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The government of Canadian British Columbia has said 'No' to Enbridge's West Coast tar sands pipeline project, the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The Calgary Herald:

"(Enbridge Northern Gateway) has presented little evidence about how it will respond in the event of a spill," the province wrote in its submission to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel.

"Put another way, it is not clear from the evidence that NG (Northern Gateway) will in fact be able to respond effectively to spills either from the pipeline itself, or from tankers transporting diluted Bitumen from the proposed Kitimat terminal."

The strongly worded submission made clear the B.C. government believes the company has yet to lay out how it would respond to a catastrophic spill - something it said is particularly important here.

"The project before JRP (Joint Review Panel) is not a typical pipeline. For example: the behavior in water of the material to be transported is incompletely understood; the terrain the pipeline would cross is not only remote, it is in many places extremely difficult to access; the impact of spills into pristine river environments would be profound," the province wrote.

"In these particular and unique circumstances, NG should not be granted a certificate on the basis of a promise to do more study and planning once the certificate is granted. The standard in this particular case must be higher," it added.

"'Trust me' is not good enough in this case."

Founder of 350.org Bill McKibben said Friday, the decision marks an important win for the climate movement. Anti-tar sands campaigners will now be looking for Obama to follow suit and reject TransCanada's bid to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, a separate export route for Alberta's tar sands that would pass south to the Texas coast.

"For years the tar sands promoters have said: ‘if we don't build Keystone XL the tar sands will get out some other way,'" McKibben said in a statement.

But, he continued, "British Columbians just slammed the door on the most obvious other way, so now it's up to President Obama. If he approve Keystone XL he bails out the Koch Brothers and other tar sands investors; if he rejects the pipeline, then an awful lot of that crude is going to stay in the ground where it belongs."

This also certainly makes plans to export tar sands oil much more complicated.

The Overpass Light Brigade has a new target: The Keystone XL pipeline. This video on that subject is the pièce de résistance.

It was created by Dusan Harminc, a Minnesota filmmaker and time-lapse animator. The brigade spent three long nights shooting at various locations in Wisconsin that are emblematic of either dirty energy (oil container units in the Port of Milwaukee) or clean alternatives (nearby wind turbines). The intention is to send President Obama a 'video letter' since he is soon to decide on the issue. Will President Obama make good on his electoral promises and enthusiasm for a new energy future, or will he capitulate to the power and greed of Dirty Oil?

On each of the three shoots, as the time-lapse progressed, the brigade's volunteer "Holders of the Lights" stood for three or more hours in the cold. It took about 12 hours of field work in addition to video production and transportation to create the one-minute video. Enjoy.

This article is cross-posted at DeSmogBlog.

Arkansas' Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has contracted out the "independent analysis of the cleanup" of the ExxonMobil Pegasus tar sands pipeline spill to Witt O'Brien's, a firm with a history of oil spill cover-ups, a DeSmogBlog investigation reveals.

At his April 10 press conference about the Mayflower spill response, AG McDaniel confirmed that Exxon had turned over 12,500 pages of documents to his office resulting from a subpoena related to Exxon's response to the March 29 Pegasus disaster. A 22-foot gash in the 65-year-old pipeline spewed over 500,000 gallons of tar sands dilbit through the streets of Mayflower, AR.

McDaniel also provided the media with a presser explaining that his office had "retained the assistance of Witt O’Brien’s, a firm whose experts will immediately begin an independent analysis of the cleanup process."

Witt O'Brien's describes itself as a "global leader in preparedness, crisis management and disaster response and recovery with the depth of experience and capability to provide services across the crisis and disaster life cycle."

But the firm's actual performance record isn't quite so glowing. O'Brien's has had its hands in the botched clean-up efforts of almost every high-profile oil spill disaster in recent U.S. history, including the Exxon Valdez spill, the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, the Enbridge tar sands pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River, and Hurricane Sandy.

Most troubling of all, Witt O'Brien's won a "$300k+ contract to develop a Canadian-US compliant Oil Spill Emergency Response Plan for TransCanada’s Keystone Oil Pipeline Project" in Aug. 2008.

Thus, if the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline inevitably suffered a major spill, Witt O'Brien's would presumably handle the cleanup. That should worry everyone along the proposed KXL route.

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Here's some new video footage of the protest at TransCanada's Massachusetts office that I wrote about on Monday. It captures the full mock funeral that the demonstrators held before the arrests begin.

They were there to hold TransCanada accountable for the degradation of our planet and the impoverishment of the future of the world's youth.

They were there to amplify the cries of the people in frontline communities, from indigenous peoples at the point of tar sands extraction, to the black and latina communities who live fence-line to the refineries where these toxic tar sands will be refined in the Gulf Coast.

They were there to pledge resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline and all tar sands development.

More about this group here.