Minister tells the Government side; Hamilton should challenge him.
Federal Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver is speaking to the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce on March 30th. His talk is described as “about the Federal Budget and the future of Canada's oil sands and associated manufacturing opportunities here in Ontario.”
Minister Oliver’s views and those of the federal Government are well known. They promote development of the tar sands as one of the main routes to economic growth in Canada. But there is another view that must be heard before deciding if the rewards of the tar sands exploitation are worth the cost.
The impact of developing Alberta’s tar sands is of national importance, so clearly there is some responsibility of civil society in Hamilton to ask if the growth and jobs created are justified. The City of Hamilton has for a long time promoted the “triple bottom line” as a way to view the merits of any proposal. It asks that we always view development in three ways – economic, social and environmental. The “triple bottom line” is also not a short term view, but asks what sort of City we want for future generations – more recently we’ve adopted “the best place to raise a child” which happily reflects a long term view.
So let’s look at the tar sands through the triple lens and for the long term - for generations to come - for Canada and the rest of the world.
The economic impact of the tar sands
The cost of inaction on climate change in terms of lost GDP outweighs the costs of taking action to cut emissions. Yet the tar sands exploitation, far from helping meet any emissions goal, is making it harder to reach. We are trading off current GDP growth for much larger GDP losses in the future. Losses that come from drought reduced agricultural production, pine beetle devastated forests, poorer fishing yields and flood and storm damaged homes and property. Some pundits state that Canada will benefit from warmer weather, without discussing the disruption that comes from accelerated climate change and the broader impacts – which will affect global GDP. In these days of globalization, we are not immune to this – as we can see when Honda North America had to shut production last year due to floods in Thailand. Worse still would be the cost of the “climate wars” anticipated by Gwynne Dyer.
We’ve seen our Premier state that our “petro-dollar” is driving manufacturing away from Ontario. And where are the economic benefits really going? To large foreign owned oil companies who are mining the oil. Not to supply Canadians but to supply the gas guzzling life style of our neighbours to the south.
The social impact of the tar sands
It is clear that the exploitation of the tar sands has led to debate, much of it unpleasant. Locally, nationally and globally we see communities and governments who not only disagree (which is democratic) but resort to finger pointing, unjust accusations and sometimes unethical tactics.
Tell the whole story on the Tar Sands
At the local level the tar sands are having significant negative impacts on nearby communities – there’s evidence that mining the Athabasca tar sands has increased cancer causing levels in the environment downstream on the Athabasca River. Health Canada has asserted that “climate change is expected to increase risks to the health of Canadians through many pathways – the food they eat, the air they breathe, the water they drink”. So as the tar sands impact our climate, so they impact our health. Nationally we see the breakdown in civil discussion. We see the spat between Premier Dalton McGuinty and Alberta’s Premier Alison Redford in discussing the rising value of our dollar due to oil exports and its impact on our manufacturing economy. We see respected national organizations being tarred as “radical groups” when challenging the Northern Gateway pipeline.
Canada’s international standing has also been harmed. We lost the respect of many countries globally when we backed out of the Kyoto commitment at last December’s Durban Summit. For this we earned yet another “Fossil of the Year” award, for the fifth year running.
The environmental impact of the tar sands
No one, not even our Minister of Natural Resources, has claimed that the tar sands are good for the environment. They are affecting an area of 140,000 sq km in the primary boreal forest of Canada, an area the size of New York State or England. Due to oil sands operations, the Alberta landscape will never look the same again, as the forest is blasted away into huge opencast mines and vast tailing ponds filled with toxic waste water. Promises to reclaim the forests to their original state are unlikely to be possible. Canada is home to half the remaining boreal forest in the world, which contains 11% of the global terrestrial carbon sinks. In order to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, the International Panel on Climate Change has said that global emissions must peak by 2015 and fall by at least 80% compared with 1990 levels by 2050. Yet Canada’s emissions have grown by over 30% since 1990 and we have no real plan to bring them down by enough to come close to what is needed.
