oil sands – Page 2

Hey Mister Prime Minister, Why Are You So Afraid Of Canadians?

June 6, 2012 by Christine

Courageous and talented Canadian artist Franke James, whose 2011 European art tour was cancelled after interference from the Harper government, has recently published an illustrated essay on the current overlap of oil and state (with a large dose of anti-science, anti-democratic polemic) in Canadian politics. You can find Franke’s essay, What is Harper Afraid Of?, at FrankeJames.com, Here’s the animated version:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/43432620]

More links:

FrankeJames.com

Dear Prime Minister Harper: Please Stop Blacklisting Environmental Artists And Scientists

Freedom Train to Canadians: Our Democratic Process Is Being Lost

May 4, 2012 by Christine

Yinka Dene Alliance Freedom Train arrived in Winnipeg last night. The Alliance is on a cross Canada trip that will end in Toronto, on Bay Street, at the Enbridge AGM. Their goal is to spread the word to Canadians about the dangers posed by the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline that is being pushed by the current Canadian federal goverment and its corporate friends. The pipeline is meant to carry bitumen from the Alberta Tar Sands to the West Coast. In this interview, Chief Na’Moks of the Wet’suwet’en Nation discusses why he joined the Freedom Train, and the implacable opposition that the First Nations have formed to protect their land.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kGFN2hz_WCQ]

More links:

Yinka Dene Alliance

#NOKXL! Score One For Our Children’s Future (For A Change)

November 10, 2011 by CPP

It’s official – break out the champagne!! The U.S. State Department just announced that it would delay making a decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline until after it had undergone extensive further review, including a search for an alternate routing. Yes, this is the same decision that PM Harper called a “no-brainer”. Tar Sands Action just posted this reflection:

Take a moment today to walk outside and enjoy the beautiful, threatened earth that is a little safer a little longer thanks to you.

Savor it. Remember what it’s like to achieve unlikely wins. We’ll need this feeling when we embark on what’s next.

Read more at the New York Times, “U.S. Delays Decision on Pipeline Until After Election”

Tar Sands Action: Big News: We Won. You Won

Dear Mr. Harper

September 30, 2011 by CPP

Canada’s Prime Minister Harper has been receiving messages about halting the expansion of the Alberta tar sands from far and wide this week. First, it was the 400 Canadians who gathered on Parliament Hill this past Monday, 200 of whom put themselves on the line to get arrested, speaking out loudly and clearly for our children and grandchildren’s future.

On Thursday, Archbishop Desmond Tutu along with seven other Nobel Peace Laureates, wrote a letter to Harper calling on him to stop the tar sands expansion. On the same day, the National Roundtable on the Environment and Economy, an arm’s-length government agency with nary a climate scientist among them, warned that Canadians face a high economic cost from the impact of a warming global climate, and the country should act quickly to reduce the financial price by investing in adaptation measures.

Also on Thursday, a group of Canadian researchers released a report which outlined a huge loss of ice in the Canadian Arctic this summer.

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in newly published research.

The loss is important as a marker of global warming, returning the Canadian Arctic to conditions that date back thousands of years, scientists say.

Individually, these messages are loud and clear. Together, they are impossible to ignore. The question remains: is Stephen Harper listening?

More links:

Media Release: Nobel Peace Laureates Call on Harper to Stop Tar Sands Expansion

Canadian Ice Shelves Breaking Up At Record Speed: Region lost almost half its ice shelves in last six years

Economic Cost of Climate Change Will Be High

NRTEE’s Report: Paying the Price: The Economic Impacts of Climate Change For Canada

Hundreds Gather on Parliament Hill to Say “No” To Tar Sands

The Planet Isn’t The Only Thing Heating Up: Opposition to Keystone XL Pipeline Grows

September 8, 2011 by CPP

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and seven other Nobel Peace Laureates have just written a letter to President Obama urging him to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and to begin building a clean energy future immediately. The letter, released yesterday by the Nobel Women’s Initiative, concludes with:

There is a better way.

Your rejection of the pipeline provides a tremendous opportunity to begin transition away from our dependence on oil, coal and gas and instead increase investments in renewable energies and energy efficiency.

We urge you to say ‘no’ to the plan proposed by the Canadian-based company TransCanada to build the Keystone XL, and to turn your attention back to supporting renewable sources of energy and clean transportation solutions. This will be your legacy to Americans and the global community: energy that sustains the lives and livelihoods of future generations.

