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In the end, Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, for all his suave talk of being a new progressive politician, who would era in a new type of politics, turned out disappointingly to be like all the rest. His suit is cut from the same old cloth.

It is sixty years ago this year that the oil giant, Shell, first found oil at Oloibiri in Ijawland in the Niger Delta, after fourteen years of searching.

The news from earlier this week that Ken Wiwa, the son of the Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, has died at the young age of forty seven, is a devastating shock to anyone who knew him.

“Democracy died today”, wrote one irate Lancastrian yesterday on Facebook regarding the decision by the UK Government to overturn a decision by the local County Council to reject a fracking application by the shale gas company, Cuadrilla.

New concerns have been raised over the ecological impact of in-situ tar sands mining after research was published yesterday revealing that high pressure steaming can discharge pollutants into the environment

It will become a defining battle of our times. A Brexit-supporting billionaire, who until recently lived as a tax-exile in Switzerland, versus the people of Britain. And the battle will be over fracking.

As the US shale industry comes under increasing scrutiny for its environmental and health impact, it has emerged that the US has secretly approved fracking offshore leading to billions of gallons of waste-water to be dumped at sea.

The political and economic reverberations of last week’s Canadian court of appeal judgement against the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline are continuing.

Just as the political opposition to crude by rail trains is growing in the US over the latest crash along the Colombia River Gorge, so is the public opposition.

The political and regulatory fall-out from the crude by rail crash in the Colombia River Gorge earlier this month is still continuing.