The production of oil sands is also water intensive, averaging three barrels of water to produce a single barrel of oil. The primary source of water is the Athabasca River, which is already down to critical levels as extraction from the river increases. Only 5-10 percent of the water is returned to the river. The rest is too toxic and is stored in tailing ponds so poisonous that birds who land there die. The huge volumes mean that enormous amounts of toxic wastewater are produced. Individual tailing ponds are up to 50 sq km in size and (so large they) can be seen from space.
What’s a job worth?
So when Minister Oliver stands up to promote the tar sands, lets also ask questions about the true triple bottom line, not just for today’s slightly bruised economy but also for the world of our children and grandchildren. Who will truly benefit from oil sands development?
Hamilton 350 Blog
Friday, 6 April 2012
Tuesday, 20 March 2012
The Ethical Path for Canada – Stop the Tar Sands, its Pipelines and Tankers
Atmospheric greenhouse gases are already past the maximum safe level and significant global climate change is obviously underway. By far the most rapidly growing source of greenhouse gases in Canada is from the exploitation of the tar sands (renamed the oil sands to make them sound less dirty that they are).
Therefore, the ethical responsibility of Canadians is to stop the growth of tar sands exploitation and work to reduce it. That is the single largest contribution that Canadians can make to slow global climate change and hopefully avoiding or minimizing its worst effects.
The tar sands are the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and already exceed – on a daily basis – one million cars each driving 500 km.
Nearly all tar sands products are exported, primarily to the United States. To increase these exports, efforts are underway to establish additional pipelines to carry the bitumen to foreign refineries.
One of these is the Keystone XL pipeline to American refineries on the Gulf of Mexico – a scheme that has at least temporarily been blocked by the US president under pressure from Americans worried about climate change and about the pollution danger from ruptured pipelines.
The second major pipeline scheme is Northern Gateway, an 1100-km pipeline across northern Alberta and British Columbia to the port of Kitimat where the bitumen would be loaded onto 225 oil super tankers each year. These mega ships would then have to make their way through the narrow channels and fjords of the Great Bear Rainforest, and along the pristine Pacific coastline. Their likely main destinations are China and the United States. As outraged First Nations and other BC residents are loudly arguing, it is only a matter of time before one of these tankers crashes and devastates the BC coastline.
The Pacific coast has already experienced the worst oil tanker spill in history – the grounding of the Exxon Valdez on March 24, 1989, that dumped between 11 and 32 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound on the Alaska coast. That spill spread over 2100 km of coastline and 28,000 square-km of ocean and its effects are still being felt more than twenty years later. The immediate effects included the estimated deaths of 100,000 to as many as 250,000 seabirds, at least 2,800 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbour seals, 247 bald eagles, and 22 orcas, as well as the destruction of billions of salmon and herring eggs.
This must not be allowed to happen again.
The Northern Gateway pipeline must not proceed and oil tanker traffic on the BC coastline must not be permitted.
These supertankers are longer than the height of the Empire State building (more than a third of a kilometre).
The effort to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline and the tanker route is now recognized as the most significant environmental action in Canada.
The Hamilton 350 Committee fully supports this effort and is taking solidarity actions in Hamilton, including on March 24 – the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster.
We also understand that the export of tar sands bitumen has very serious consequences for employment in Hamilton. As recognized by Premier McGuinty, Ontario manufacturing has been heavily damaged by Canada’s growing dependence on oil exports. The Canadian dollar has become a petrodollar – closely tracking the price of oil as it has climbed dramatically alongside the ramping up of tar sands exploitation. The resulting high dollar has hurt manufacturing exports and resulted in tens of thousands of lost jobs, particularly in southern Ontario.
Hamilton has another connection to Enbridge Inc, the company pushing the Northern Gateway pipeline. One of their pipeline hubs is in the village of Westover, in Flamborough. Enbridge is the largest transporter of crude oil in Canada (over 15,000 miles of pipeline) and exports 65 percent of western Canadian oil and bitumen. Enbridge is currently proposing to reverse flows in the 200 km Sarnia-Westover pipeline to allow shipping of tar sands oil to the ExxonMobil refinery near Nanticoke. This is a first step in making eastern Canadian refineries accessible to tar sands products, and another alternative to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines.
