Kinder Morgan

Texas oil company, Kinder Morgan wants to transport tar sands bitumen across British Columbia to sell to China. The downsides are:

• Spills that will destroy rivers and oceans.
• They want to use parks as part of the route.
• Extracting the bitumen will create huge CO₂ emissions.
• China will create immense CO₂ emissions burning that carbon.
• The project has a short life. It will have nowhere near the 60-year life used to estimate profitability. Fossil fuels are a sunset technology. The taxpayers will be on the hook for infrastructure mortgages.
• The government assumes much of the risk and startup cost, but Kinder Morgan gets the profits.
• Low-paid temporary foreign workers will largely do the construction. Even these jobs are temporary.
• Kinder Morgan is a scofflaw. They use their immense wealth and political influence to get away with it. They are not an ethical corporation. It is almost like doing business with gangsters.

Proponents claim these projects will fill government coffers to overflowing which compensates for any disadvantage. The CEO (Chief Executive Officer), Richard Kinder makes $500 million a year. Corrupt men in government have created loopholes for him so he pays $0 personal income tax. Kinder Morgan has more than 11,000 employees and has a combined enterprise value of approximately $125 billion yet Kinder Morgan pays less than $1 million per year in corporate income tax for all their many activities across Canada, less than the cost of one house. This is hardly staggering wealth. People like BC Premier Christie Clark and Prime Minister Stephen Harper have been seduced by dreams of avarice and have encouraged Kinder Morgan to con them, or, given the way they have acted as cheerleaders for Kinder Morgan, they may even be in on the con.

~ Roedy (born:1948-02-04 age:68)