Neil Young says oil town left looking like ‘Hiroshima’
Legendary rock star Neil Young has waded into a bitter row over a controversial US oil pipeline by accusing extractors of leaving one area looking like Hiroshima.
In a public speech, the musician has blasted the $5.3bn Keystone XL project, which is designed to carry crude oil from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to refineries in Texas almost 5,000 miles away.
After visiting Fort McMurray, the nearest town to the work, Mr Young said the area is now a “wasteland” and claims that “people are dying of cancer” as a result.
“This is truly a disaster,” he told a US National Farmers Union conference in Washington DC. “The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. It’s very unfortunate that this is where we get the majority of our fuel from.
“The fuel’s all over – the fumes are everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”
Before the oil can be sent across the US, vast pits are dug to extract sand in a similar way to traditional mining. The sand is then sifted to extract the oil. The process is considered more invasive to the land than drilling
Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada, the owner of the pipeline, disagreed with Mr Young: “I may not be as old as Mr Young, but I have looked at photos of Fort McMurray and Hiroshima – and the two are nothing alike. Like many other people, I’ve been to Fort McMurray and have seen the mining operations there and would never even consider comparing them to a historical tragedy.
“It may be colourful for a musician to use that language, but it diminishes the importance of what happened in the past and what is actually going on in Fort McMurray today.”
Two phases of the pipeline, from Canada to Illinois, are already in operation. A third stretch from Oklahoma to Texas is under construction and a fourth between Canada and Nebraska is awaiting government approval.
The proposals have prompted more than 1.5m public comments to the State Department, which had promised to complete a 2,000 page environmental review of the project by the summer. A key conclusion of a draft document stated that the 830,000 barrel per day project would not result in higher levels of emissions linked to global warming because the oil would find its way to market whether or not the pipeline gets built.
President Barack Obama’s final decision on the pipeline is not expected until 2014.
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said of Mr Young’s comments: “I am a fan of Neil Young’s music. But on this matter we disagree because Keystone XL will displace heavy oil from Venezuela, which has the same or higher greenhouse gas emissions, with a stable and secure source of Canadian oil.”
A spokeseman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which represents member companies that produce about 90pc of the country’s natural gas and crude oil, responded to Mr Young’s claims by saying that “everyone is entitled to their opinion”, adding: “The industry is invested in the environment because its workers have to live nearby.”
Last year actress Daryl Hannah was arrested for trespassing after being accused of standing in front of the pipeline’s construction equipment on a farm in Winnsboro, 100 miles east of Dallas.
The pipeline is being built at a time when fracking has sparked a shale gas revolution, cutting energy costs dramatically and triggering a wider industrial revival.
Source: The Telegraph
