Mixed results for the eco mob – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – August 25, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Canada’s NEB expands its review of the Energy East pipeline proposal, while U.S. limited partnership Energy Transfer Equity files a racketeering lawsuit against Greenpeace and other ENGOs

Two developments this week indicate the stark difference in the political climate with regards to energy on opposite sides of the 49th parallel. President Donald Trump wants to continue to unleash the U.S.’s vast fossil fuel potential, which has had a dramatic, positive effect on job creation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks to a carbon tax and a regulation-forced transition to a land of sunshine and wind-turbine lollypops.

On Wednesday, Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) announced that it was expanding its review of the Energy East pipeline proposal, which would take Alberta oil to Quebec and the East coast, to include both its impacts on climate, and climate policy’s impact on it.
This promises to make even more complicated what is already a regulatory bog, and represents a major victory for radical anti-development environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) such as Greenpeace.

Meanwhile, south of the border on Tuesday, U.S. limited partnership Energy Transfer Equity, promoter of the Dakota Access Pipeline, announced that it had filed a racketeering lawsuit against Greenpeace and other ENGOs, alleging that this eco mob “manufactured and disseminated materially false and misleading information… for the purpose of fraudulently inducing donations, interfering with pipeline construction activities and damaging Energy Transfer’s critical business and financial relationships.”

Plus “acts of terrorism” against a pipeline that had undergone three years of “rigorous environmental review.”

There is a significant Canadian connection in Energy Transfer’s case. It follows a similar suit brought last year by Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products against Greenpeace following Greenpeace’s campaign claiming that Resolute, one of the most respected companies in the forest industry, is a “Forest Destroyer.”

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