subsidies – 350orbust

It’s Time To Enter a Twelve-Step Program For Our Oil Addiction

August 16, 2011 by CPP

This was first posted on July 28, 2010. Unfortunately, it remains just as accurate a year later, despite the promise of the leaders at the 2009 Pittsburgh G8 to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. President Obama is expected to make a decision on whether or not a second Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil to refineries in Texas, can go ahead. People are gathering in Washington DC over the next few weeks to send Obama a clear message – President Obama, just say no to releasing the carbon bomb of the tar sands!

Is anybody else getting tired of being told that we have to continue on the destructive oil-dependent path we’re currently on? There seems to be a large and vocal part of the population that believes because this is way we’ve been doing things for the last 100 years or so, give or take a few decades, it is the only possible path to maintain our standard of living. The truth is, unless we take a sharp turn and start living and doing business sustainably, our standard of living is going to come crashing abruptly and painfully down. You just can’t live indefinitely like there are 5 more planets like earth, like we currently do in North America, when in fact there is only this one.

If you aren’t convinced that oil is a dirty fuel after the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, one that is getting filthier all the time due to our growing dependence on the Alberta tar sands, go to Wikipedia.org’s “list of oil spills” page. It is a reverse-chronological list of oil spills that are currently happening, and that have happened since the early 1900s. Hundreds of thousands of tons of oil have been spilled in 2010 already (remember we’re only halfway through the year) by seven spills around the globe.

And yet, here we are in 2010, and governments around the world are using our taxpayer money to subsidize Big Oil and Gas to the tune of $500 billion a year! As I wrote previously, we are all subsidizing Big Oil’s war on our grandchildren!

Yet, it turns out, it didn’t have to be this way. Henry Ford’s Model T came right from the factory, in 1911, with flex-fuel capacity; it could run on alcohol and gas. And in the 1930s and 1940s, Henry Ford developed a car body that was made from hemp fiber that also ran on hemp biodiesel. According to the YouTube video clip that features it, the resulting material was “lighter than steel, but could withstand ten times the impact without denting”. It seems clear that Henry Ford did encourage hemp cultivation to use as a fuel and as a manufacturing material. This was before hemp growing was banned in the U.S. in a strange twist in their war on drugs (hemp has no hallucinogenic properties although it is related to the marijuana plant).

Here are some videos that demonstrate how we could have gone down a different path to fueling and making our vehicles, and how, if we act quickly enough, we might still be able to change direction:

Ford’s first flex-fuel car, the 1911 Model T:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qDYoEupI28&feature=player_embedded]

Archival footage of Ford’s 1941 hemp car (the quality is quite poor, but it gives you the general idea):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rgDyEO_8cI]

Take Action and become a fossil fuel abolitionist:

Participate or organize a “Moving Planet” event on Sept. 24th. Initiated by 350.org, people all around the world will be rallying to demand solutions to the climate crisis, and a move beyond fossil fuels.

Join or start a Citizens Climate Lobby group in your community. CCL is focused on creating the political will for a stable climate, and empowering individuals to have breakthroughs in exercising their personal and political power.

For more ideas, check out my Action Not Apathy page.

More links:

B.C. Carbon Tax a Winner: The shift has been an economic boon for the province’s taxpayers and is projected to lower greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent

100 days of oil: Gulf life will never be the same again

Oil Pipeline Leak Pollutes Major Michigan River

Big Oil Lines Its Pockets With Our Money While Canadian Seniors and Students Pay The Price

April 5, 2011 by CPP

Every year, $1.4 Billion of Canadian tax payer’s money goes to line the pockets of the richest companies in the world. That is $1.4 billion a year that is not going towards creating good, green jobs. It is more dollars taken out of public services like health care and education, and more dollars that aren’t going into making post-secondary education affordable. In fact, $1.4 billion could pay off two-thirds of all students loans taken out last year.

