Hamilton Climate Action on November 6!

Is Enbridge making “guilt payments” to Hamilton to grease approval of its brand new 48” fracked gas pipeline across rural Hamilton?
 
Join the picket of their media conference this Wednesday at 9:30 am on Stone Church Road East at Nebo Road


The city has issued an invitation to a media conference on Wednesday November 6 where Enbridge will announce the “support” it will provide the Hamilton Fire Department. The event is scheduled for 10 am at Fire Station #5 at 1227 Stone Church Road East at Nebo Road.

Enbridge Inc is the largest pipeline company in North America and is currently proposing to build a brand new fracked gas pipeline across some of Hamilton’s most ecologically sensitive rural lands. The new pipeline shows the company denies the climate emergency and the globally-recognized requirement to cut use of fossil fuels as fast as possible. Enbridge falsely says the pipeline is for “increased demand” at the same time as Hamilton and Burlington have already detailed how natural gas consumption must fall drastically in the next three decades as both cities move to carbon net-zero by 2050.

The guilt payments to the fire department also come in the wake of three major Enbridge gas pipeline explosions in the last 13 months. As such they represent an admission by Enbridge Inc that their pipelines are dangerous and very likely to result in fires and other dangerous situations that require the services of fire departments. Barely three months ago, an Enbridge gas pipeline exploded in Kentucky killing one person and sending five others to hospital. Earlier in the year, an Enbridge gas pipeline generated another fireball in Ohio. And in October of last year the explosion of an Enbridge gas pipe near Prince George, British Columbia created a massive fire and evacuation.

Enbridge’s planned new fracked gas pipeline from Kirkwall to just east of Highway 6 is an intentional climatic and ecological disaster. The route is entirely inside the Greenbelt and crosses the Beverly Swamp, Spencer Creek, Bronte Creek and multiple municipally-designated ecologically sensitive lands and waters. It also would plough through several large properties that have been purchased with public monies and are held by the Hamilton Conservation Authority for the express purpose of ensuring their permanent protection from bulldozers and other development. Pipeline installation typically involves bulldozing a 30-metre wide zone – in this case for ten kilometres.

The central business plan of Enbridge and other fossil fuel corporations will cause more global heating and climatic catastrophes by extracting, transporting and selling as much fossil fuel as possible. They are building new pipelines and carrying on this business plan despite widespread knowledge of its consequences and warnings a year ago from the most reputable global scientific body of climate scientists that climate-disrupting emissions must drop at least by half within the next decade.

Any payments made by these companies to public fire departments are piddling compared to what they owe for the climatic and other damages these corporations have already imposed and are continuing to make worse. This is not an act of charity by Enbridge, but instead an attempt to avoid being charged the full cost for their damaging business activities. Hamilton and its fire department should make clear that it regards these Enbridge monies as merely a tiny down payment on what is really owed and which must and will be collected. And obviously the city should not be bribed and should vigorously oppose Enbridge’s new pipeline.