The Keystone XL Pipeline has become a focus point for citizens concerned about climate change, and who want to offer their children a green energy future. To get more information about why this pipeline is so dangerous, for the aquifers and ecosystem of the midwestern U.S. as well as the climate, click here. If you want to take action for the sake of your children’s future, and mine, go to Tar Sands Action.org. If you are in Canada and can come to Ottawa for the September 26th day of action on Parliament Hill, click here for more information. If you are unable to travel to Ottawa but would like to take a stand for a clean energy future, participate (or organize) a Moving Planet event in your community on September 24th. The message of Moving Planet is that, around the world, people are ready to move beyond fossil fuels. In case you need more inspiration, check out this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj6gN8u5flM&feature=youtu.be]

More links:

Read the full text of the letter from the Nobel Laureates.

Al Gore Praises Tar Sands Activists, Condemns Smog Decision

Big Oil Bankrolls Meeting on Canada’s Energy Future

July 15, 2011 by CPP

At least it’s clear who’s setting the agenda at this weekend’s meeting of Provincial and Federal Ministers of Energy and Mines. It turns out the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Oil Sands Developers Group are the major sponsors of the annual meeting of energy and mines ministers in Kananaskis, Alberta. On the agenda is Canada’s energy future and the path towards a national energy strategy.

It is unusual to allow any corporate sponsorship of these meetings, never mind to the tune of nearly $200,000. The last energy ministers meeting held in Western Canada in 2008 received a total of $3000 from one corporate sponsor, and when the ministers met last year in Montreal the organizers chose not to accept any funding from the private sector. In contrast, oil companies are bankrolling this weekend’s meeting to the tune of $180,000, roughly 1/3 of the entire conference costs.

In the second decade of the 21st century, Canadians are facing a choice between an energy future built around a rapid expansion of the Alberta tar sands and an alternative vision that would serve all Canadians (not just those with investments in the tar sands), one that would make Canada a leader in clean energy and ensure that Canada does its fair share to reduce global warming pollution. What are the chances that a clean, renewable future will be chosen when this meeting is paid for by Big Oil?

Take action – David Suzuki Foundation: Tell your energy minister to stand up for a clean energy future. Better yet, after you’ve sent an email, pick up the phone and call your energy minister and tell him you’re not happy that Big Oil is setting the agenda for Canada’s energy future.

PM Harper on Alberta’s Pristine Boreal Forest: An “Unuseable Mass of Dirty Sand” Prior to Tar Sands Development

October 13, 2010 by Christine

The picture below is what, last Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called “nature’s biggest unusable oil spill”:

muskeg and water. the boreal landscape — Photo: Warren Cariou, Land of Oil and Water

Unlike our Prime Minister, the First Nations who call Northern Alberta home don’t think of this land of muskeg and forest as an oil spill. They call it home, home for them and for the animals and plants that live there and have provided sustenance for them since time before memory.

Harper’s comment is illustrative of the kind of thinking that has got us to the brink of environmental collapse, with global climate destabilization a reality and ocean acidification poised to destroy marine biodiversity. Wendell Berry, American farmer and poet, argues that wherever we are living, we are in trouble because of a “land-destroying economy” that pursues “production-by-exhaustion”. Mountain-top removal to mine coal is one clear example of this, but extraction of oil in the tar sands is another one. Berry recently addressed a gathering at the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas:

Extracting fossil fuels from the ground is dangerous, and so is the way those fuels are used to work the ground in farming.

The mining of the forests and soil, along with the extraction of fossil fuels, may have started innocently, but since the European conquest of the Americas, “It took us only a little more than 200 years to pass from intentions sometimes approximately good to this horrible result, in which our education, our religion, our politics, and our daily lives all are implicated,” Berry tells the packed house in The Land’s barn.

Alberta tar sands. Photo: David Dodge, Pembina Institute

If we continue to be led by politicians who view the world around us as an untapped resource waiting to be exploited, we are doomed. Berry condemns Harper and his ilk for putting us into the situation we are in, but he also says that because of the “carelessness of our economic life” we all play a part in the destruction of our ecosystem. The solution, Berry says, is for us to learn to do better:

“We can learn where we are, we can look around us and see,” he suggests. We also can rely on land health, “the capacity of the land for self-renewal,” and work at conservation, “our effort to understand and preserve that capacity.”