In 2009, while attending the G8 conference, Stephen Harper pledged to end these oil subsidies. Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten that promise. Let’s remind him of it on May 2nd.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00iEvfsJL50]

More links:

Fuelling the Problem

In Harper Budget, Big Oil Gets Subsidized While Environmental Monitoring Is Gutted

March 11, 2011 by CPP

Cameron Fenton from the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition developed this helpful diagram to illustrate the dramatic way the Harper government is shifting taxpayer’s money. In the upside-down world of our current federal government, funding is slashed to programs that benefit all Canadians, like environmental monitoring. Instead, this government prefers to keep padding the pockets of their corporate pals, and to carry on a concerted campaign to turn Canada’s criminal justice system into a clone of the dysfunctional America one by increasing spending on jails by over $500 million. This, at a time when statistics show the Canadian crime rate is dropping, and after this government cut funding to rehabilitative programs like prison farms.

Here’s Cameron’s diagram, reposted with permission. Take a good look at it, fellow Canadians. This is our future if we continue to have Harper as our Prime Minister:

Cameron put it this way in his article on Media Co-op:

In early March 2011, the federal government of Canada announced that it would be cutting over $10 billion dollars in spending in the upcoming 2011 annual budget. This includes massive cuts to environmental monitoring bodies like Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada. Also included in these cuts is a $2.6 billion cut to employment insurance recipients.

At the same time, spending for the national security apparatus is ballooning, with the military expenditures projected to cross the $20 billion mark this year. The March announcement also included a 10% increase in spending across the board for public safety departments and national security agencies, building on the $7.9 billion forecast to be spent last year. This includes a 21%, or $521.6, million increase in spending on prisons and a 14%, or $227 million, increase in spending at Canadian Border Services.

All the while, the government is also giving away $1.4 billion each year to oil and gas companies, the majority of which goes directly into the Alberta tar sands.

Check out this new video from Citizens Climate Lobby (Toronto) on the same topic:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0UVyJBu-sU]

More links:

Info-graphic: Parts per million: Big Oil Gets Subsidized While Environmental Monitoring is Gutted

Citizens Climate Lobby: Canada

Climate Action Network Canada: End Fossil Fuel Tax Breaks

Canada’s Military Spending Highest Since World War II

What Will It Take For Us to Say “NO” to Corporate Environmental Disasters?

October 8, 2010 by Christine

Do we really want corporations calling the shots, dictating government policy for the rest of us? Last January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that corporations are persons, entitled by the Constitution to buy elections and run the government. Every year, globally, Big Oil gets $500 billion dollars a year of our (taxpayer’s) money, to encourage us to keep digging up old buried dead things, at great risk to people and the environment as evidenced most recently by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and Canada’s toxic tar sands, and of course climate change. Those same corporations make billions of dollars in profits from selling us all that oil, and use that money to muddy the public debate on climate change, about which there is scientific certainty – the only question that climate scientists debate is how fast the “tipping point” into catastrophic global climate instability is going to occur.

This week, we have the pictures out of Hungary as a mile-wide tidal wave of toxic sludge from an aluminium factory reaches the Danube river, one of Europe’s key waterways and the source of drinking water for many. At least four people were killed and three are missing, and over 120 have been hospitalized, after the unstoppable torrent inundated homes, swept cars off roads, burned people through their clothes and emptied 35 million cubic feet of toxic waste onto several nearby towns. USA Today reports:

Meanwhile, residents wearing pants coated with red mud cleared the muck away from their homes with snow shovels.

Kati Holtzer said the sludge smashed through the door of her home in Kolontar and trapped her and her 3-year-old boy in a churning flood of acrid waste.

She saved her son by placing him on a sofa that was floating in the muck. She called her husband, Balazs, who was working in Austria, to say goodbye.

“We’re going to die,” she told him, chest-deep in sludge.

We all need to take responsibility for demanding more stringent environmental standards, whether in Hungary or in the Alberta tar sands. There are other ways of doing business – let’s vote with our pocketbooks as well as our ballots, and demand change. We need jobs, but not at the cost of our future, and that of our children. As Franke James puts it, “Maybe the truth is without a healthy environment, there is no economy.”

This video shows how fast, and overwhelming, the toxic wave was as the reservoir holding in the waste burst. This was a farming community, but experts are saying there is little chance that farming can be resumed because of the permanent change in soil PH, as well as chemicals left behind by the deluge.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEMWh6EjJoY]

Was Our Oil Dependency Manufactured?

