Running Big Oil Off the Road

[marmar]

from In These Times:




Running Big Oil Off the Road
An Idaho couple pushes back against oil companies’ efforts to transform a scenic road.

By Steve Bunk


In May 2010, Linwood Laughy’s curiosity was piqued by the sight of workmen raising power lines near his home not far from the northern Idaho hamlet of Kooskia. He discovered the lines were being moved to accommodate passage of massive truckloads of oil company equipment along twisting, two-lane Highway 12, a Wild & Scenic River Corridor prized by recreationists, environmentalists and local Indian tribes. No announcement had been made of such plans.

Laughy, a tour company owner, and his wife, Karen “Borg” Hendrickson, began digging for answers. They discovered that several oil companies had been colluding for years with the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) to transform the beautiful byway into a “high and wide” industrial corridor for hundreds of so-called “megaloads” of oil sands mining equipment, which would block both lanes of this sole access route to hospitals and other services.

The equipment would be barged from the West Coast to the inland port of Lewiston, Idaho, before being trucked across the state into Montana, where the vehicles would veer north to the huge, environmentally controversial oil sands extraction operations in northern Alberta, Canada. (Oil sands, also known as tar sands, are huge deposits of bitumen that are mined and transformed into oil through a process environmental groups say has polluted Alberta’s air, land and native people.)

Hendrickson started a website, FightingGoliath.org, to disseminate what she and her husband were learning. They gathered 3,600 signatures on a petition opposing the megaloads, which threaten the sparsely populated area’s principal industry, tourism. They induced the state to hold a series of public meetings on the issue, during which ITD spokespersons denied any intention to permanently change the scenic route. Laughy and Hendrickson retained lawyers and have been fighting court battles for months. Their grassroots movement spread to Montana, garnering press coverage across America and overseas. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7385/running_big_oil_off_the_road

[loudsue]

1. The oil and gas companies are going to bring the whole world to its knees

Between their casino type bidding on the price of futures (unregulated wall street) gouging the life out of the American economy with inflated oil prices, and their fracking of shale to extract natural gas with the most insidious chemical pollutants ruining groundwater, to the tar sands extraction of oil polluting water, soil AND air, they are just the sewer of the economic system.

Is oil good to have? Sure. Can we have affordable oil made from...say...hemp? Sure. Do we have to take down the entire ecosystem of the globe to do it? No.