Climate activists took to Seattle's Elliott Bay Tuesday to protest the Canadian government's decision to buy Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Pipeline. The price tag is $3.46 billion.
The pipeline's expansion faced a tenuous future as lawsuits mounted from British Columbia and indigenous people. The controversy nearly led Kinder Morgan to scrap the deal. Instead, it will sell the controversy-plagued project to Canada.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vocalized his support of the project, despite opposition to its potential environmental impacts. The pending transaction has ramped up efforts to stop it, including a letter written and signed by more than 70 local leaders in the Pacific Northwest.
"Obviously we care about our planet but specifically we're concerned about the impact of the transport of this oil on Puget Sound," said King County Executive Dow Constantine. "This heavy crude, when it spills, doesn't float on the surface so it can be cleaned up, it sinks to the bottoms and right now we don't have a way to clean it up."
The pipeline will increase the amount of barge traffic in Puget Sound sevenfold, raising concern over a spill but also acoustic pollution for endangered species like the Southern Resident Killer Whales.
"It is all-in-all a bad thing for our natural environment," Constantine said. "This has been the case with every oil and coal transport proposal we've taken on. Somebody at the one end of the pipeline is going to benefit, somebody at the other end is going to benefit, but most of the folks along the way are bearing the costs and the risks."
