Protecting the community as well as your own children, grandchildren and property today means that we all must do our own research on this issue.

The artfully spun hype and targeted ads we are receiving in the mail, or that are being published as full-page ads in the papers, as the expression goes,

are not truthful. “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling it’s boots on.” (Attributed to Mark Twain, but actually a remark by Charles Haddon Spurgeon around 1855.)

Anyone who is basing their thinking on the truth of this issue about what the oil industry people are promoting, is doing themselves and their community an honest disservice by accepting the false information that is in the mailings or shown by expensive newspaper advertisements.

According to a Natural Resource Defense Council report (as quoted in PR Watch), The Center for Media and Democracy:

“Keystone PipeLIES Exposed: The Facts on Sticky Leaks, Billion Dollar Spills, and Dirty Air.” Feb. 26, 2014 “Tar sands oil bears little resemblance to anything most people would recognize as petroleum. In its natural form, it is not even liquid. Rather, it is solid or semi-solid bitumen, mixed with clay, sand, and water in a sticky sludge.”

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This article continues…”It basically is a very tarry, asphalt-like substance that requires an enormous amount of energy to get out of the ground and an enormous amount of energy to move and to refine,” says Anthony Swift, staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“It’s a much lower grade of oil, almost liquid coal. There are many more impurities, there are many more toxic substances in it” compared to

conventional petroleum.”

From the same article…”The Association of Oil Pipelines says that from 2006 to 2008 there were only 0.7 safety incidents per thousand miles of pipeline.

But with 55,000 miles of petroleum pipelines crisscrossing the country, that still amounts to 38 pipeline spills in a three-year period, or roughly one

a month.” “Industry leak detection systems missed 19 out of 20 spills,” says NRDC’s Swift. “And what’s more concerning is, if you look at the data

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over the last 10 years, four out of five spills have been greater than 40,000 gallons.”

“And basically the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline is the linchpin for Canada to fully develop its tar sands,” League of Conservative Voters’ Tiernan Sittenfeld remarks “…for without a reliable, cost-efficient conveyance to transport the product from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries with access to international shipping terminals, the oil producers simply cannot make enough profit to make tar sands extraction worthwhile.”

Please follow the money. Once again, we are talking about profit, pure and simple. And the plans that could be thwarted by our community

if an ordinance blocks these tar/oil sands plans that were already permitted back in 2009! Follow also, real reporting to recognize that most of this oil

will never be used by the U.S. and after the flurry of building out the pipeline and changes, there will be no increase in jobs per se.

Ellen Fraser

South Portland


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