July 28, 2010 by Christine

Is anybody else getting tired of being told that we have to continue on the destructive oil-dependent path we’re currently on? There seems to be a large and vocal part of the population that believes because this is way we’ve been doing things for the last 100 years or so, give or take a few decades, that this is the only possible path to maintain our standard of living. The truth is, unless we take a sharp turn and start living and doing business sustainably, our standard of living is going to come crashing abruptly and painfully down. You just can’t live like there are 5 more planets like earth, like we currently do in North America, when in fact there is only this one.

If you aren’t convinced yet that oil is a dirty fuel after the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, one that is getting filthier all the time due to our growing dependence on the Alberta tar sands, go to Wikipedia.org’s “list of oil spills” page. It is a reverse-chronological list of oil spills that are currently happening, and that have happened since the early 1900s. Hundreds of thousands of tons of oil have been spilled in 2010 already (remember we’re only halfway through the year) by seven spills around the globe.

Here are some videos that demonstrate how we could have gone down a different path to fueling and making our vehicles, and how, if we act quickly enough, we might still be able to change direction:

Ford’s first flex-fuel car, the 1911 Model T:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qDYoEupI28&feature=player_embedded]

Archival footage of Ford’s 1941 hemp car (the quality is quite poor, but it gives you the general idea):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rgDyEO_8cI]

Activists Demand End to Fossil Fuel Subsidies, Call For Clean Energy Now

June 19, 2010 by Christine

Thursday June 17 was a Global Day of Action in the lead-up to the G8 meetings in Muskoka (June25-26) and the G20 summit in Toronto (June 26-27). Around the world, activists called on world leaders to invest in the future by tackling climate change, fighting poverty and inequality, and rethinking the global economy.

From the tcktcktck website:

Toronto, Canada is the site of the G20 and played host to the main action of the day. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Chair of the G8 & G20 Summits, has said that ‘climate is a sideshow’. With that in mind, event organizers decided to make Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper the star of his own sideshow.

In a parade through Toronto’s bustling financial district, “Prime Minister Harper” led a group of his favourite banker buddies in a series of joyful dances as they handed out billions of Canada’s brand-new ‘billion’ dollar bills. In their wake, they left a messy crowd of oil-drenched citizens being cleaned up by taxpayers. This peaceful and vibrant anchor event was designed to send a clear message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper: Stop dancing around the issues and put climate change on the agenda of the G8/G20.

Here’s a video of the Toronto event:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o16KbNaOSUE]

We All Subsidize Big Oil’s War On Our Grandchildren

April 28, 2010 by Christine

Corporate Knights is “the” Canadian magazine for responsible business, and calls for clean capitalism. Jim Harris, author, environmentalist, and former leader of the Green Party of Canada, recently discussed our addiction to oil, and demonstrated how governments around the world subsidize Big Oil and Gas companies to the tune of $500 billion a year!! It turns out that we are all paying to destroy our grandchildren’s future, while these corporations rake in huge profits. BP, for example, whose profits in the first quarter of 2010 were $5.6 billion, is the same company whose oil rig sunk in the Gulf of Mexico last week, and which is pouring 42,000 gallons of oil per day into the ocean. This growing slick is expected to hit the vulnerable coast of Louisiana this weekend.

BP is just one example of how oil companies rake in monstrous profits while making us, our oceans, and our planet sick. Seven to the top 20 most profitable corporations worldwide were oil companies in 2008 – and their cumulative profit roughly equaled the other 13 firms added together. The question we should all be asking ourselves is why are global governments subsidizing the most profitable corporations in the world?

In contrast, subsidies to green energy sources are only 6-9 cents on the dollar when compared to oil and gas subsidies.

Click here to view Harris’s special presentation on Corporate Knights web site. Also available on the website is a word doc giving you all the links and documentation from the presentation. This is an incredible resource for those working for urgent action on climate change. Jim also invites your feedback – you can connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.com.

Meanwhile, there are signs of change. 100,000 people rallied on the Mall in Washington D.C. last Sunday to call for action on climate change and a green energy economy.

For more on this story, click here or here.