A group of 13 Greenpeace protesters are suspended from the St. Johns Bridge over the Willamette River leading to the Portland, Oregon harbor. The icebreaker MSV Fennica has been in the harbor for repairs and planned to return to Shell Oil’s artic drilling area. Oil drilling there cannot take place without the equipment being delivered by the Fennica. They are […]

Senate Democrats, in a very weird bid to help Democrat Mary Landrieu’s reelection bid, allowed a vote on the mythologized Keystone XL pipeline yesterday. It failed by one vote. And that’s a very Good Thing. As I have written about before, the much-touted job creation promised by the pipeline’s ignorant or lying proponents, is wildly inflated: Let’s take the first […]

You know we’re in the steely grip of corporatocracy when this happens: West Bay Exploration Company has no plans to cease drilling at the corner of West Delhi and Miller roads northwest of Ann Arbor. The company’s oil rig is in Scio Township, where the Board of Trustees passed a moratorium last week against oil exploration activity. West Bay Exploration […]

My wife Anne, who lived in St. Louis, Missouri when we met, often tells people that I “wooed her with Michigan”. And it’s true. Michigan has so much to offer from big cities to secluded forests and everything in between. We have over 19 million acres of forested land, about 4 million of which is state-owned. This immense amount of […]

A new group has formed called Citizens for Oil-free Backyards (COFBY)to oppose oil and gas exploration, drilling, and extraction in Scio Township, just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in other parts of Michigan. Their efforts are in response to an effort by Traverse City-based West Bay Exploration to begin exploring for oil in Scio Township. More than 300 people attended […]

Oil well in Saline, Michigan. CC image credit: Dwight Burdette | Wikimedia Commons A standing room-only crowd of more than 300 Scio Township residents packed a recent hearing at the Washtenaw Intermediate School District headquarters last Thursday to speak out about a proposal to drill for oil near the border with Ann Arbor. The hearing was hosted and moderated by […]

This past week a federal report came out saying the carbon emissions will not be increased by allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to run through the USA. This will rejuvenate efforts by the Big Oil proponents of the pipeline to keep up their political pressure. But this argument has, in my opinion, never been about increased carbon emissions. It’s about […]

What could possibly go wrong? Photo by Anne C. Savage Impending upgrades to crude oil pipelines that bring tar sands crude to the Midwest are sparking fears of a significant jump in crude oil shipments on the Great Lakes. A report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes has details of the impending oil glut, the potential devastating impact on […]

Just a totally harmless cloud of heavy metal-laden black dust, no problem at all The large piles of petcoke that have been stored on the banks of the Detroit River delivered a little surprise to the residents of Windsor across the border last weekend in the form of a thick black cloud of dust kicked up by a storm. Here’s […]

The misinformation is rampant. Get informed.

The two biggest lies perpetuated by the fossil oil industry (“Big Oil”) and their corporatist minions in decision-making roles in our government are that TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline will bring thousands and thousands of jobs to the U.S. and, perhaps more importantly, will increase our national security by making us less reliant on oil imported from the Middle East and other foreign countries that aren’t allies like Canada.

Both are complete and utter lies and there is solid proof to dispel both.

Much, much more after the jump.

GOP presidential candidates: paid shills for Wall Street There has been an endless litany of GOP wharrgarbl lately about how rising gas prices are the fault of President Obama and his environmental policies. According to these professional wharrgarblists, all we need to do is drill more and open the Keystone XL pipeline and prices will magically fall below $2 per […]