Train derailment and explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Québec

 Concerns are being raised that efforts to improve efficiency at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. are contributing to a series of accidents at the railroad in recent months, including two more this week.

The country’s second-largest railway is in the midst of a massive restructuring under its new chief executive, Hunter Harrison, aimed at righting the railway’s chronic underperformance.

Those efforts have already started to take hold, with CP delivering its best-ever first quarter result this year en route to a record year of earnings, management says.

The deregulation of Canada's railway safety regulatory system, which occurred in the late 1980s, making the railway responsible for its own safety has not, and is not, adequately protecting the interests of the Canadian public, the Canadian environment, or Canadian railway workers. In order to restore the confidence of the Canadian public in the safety of railway transportation in Canada, Parliament must move to restore rail safety and effective enforcement power to Transport Canada, or an equivalent independent body. It is time for government to take back the safety obligations that have been granted to the railway industry; viz. self-regulation. 

The simple fact is that while pipelines are safer than railways for transporting petroleum products, if either are left to enforce their own safety standards, accidents in both will increase dramatically, as they already have. Government regulation, in which revolving door switching between regulators and the regulated is prohibited, is necessary to minimize such accidents. This accident provides another reason, in addition to climate change, to transform our economy from fossil fuels to green renewable energy as quickly as possible

richardp wrote:

I'd be quite surpised if I lived to see a mass exodus from petroleum-based products to green energy in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s, BTW).  All we can do for now is try to extract, transport and process these materials in as safe a way as possible.  If more stringent oversight will help then it's a no-brainer. 

So you think carrying on with the fossil fuel status quo is a no-brainer. The computer models that originally predicted ice-free Arctic summers by 2100 were too conservative, so the models were modified to 2050 as new data showed a faster rate of change and now there are predictions that this could happen as early as 2015. The reaction? Canada, the US, Russia, and China see this as a great opportunity to drill for more oil and natural gas. Shell sent a drill ship to the Arctic in 2012 but it had an accident before it could start drilling - a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh has closed 1,000 schools due to flooding from climate change. With a population of 156 million in 2009, and 80% of its land mass subject to flooding as sea levels rise, it has joined several small island nations (the Maldives, Seychelles, Kirabati, and Nauru), who expect to disappear as sea levels rise, in initiating a International Criminal Court genocide lawsuit because of this. They do not expect to win due to the power of their opponents and so the Maldives are already negotiating with India and Australia to move its entire population to one of these countries as the Maldives are submerged. Kirabati has bought 6,000 hectares in Fiji in anticipation of having to move its population there. 

Hurricane Sandy resulted in the government spending $50.5 billion in spending as climate change changes weather patterns and rasises sea levels. Vancouver is now estimated to spend $9.5 billion on raising sea level walls by 2100 in order to counter sea rise and in addition New York City just released its $20 billion climate change resilience plan to raise its sea wall levels in order to prevent the damage that paralyzed the city and totally shut down its subway system during Sandy. Now think of the expenditures required to protect the world's coastal population (60% of the world's population lives with 50 km of a coast). Since the 1970s, droughts have become longer and more extreme worldwide, inclucing Canada and the US, but particularly in the tropics and subtropics.

http://thelittleislandthatcould.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/kiribati-reloca...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/01/29/hurricane-...

http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/sandy-and-the-record-arctic-sea-i...

http://www.retooling.ca/cgi/page.cgi?aid=243&_id=80&zine=show

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/05/2258731/adaptation-or-mitiga...

http://www.epa.gov/climatestudents/impacts/signs/droughts.html

Quote:

What then does this mean for the world’s population? Just as the causation is unevenly distributed, the impact of climate change will most directly be felt by the poorest countries and peoples.24 With regard to access to water, a temperature rise of 2 degrees C will result in 1 to 4 billion people experiencing growing water shortages, especially in Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe and parts of South and Central America.25 The study cited does not consider the potential for adaptation and so highlights potential water stress. Land in constant drought will increase from 2 per cent to 10 per cent by 2050; land in extreme drought will increase from 1 per cent to 30 per cent by the end of the century.26

Concerning agriculture, higher latitude countries may in fact benefit from a moderate 2-3 degree C warming but tropical regions will definitely see declines in yield, given that many farmers are already operating close to critical temperature thresholds.27 Around 800 million people are already at risk of hunger, and malnutrition currently causes around 4 million deaths annually. A moderate 2-3 degree C warming would add a further 30-200 million people to those at risk of hunger.28

Climate change will also exacerbate the spread of diseases. The World Health Organisation estimates that since the 1970’s climate change is already responsible for more than 150,000 deaths annually, through the increased incidence of diarrhoea, malaria and malnutrition. Again, these increases occur primarily in Africa and other developing regions. A mere 1 degree C increase in global temperature29 could double this figure to 300,000 deaths annually.30

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1774900&f...

