I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
State Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) — who represents Michigan’s most polluted zip code — and representatives from several state environmental groups gathered near the spirit of Detroit statue last week to protest the construction of 2,000 mile long pipeline that will bring an additional 900,000 barrels a day of Canadian tar sands into the U.S. to be processed into gasoline and diesel.
The mining of Canadian tar sands requires a tremendous amount of water and the processing needed to turn tar sand into usable fuel requires far more energy than the production of conventional oil.
The Metro Times reports that the Marathon oil refinery in Detroit is one of the sites where the asphalt-like tar sand is being processed, and that this facility is being expanded with the help of tax exemptions granted by the Detroit city council.
To facilitate the expansion, in 2007, the Detroit City Council approved granting Marathon an exemption on personal property taxes that, according to published reports, totaled about $176 million over 20 years.
The Detroit upgrade, when completed, will allow the refinery to process an additional 80,000 barrels of heavy crude per day, Marathon says. The project also includes installing 29 miles of new pipe between Monroe County and Detroit to increase the flow of oil described as having the consistency of cake batter.
The Detroit demonstration was part of a nationwide effort to raise awareness about the environmental impacts of increasing reliance on tar sands.
Canadian opponents of the pipeline warn that even before the tar sands reach the US their production is associated with increased carbon dioxide emissions, and increased exposure to heavy metals, and sulfurs.
The strip-mining of tar sands is also reshaping the Alberta landscape, they say.
A pristine forest covering over 65,000km2 (equivalent in size to California’s Mojave desert) is slated for tar sands expansion. This expansion will destroy some of Canada’s Boreal Forest, the world’s largest terrestrial carbon storehouse and home to the largest forest wetland ecosystems left on the planet.
Fifty members of Congress recently asked Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and President Barack Obama to consider the potential climate impacts before approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
The lawmakers wrote:
We believe that a full lifecyle assessment of the greenhouse gas emissions for tar sands would provide the Department of State with necessary information to determine whether issuing a presidential permit for the pipeline is consistent with the Administration’s clean energy and climate change priorities. Numerous scientific studies have found tar sands oil to produce much higher lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions that convention [sic] oil.
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