It won’t be the politicians that push for the paradigm shift that is required. While it’s tempting to get a bumper sticker that says “Ditch Harper. Save the Planet“, the reality is more complicated; it turns out, it’s up to us to change ourselves and then work to change the world:

Berry doesn’t look to educational, political, or corporate institutions for much help in those efforts, suggesting that we instead look to “leadership from the bottom” that can be provided by groups and individuals “who without official permission or support or knowledge are seeing what needs to be done and doing it.”

As was demonstrated by the Global Work Parties held this past weekend, it’s up to us, you and me and the millions around the world who recognize what destruction we have wrought, to change what “business as usual” means. I’m rolling up my sleeves – how about you?

Jeff Rubin: The Bar Has Fallen So Low Now Big Oil Is Pushing Alberta Tar Sands As “Green”

June 10, 2010 by Christine

Originally from The Huffington Post and then re-published in The Globe and Mail, economist Jeffrey Rubin, author of “Your World is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller”, had this to say about the recent attempts by the governments of Alberta and Canada, as well as Big Oil, to rebrand the dirtiest project on earth, the Alberta tar sands, as “green” in the face of the Gulf oil catastrophe:

It’s funny how it’s taken the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history to suddenly make other forms of oil extraction and processing look green. Only months ago, the carbon trail from the massive planned expansion of tar sands production made Canada a pariah at the world environmental summit in Copenhagen. But now tar sands producers and others are promoting tar sands oil as an ecologically friendly alternative to the environmental risks of another deep-water oil spill.

How low the bar has fallen.

There’s nothing clean about the production of synthetic oil from tar sands. The production of a single barrel of synthetic oil pollutes some 125 gallons of fresh water and emits over 200 pounds of carbon dioxide, principally as a result of the combustion of the natural gas, over 1,000 cubic feet of it, needed to generate the heat to separate the oil from the sand and then process it.

Click here to read the full article on The Huffington Post.

Canada’s Avatar Sands Called “Responsible” by Industry

March 25, 2010 by Christine

Avatar, Canadian-born director James Cameron’s blockbuster, didn’t sweep the Oscars as some expected after getting 9 nominations, but a coalition of 50 indigenous and environmental groups took advantage of Avatar’s high profile to run an ad in the entertainment magazine Variety just prior to the award show earlier this month.

The full-page ad draws the parallels between the film and what is happening in right now in the Alberta tar sands, saying the oil sands are:

“Where Indigenous Peoples in Canada are endangered by toxic pollution and future oil spills.”

“Where Shell, BP, Exxon, and other Sky People are destroying a huge ancient forest. Where giant Hell trucks are used to mine the most polluting, expensive unobtanium oil to feed America’s addiction.”

Micheal Marx, head of U.S-based Corporate Ethics International, one of the groups that bought the ad stated: “There are people living the Avatar storyline around the world, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to bring attention to that.”

“The tar sands have become the symbol of Canadian inaction on climate change,” said John Bennett, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, another one of the groups that backed the ad. “Avatar is about industrialists wanting to take every last resource and use it without regard for the future, or for those who live nearby. That’s very synonymous with what’s happening with the tar sands.”

Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, boreal forest country – the same forest that is being destroyed by the oil sands development. He has been outspoken about the movie’s message. “Avatar asks us all to be warriors for the Earth,” he said recently. “This beautiful, fragile, miracle of a planet that we have right here is our land. Not ours to own, but ours to defend and protect.”

Oil producers defended their industry, calling the oil sands “responsible energy” as opposed to the ad, which they claimed was “irresponsible”.

“If you look at the history of the oil sands, we have had constructive engagement with the aboriginal people for more than 40 years,” spokesperson Jane Annesley said.

Below are some First Nation responses to the oil industry, from the Sierra Club Canada website:

“We used to be able to drink water directly from Beaver Lake and it didn’t hurt us. We can no longer do that, and we can no longer make a traditional way of life in our home territory because of the tar sands developments. The oil companies can phrase it any way they like but no one has ever not dug for oil because of us and we don’t find the consultation process meaningful.”

Ron Lameman, Beaver Lake Cree Nation

“While First Nations have been in the region for more than 10,000 years, major tarsands companies like Syncrude and Suncor have been leasees in our traditional homelands for only a fraction of that time, 40 years to be exact, I would question CAPP’s take on characterizing us as “their” neighbours. I am a member and former Chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the largest First Nation in the Athabasca tarsands and today our First Nation has no “formal” relationship with Syncrude or Suncor, that after 40 years is not something I would characterize as good corporate responsibility. They actually have both recently been applying pressure to the First Nations in our community of Fort Chipewyan for speaking out publicly about environmental, health and other issues that we have observed with the unrelenting pace of tarsands development in the past few years.