With pine beetles now surviving winters in large numbers thanks to global warming, 80% of BC's pine forests have been destroyed and with it much of the province's forest industry. Now that the pine beetles have crossed the Rockies we can expect similar devastation to much of Canada's boreal forests and forest industry. Forest fire seasons  the forest-fire season in Alberta starts earlier and lasts longer because of climate change, further damaging our forests and neighbouring communities, such as Slave Lake in Alberta and Kelowna in BC. 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/pine-beetles-transf...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/dramatic-rise-in-fores...

Species are disappearing at 1,000 times to 10,000 times that found in the fossil record rate, in part due to climate change. As a result, half the species that exist today could be extinct by 2050. 

http://books.google.ca/books?id=UFVmiSAr-okC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=speci...

Yes, we can keep on doing what we have been doing with a no-brainer attitude that we can't afford the cost of change despite the steadily mounting evidence of how extensive these costs are. 

 

 

 

Thousands of new tanker cars have been ordered by North American railways.

Compounding the risk, Stewart added, is the fact that many rail companies move oil in cars known as "DOT-111" tankers.

These cars, most commonly used to transport crude oil in Canada, have a history of puncturing during

accidents. The federal Transportation Safety Board has said repeatedly that they are prone to spill their contents during derailments and other impacts, and a U.S. Transportation and Safety Board investigation into a 2009 CN derailment and fire concluded that the tankers should be fitted with head shields, tank jackets and other safety measures to mitigate against disaster. It's unclear if any of those recommendations were implemented. Right now, only a small amount of oil is moved through B.C. by rail, said Stewart, mostly through the Interior and down to California. He said correspondence between environmental groups and several rail companies has revealed many are considering taking oil to the B.C. coast. ...

Approximately 230,000 barrels (more than 20 million litres) of oil are moved by rail in North America every day, according to the Railway Association of Canada.

 Burkhardt's privatization approach spread to deals with investment firms to pick up government-run railroads in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia, according to media reports at the time. ...

His Rail World purchased the assets of what became the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway out of bankruptcy in 2003. The regional rail company has 510 route miles of track in Maine, Vermont and Quebec, and employs about 170 people, according to the company's website. It runs about 15 trains daily, and has a fleet of 26 locomotives.

The railway has had eight incidents of hazardous material spills reported since February 2005, including instances of spilled diesel, gas oil, sulfur and other materials, according to data compiled by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. 

Burkhardt's career in the industry includes a 12-year stint as president of a railroad that broke convention by shunning unions, reinvesting profit rather than paying dividends to investors and expanding internationally. 

Burkhardt helped to found Wisconsin Central railroad in 1987 on a business model that took advantage of the 1980 law that deregulated the U.S. rail industry, according to Tribune articles.

Complaints from railway unions slowed the railroad's start and caused early financial troubles, but the company quickly emerged as a profitable enterprise, according to reports.

lagatta wrote:

The story has made the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/07/quebec-rail-crash-death-toll

I disagree strongly with richardp. We must take transition action, climate action NOW!

I actually think we all agree here.  I'm just being realistic: with the amount of money behind the resource economy, no amount of protest is going to stop the extraction, processing and transport of petroleum products.  The only thing that will change that corporate juggernaut is a significant percentage drop in petroleum demand.  Until that happens, incidences like this are simply going to be noted as a "cost of doing business", and no amount of pie-in-the-sky dreaming will change that.

China was responsible for almost one-fifth of total global investment, spending $52 billion on renewable energy last year. According to China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2011-2015), the country will spend $473.1 billion on clean energy investments over the next five years. China’s goal is to have 20 percent of its total energy demand sourced from renewable energy by 2020. ... Global investment in renewable energy reached a record $257 billion in 2011, a 17 percent increase from the amount invested in 2010.

The countries of the European Union are the number two global leaders in the development and application of renewable energy. Promoting the use of renewable energy sources is important both to the reduction of the EU's dependence on foreign energy imports, and in meeting targets to combat global warming. ... EU leaders reached agreement in principle in March 2007 that 20 percent of the bloc's final energy consumption should be produced from renewable energy sources and by 2020 as part of its drive to cut emissions of carbon dioxide.

Green investments in China in 2012 rose 20% to $65 billion while they fell 37% in the U.S. to just under $36 billion.

Is this enough spending and regulation to solve the problem? No. However, the issue is starting to be addressed in some countries and without further public pressure around the world, we do not have any chance of solving this problem. 

jerrym wrote:

Is this enough spending and regulation to solve the problem? No. However, the issue is starting to be addressed in some countries and without further public pressure around the world, we do not have any chance of solving this problem. 

It amounts to lip service as long as everyone still jumps in their cars, trucks, SUVs, busses, airliners, go on cruises ... buy goods made of plastic ... 

I admire your optimism but I see it as naive.