March for Climate Change

On Sunday, September 21st, a huge crowd will march through the middle of Manhattan. It will almost certainly be the largest rally about climate change in human history, and one of the largest political protests in many years in New York. More than 1,000 groups are coordinating the march -- environmental justice groups, faith groups, labor groups -- which means there’s no one policy ask. Instead, it’s designed to serve as a loud and pointed reminder to our leaders, gathering that week at the United Nations to discuss global warming, that the next great movement of the planet’s citizens centers on our survival and their pathetic inaction.

As a few of the march’s organizers, though, we can give some sense of why we, at least, are marching, words we think represent many of those who will gather at Columbus Circle for the walk through midtown Manhattan.

We march because the world has left the Holocene behind: scientists tell us that we’ve already raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree Celsius, and are on track for four or five by century’s end. We march because Hurricane Sandy filled the New York City subway system with salt water, reminding us that even one of the most powerful cities in the world is already vulnerable to slowly rising ocean levels.

We march because we know that climate change affects everyone, but its impacts are not equally felt: those who have contributed the least to causing the crisis are hit hardest, here and around the world. Communities on the frontlines of global warming are already paying a heavy price, in some cases losing the very land on which they live. This isn’t just about polar bears any more.

But since polar bears can’t march, we march for them, too, and for the rest of creation now poised on the verge of what biologists say will be the planet’s sixth great extinction event, one unequaled since the last time a huge asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago.

And we march for generations yet to come, our children, grandchildren, and their children, whose lives will be systematically impoverished and degraded. It’s the first time one century has wrecked the prospects of the millennia to come, and it makes us mad enough to march.

We march with hope, too. We see a few great examples around the world of how quickly we could make the transition to renewable energy. We know that if there were days this summer when Germany generated nearly 75% of its power from renewable sources of energy, the rest of us could, too -- especially in poorer nations around the equator that desperately need more energy. And we know that labor-intensive renewables would provide far more jobs than capital-intensive coal, gas, and oil.

And we march with some frustration: why haven’t our societies responded to 25 years of dire warnings from scientists? We’re not naïve; we know that the fossil fuel industry is the 1% of the 1%. But sometimes we think we shouldn’t have to march. If our system worked the way it should, the world would long ago have taken the obvious actions economists and policy gurus have recommended -- from taxing carbon to reflect the damage it causes to funding a massive World War II-scale transition to clean energy.

Marching is not all, or even most, of what we do. We advocate; we work to install solar panels; we push for sustainable transit. We know, though, that history shows marching is usually required, that reason rarely prevails on its own. (And we know that sometimes even marching isn’t enough; we’ve been to jail and we’ll likely be back.)

We’re tired of winning the argument and losing the fight. And so we march. We march for the beaches and the barrios. We march for summers when the cool breeze still comes down in the evening. We march because Exxon spends $100 million every day looking for more hydrocarbons, even though scientists tell us we already have far more in our reserves than we can safely burn. We march for those too weak from dengue fever and malaria to make the journey. We march because California has lost 63 trillion gallons of groundwater to the fierce drought that won’t end, and because the glaciers at the roof of Asia are disappearing. We march because researchers told the world in April that the West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt “irrevocably”; Greenland’s ice shield may soon follow suit; and the waters from those, as rising seas, will sooner or later drown the world’s coastlines and many of its great cities.

We don’t march because there’s any guarantee it will work. If you were a betting person, perhaps you’d say we have only modest hope of beating the financial might of the oil and gas barons and the governments in their thrall. It’s obviously too late to stop global warming entirely, but not too late to slow it down -- and it’s not too late, either, to simply pay witness to what we’re losing, a world of great beauty and complexity and stability that has nurtured humanity for thousands of years.

There’s a world to march for -- and a future, too. The only real question is why anyone wouldn’t march.

Eddie Bautista is executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. LaTonya Crisp-Sauray is the recording secretary for the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org and a TomDispatch regular.

Lac Mégantic a grim warning for Hamilton

Federal rail safety deregulation means city has to look after itself

By Ken Stone

Since the Lac Mégantic tragedy, Hamiltonians have grown increasingly worried about crude oil shipments by rail. And well they should! The tankers that exploded in Lac Mégantic may have passed through Hamilton. They were apparently filled with fracked oil from North Dakota, which contain highly flammable chemicals. Trains probably also carry bitumen from the Alberta tarsands through Hamilton. If bitumen-carrying tankers derailed and ruptured close to Hamilton watercourses, bitumen could sink to the bottom, poisoning our water, as occurred when Enbridge's pipeline ruptured in Kalamazoo, Mich. A billion dollars and four years later, it still has not been completely removed.

Regrettably, shipping dirty fossil fuels from fracking and from the tarsands is growing enormously by pipeline and by rail. There's been a 28,000 per cent increase in volumes of oil shipped by rail during the past five years. The Canadian Railway Association forecasted about 140,000 oil tankers to be shipped in Canada in 2013, up from only 500 carloads in 2009. And railroads plan to continue this exponential expansion.

Triggering this vast increase is the reckless plan to quintuple the output of the tarsands and to introduce fracking all across North America. These plans to exploit dirty sources of oil are motivated by profit-seeking corporations owned mainly by foreigners. Yet, the projects have the solid backing of the Harper government. Ordinary Canadians are left to live with the negative economic, social, health and environmental costs of this rapid plundering of Canada's finite natural resources.

