous trek to a good place to settle and farm their own land.

Great so, if Joris Bohnson et al, don't adopt magma energy - it's my fault for not pretending I'm the second coming? No. If rationality doesn't appeal, humankind deserves to die. It's cosmic justice. Every species that has ever existed has necessarily had to be right to reality, or be rendered extinct. We're no different, just because we are intelligent enough to be able to deceive ourselves.

There is no energy source with net zero emissions.
There is no free lunch.

Hydrogen has to be made, and harnessed in a safe way. All these processes can cause environmental damage.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:24 am

Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 8:56 am The important theme of doom and gloom from politicians shows that initiative must come from the hearts and minds of ordinary people. With the demise of religion we need a new myth.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Sep 19, 2021 9:02 amI disagree entirely. A viable solution can only come from government, capital and industry.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:45 amI don't deny the hegemony of government, capital, and industry. In the absence of massive and expensive public indoctrination these powers rely on public assent to make real changes. People do not willingly change their minds unless their hearts are also involved.

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 9:59 amAssuming so, are you saying that a prosperous sustainable future - as opposed to a crippling communist dirge of a future, isn't something that appeals emotionally? Think of the children!

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:12 amIt depends on how the narrative is told. Consider religions for instance. For an example a nomadic tribe needed the myth of a transportable god so they could more effectively undertake the dangerous trek to a good place to settle and farm their own land.

Great so, if Joris Bohnson et al, don't adopt magma energy - it's my fault for not pretending I'm the second coming? No. If rationality doesn't appeal, humankind deserves to die. It's cosmic justice. Every species that has ever existed has necessarily had to be right to reality, or be rendered extinct. We're no different, just because we are intelligent enough to be able to deceive ourselves.

The current slew of puppet leaders who kneel at the altar of capitalism are not to be trusted with anything.
Nothing good will come out of the next meeting of the great and powerful.
Nonetheless they are our only hope since "the Market" is not going to solve the problems.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:55 am There is no energy source with net zero emissions.
There is no free lunch.
Hydrogen has to be made, and harnessed in a safe way. All these processes can cause environmental damage.

You really should read my thread. This thread. The thread that you are commenting on. It will help you understand how everything you say here is wrong. I'll give you the highlights!

I propose harnessing magma energy - a form of geothermal energy captured by drilling into very hot rock in the earth's crust, close to magma chambers and subduction zones, lining the boreholes with pipes, and pumping water through to produce contained jets of dry superheated steam to drive turbines, to produce electricity.

Electrolysis - passing an electrical current though water, produces hydrogen and oxygen gas - which are then separated, and the hydrogen can either be piped as a gas, or pressurised into liquid hydrogen, a liquid fuel that contains 2.5 times more energy per kilo than petroleum.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:55 amThe current slew of puppet leaders who kneel at the altar of capitalism are not to be trusted with anything. Nothing good will come out of the next meeting of the great and powerful. Nonetheless they are our only hope since "the Market" is not going to solve the problems.

Given this huge, clean source of energy, as a basis to produce hydrogen fuel, capitalist growth can be maintained - and strike a positive, forward facing balance between human welfare and environmental sustainability, very much in our favour.

The idea that capitalism is the problem is left wing, anti-capitalist propaganda. It's lefties putting their own political interests before the interests of the planet, and in that regard, how are they any different to the slew of politicians sucking up to fossil fuel donors? Neither want an actual solution; they've both got a self serving, vested interest in the problem!

Vitruvius wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 11:38 am

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:55 am There is no energy source with net zero emissions.
There is no free lunch.
Hydrogen has to be made, and harnessed in a safe way. All these processes can cause environmental damage.

You really should read my thread. This thread. The thread that you are commenting on. It will help you understand how everything you say here is wrong. I'll give you the highlights!

I propose harnessing magma energy - a form of geothermal energy captured by drilling into very hot rock in the earth's crust, close to magma chambers and subduction zones, lining the boreholes with pipes, and pumping water through to produce contained jets of dry superheated steam to drive turbines, to produce electricity.

You have to make the pipes
You have to dig the bores
You have to transort the pipes and the equippment.
You have to maintain the equipment.
You have to convert the energy and build machines that transfprm the energy into something useful
You have to store and or transport the energy.
All of this has a carbon footprint.

Electrolysis - passing an electrical current though water, produces hydrogen and oxygen gas - which are then separated, and the hydrogen can either be piped as a gas, or pressurised into liquid hydrogen, a liquid fuel that contains 2.5 times more energy per kilo than petroleum.

You first have to find your electricity.
You have to make the pipes
You have to build storage fascilities
You have to transort the pipes and the equipment.
You have to maintain the equipment.
You have to convert the energy and build machines that transfprm the energy into something useful
You have to store and or transport the energy.
All of this has a carbon footprint.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:55 amThe current slew of puppet leaders who kneel at the altar of capitalism are not to be trusted with anything. Nothing good will come out of the next meeting of the great and powerful. Nonetheless they are our only hope since "the Market" is not going to solve the problems.

Given this huge, clean source of energy, as a basis to produce hydrogen fuel, capitalist growth can be maintained - and strike a positive, forward facing balance between human welfare and environmental sustainability, very much in our favour.

It is not clean.
It is not free and not limitless.

The idea that capitalism is the problem is left wing, anti-capitalist propaganda.

No, It is a fact. Watch what happens at the next big meeting.
If it does not make a profit for a small number of individuals it is not going to be implemented.
If creating a new source of energy is going to stop capitalists from making money , the new source with not only not be adpotoed but will be attacked in the media, as dangerous and problematic.

It's lefties putting their own political interests before the interests of the planet, and in that regard, how are they any different to the slew of politicians sucking up to fossil fuel donors? Neither want an actual solution; they've both got a self serving, vested interest in the problem!

You would do well to get your head out of your fucking arse and smell the shit.
You are bound hand and foot with your ideological idiocy.
Grow the fuck up.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 12:07 pm You would do well to get your head out of your fucking arse and smell the shit.
You are bound hand and foot with your ideological idiocy.
Grow the fuck up.

ditto.