As light hearted the cartoon may be, this is a serious issue. Enbridge is not about safety, Enbridge is all about profits. Granted every business is entitled to make a profit and should. But Enbridge is over the top. It is too risky to have Enbridge run a oil pipe through thousands of fresh water supplies. At the end of the road, water is more precious then oil. Having just one oil spill in a sensitive water shed area will be a disaster than no man can repair.

I like this version better.

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a359/sledhed/General%20stuff/bush-cri.png

How can P

Plankton have also created fossil fuels.  Millions of years after they have sunk to the bottom of the sea floor, dead phytoplankton and zooplankton decompose into bacteria, creating crude oil and natural gas. 

The most conclusive evidence of the oil spill’s impact on the fishery, however, is the population response over the 10 years since the spill event. Pink salmon returning to PWS over this period have generated the highest period average in the recorded history of the run (Figure 1). Three of the return years after the spill have been the highest return years ever seen. The 1990 adult returns represented individuals that had survived the greatest potential for exposure to the oil spill as eggs and fry in 1989, as they left the hatcheries and native streams and entered the PWS marine environment. That year class returned in 1990 to constitute the all-time record return for PWS, with a total run size of 46 million fish. The 1991 adult returns represented a different risk of exposure to hydrocarbons from the oil spill, as they were the first year class to have completed an entire incubation cycle in the post-spill environment. The 1991 return, 40 million fish, was the second largest recorded. The 1992 and 1993 pink salmon returns throughout oiled and unoiled areas of PWS fell to 10 and 7.6 million fish, respectively, the lowest since 1978, but since that time the third largest recorded run (39 million fish) returned, and subsequent runs have continued to be very strong.

The return performance of pink salmon in the oiled and unoiled streams is another important indicator of the lack of significant oil spill effects on the pink salmon population. Five oiled and five unoiled reference streams were surveyed to determine the return success of adult pink salmon from 1989 through 1998. Standard survey methods (Maki et al. 1995) were used for weekly counts of the number of live pink salmon returning to each stream. The results indicated that patterns of variation in abundance and distribution of spawning adults in the study streams were typical for pink salmon throughout PWS; no difference existed between spawning patterns in oiled and reference streams.

In the final analysis, over the 10 years following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, extensive research, analysis, and monitoring of pink salmon mortality, incubation success, viability of spawners, and record return performances have produced clear evidence that counters expectations of injury. Each of the key life stages of pink salmon showed no effects attributable to spill hydrocarbons. In combination with the low levels of exposure to spill hydrocarbons, the biological studies have documented the low level of risk to pink salmon and support  the conclusion that specific, oil-related effects on the pink salmon population in PWS were undetectable.

http://www.iosc.org/papers_posters/00854.pdf