For the Hamilton 350 Committee, the question of rail versus pipelines for shipping oil misses the point. We hold that two-thirds of all fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. Climate change is happening and it's already hurting Hamilton with extreme weather, such as floods and ice storms. Unless Canadians reduce their use of fossil fuels, we're heading for ecological disaster.

But why should city councillors be concerned about rail safety during budget deliberations? The answer is liability. In Lac Mégantic, the MM&A Railway had $25 million in insurance and declared bankruptcy when it became clear the cleanup would cost hundreds of millions. What steps has Hamilton taken to avoid financial catastrophe should an oil-bearing train derail in Dundas and ignite? Has Hamilton done its due diligence on defects in hundreds of aging DOT-111 tankers passing daily through Dundas? These tankers make up 70 per cent of North America's rail-tanker fleet. Yet, their propensity to rupture is well-documented. CP Rail's CEO Hunter Harrison recently declared the DOT-111's should be "removed from the rails tomorrow." Let's take him up on that call. Unionized workers at National Steel Car, where many were built, would be working three shifts and a lot of overtime for years to come to retrofit or replace them.

What about other safety factors such as better track maintenance, slower train speeds, in-cab cameras, and automatic stopping systems? Since the Lac Mégantic inferno, Transport Canada has instituted a weak hazardous-materials reporting regulation. The railways themselves instituted some voluntary new safety rules.

However, weak and voluntary measures won't adequately protect Hamilton from an oil tanker spill. Why? Because the Lac Mégantic tragedy was the direct result of deregulation of rail transport. The federal government has, for decades, been cutting resources to Transport Canada while placing increasing reliance on railways to police themselves. This move is akin to placing the fox in charge of the proverbial chicken coop. For example, just weeks before the Lac Mégantic catastrophe, the Canadian Railway Association formally asked Transport Minister Lisa Raitt to permit them to stop railway inspectors from examining brake, axle, wheel and car components. The request was quietly withdrawn after the tragedy. The regulatory downsizing of train crews was also a factor in the catastrophe. The MM&A train that destroyed Lac Mégantic's core had a one-person crew, a far cry from decades ago when trains had much larger crews plus a caboose for them to stay in.

Because of lax federal regulations, city councillors must budget staff time to investigate what measures to protect itself from train wrecks a municipality can undertake on its own or in concert with other municipalities.

But even the best safety rules for trains (and pipelines) can't prevent all accidents, since people make mistakes. The best long-term protection against oil spills from trains (and pipelines) is to reduce and eventually eliminate the shipment of such hazardous materials.

This brief was originally delivered by Ken Stone to the General Issues Committee of Hamilton city council during its 2014 budget deliberations, on behalf of the Hamilton 350 Committee.

Hamilton Spectator, March 6th, 2014

National Energy Board Decision on Line 9

It has been announced that the National Energy Board (NEB) decision on Line 9 will be released late Thursday afternoon (March 6, 2014). In response, the Hamilton 350 Committee has called a rally for noon Friday, anticipating that approval will be granted to Enbridge’s controversial plan to expand the flows in the Sarnia to Montreal pipeline and include bitumen in the products being shipped through it.

It’s already clear that the NEB decision won’t address many of our most significant concerns including the effects on climate change of increasing both the extraction and transport of fossil fuels, and the economic impacts on manufacturing of additional oil exports.

In the Line 9 review and hearings, the NEB categorically refused to even consider “the environmental and socio-economic effects associated with upstream activities, the development of oil [tar] sands, or the downstream use of the oil transported by the pipeline.”

So the climatic effects of the expansion of flows in Line 9 have not been considered by the NEB. The climatic and other environmental impacts of expansion of the Alberta tar sands to supply the bitumen being sent through Line 9 have also not been examined.

And while the current federal government claims to be focused on the economy, not even the economic impacts of exporting more oil were examined. The increasing reliance of Canada on the export of fossil fuels has already done great damage to manufacturing, especially in Ontario and Quebec, by driving up the exchange rate of Canadian currency and making export of manufactured goods less competitive.

It is clear that we must wean our society off fossil fuels. The minimum first step is stop making things worse. When you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. Therefore, at minimum, no increase in the extraction or transportation of fossil fuels should be contemplated.

The science is beyond doubt. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has confirmed that human burning of fossil fuels is the main cause of global climate change. Great harm has already resulted and even the best case scenarios promise much greater damage ahead. We are very likely seeing some of that harm here in Hamilton in the form of extreme events such as torrential rain, ice storms, flooding and other increasingly unusual and disruptive weather.

The NEB is incapable or unwilling to deal with these key issues. In addition, its requirement that individuals and organizations apply in writing to even hope to obtain permission to submit written reviews is clearly undemocratic.

The transparency of this so-called regulatory agency must also be questioned after it quietly approved expanded flow in an Enbridge pipeline parallel to Line 9 without even requiring notification of the affected First Nations or municipalities including Hamilton, or the individuals across whose private lands the pipeline runs.

Join us on Friday, March 7, 2014, at 12-noon at Hamilton City Hall for a Line 9 rally.

Hamilton 350 Blog