While we do have First Nations members employed in the industry and First Nation owned companies as contractors to tarsands companies, there is a growing concerns by First Nations in the region who question our involvement in the industry.

First Nations especially the Mikisew Cree have recently intervened in several hearings for the multibillion dollar project applications and have recommended a moratorium on many of these applications until many of our issues were mitigated or science has caught up to the multitude of questions. So I would question CAPP and other oil companies suggesting
that we are their “full partners and stakeholders” endorsing their actions.

Having productive relationships with the oil and gas sector and endorsing their licences to operate is far from the truth from a First Nation perspective.”

George Poitras, Mikisiew Cree

“CAPP does not speak for aboriginal people; we will speak for ourselves. More and more of us are saying we don’t want your tar sands, we don’t want your pipelines, and we don’t want your oil tankers.

We aren’t interested in being partners with an industry association that has shown such blatant disregard for our basic human rights. CAPP claims to address our “economic, social and cultural needs,” but when our need is for them to stay out of our territories, it’s only their own economic needs that get addressed.”

David Luggi, Chief of the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council

To take a stand against Canada’s dirty oil industry:

Go to Lovewinter.org to send a message to President Obama to stop the spread of the dirty oil sands oil to the U.S.

Go to www.tarnation.ca to play Tarnation, a video game that lets you blast PM Stephen “Tarper” and Micheal “Oil Rignatieff” with oil, sending them right out of the tar sands – and then send them an email to them encouraging them to change their policy.

For more info check out these links:

Sierra Club Canada – Tar Sands

Indigenous Environmental Network

“Money Spent on Tar Sands Could Decarbonize Western Economies”

Dirty Oil Sands.org

U.S. Campaign to separate oil and state

Norway Outlines Its Climate Cure, Climate Change Response Plan for Ontario Urged, Meanwhile Alberta Tar Sands Growth Unchecked

February 24, 2010 by Christine

In the news this week, those progressive Scandinavians are at it again! Norway has announced one of the world’s toughest climate goals, with a target of 30 – 40% reduced CO2 emissions from 1990 levels by 2020. Unlike recent announcements of a progressive new Canadian environmental policy, which turned out to be a Yes Men hoax (click here or here for more), Norway is serious about pursuing this strategy. The “Climate Cure” plan that has just been released is a 300-page document prepared by Norwegian state agencies to guide deep cuts in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. This policy is in line with the reductions that the best science say are necessary to avert global climate destabilization from greenhouse gas pollution. The economic cost is considered in the plan as well, with Norwegian Environment Minister Erik Solheim saying the modest impact on economic growth predicted will mean that Norway will be as rich by Easter in 2020 than the country otherwise would be at Christmas in 2019. Seems a small price to pay to keep the planet habitable for future generations! To read more about Norway’s announcement, click here.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a blue ribbon panel of experts has produced a 96 page report entitled “Adapting to Climate Change in Ontario” which makes 59 comprehensive recommendations on how to deal with coming climate change-related effects. By this spring, the report states, Ontario should produce a “climate change adaptation action plan,” to guide policy creation in everything from physical infrastructure – such as building better roads and bridges – to agriculture, water, at risk species, and human health. Click here for more.

No announcements from the Canadian government on an environmental plan that will ensure a safe and healthy future for Canadians, though. The federal and Alberta governments’ support for the oil sands, the dirtiest oil in the world, continues unabated. However, there are signs from outside the country that campaigns that target the tar sands and the companies associated with them are having an effect. As discussed earlier on this blog, two Fortune 500 companies – Whole Foods and Bed Bath & Beyond – recently announced they were going to remove the oil sands from their supply chains. Meanwhile in Britain, campaigners are encouraging people to lobby their pension plans if they hold shares in BP or Shell, two major oil sands investors. And in the U.S. a “Love Winter Hate the Oil Sands” campaign is just getting started. It seems these companies will only listen when their bottom line is threatened – sanity, science and long-term planetary security don’t seem to make a difference. A campaign that targets Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) for its bankrolling of the tar sands is also underway – and is having an effect. This week, RBC Chief Operating Officer Barbara Stymiest (yes, that really is her name) and Rainforest Action Network met – click here to read “Getting to Maybe with RBC” or here for a Macleans article about this issue. To send a letter to Royal Bank of Canada CEO Gordon Nixon telling him to stop investing in the tar sands, click here. To join the Facebook group “Ending Investment in Tar Sands” click here.