Other Hamilton connections to the tar sands include four major gas station groups operating locally that are owned by tar sands companies – Esso, Petro-Canada, Shell and Husky.
Hamilton 350 Blog
Friday, 17 February 2012
Corporations have no use for borders
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.
Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.
Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.
“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.
- Chris Hedges
But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”
The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.
Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.
Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”
No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.
“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”
Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.
This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.
- Chris Hedges
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Time to fight back
Dear friends in Canada,
I've been visiting Canada all my life, but I'm a little worried about my upcoming trip.
In late March I'm supposed to come to Vancouver to give a couple of talks. But now I read that Joe Oliver, your country's Minister of Natural Resources, is condemning "environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block" Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Pacific.
I think he's talking about people like me.
So I’m pushing back a bit, and I need your help. Let’s tell Joe Oliver that preventing the combustion of the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet isn’t “radical” -- it’s exactly the opposite. It’s rational. It’s responsible. And it’s just plain right.
Click here to sign the petition to Prime Minister Harper and Joe Oliver, and help show that Canadians everywhere are committed to stopping the oil sands.
Here’s the thing: I've spent much of the last year helping rally opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline from the oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico. I was arrested outside the White House in August, and emceed the demonstration that brought thousands of people to circle the White House in November. And just yesterday, I helped lead a crew of hundreds of "climate referees" to blow whistle on the influence that Big Oil has over our democracy. But this fight knows no borders, which brings me back to my concern about my trip to Canada in March.
When I come to British Columbia, I'll urge everyone I meet to join a growing movement standing in solidarity with First Nations Peoples across Canada who oppose Enbridge's Gateway project. Since a majority of Canadians, according to the polls, also oppose the pipeline, I'll be in good company. But Oliver, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the organizers of the “Ethical Oil” campaign don't want any outside voices. As the latter explained on its website, "It's our pipeline. Our country. Our jobs. And our decision."
Fair enough. But you know something? The atmosphere belongs to all of us. There's not some wall at the 49th parallel that separates Canada's air from everyone else’s. Since the oil sands is the second biggest source of carbon on the planet, that makes their development everyone's business. As NASA's James Hansen, the planet's premier climatologist, put it recently, if you heavily develop the oil sands, it's "essentially game over for the climate." That's why I'm doing everything I can do build this movement -- and that's why I need your help to unite a groundswell of activists in Canada.
Click here to add your name to the petition saying you're ready to take a stand to stop the oil sands -- if we can get 10,000 Canadians to sign on, we’ll stage a high-profile delivery that Joe Oliver, Prime Minister Harper, and the oil companies won’t be able to ignore.
It's much easier for Ottawa to pretend that anyone who raises doubts about the oil sands are ideological extremists who hate Canada, much easier to demonize the scientists and citizens who ask uncomfortable questions. You can judge for yourself, but I don't think I'm some kind of extremist. I'm a Methodist Sunday School teacher who happened to write the first book for a general audience on climate change.
To me, the extremists are the ones running the oil companies, because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere; those of us who want to keep the planet a little like the one we were born on seem more like conservatives.
I know I don't hate Canada. I spent five years living in Toronto as a young boy, while my father worked for Business Week magazine. I remember with great fondness Mrs. Reesor, Miss Beer, Miss Conway and Miss Wright, who taught my first four grades. I remember rooting for Davey Keon, the Toronto Maple Leafs centre, and I remember waiting with great impatience each summer for the CNE to open.
In later years I've traveled the country stem to stern, written about fishermen struggling in Newfoundland, hiked the mountains above Jasper, skied the trails of the Gatineau. The Canada I remember was open to the world: It welcomed the rest of the planet to Expo 67, it hosted the Olympics, it helped crack the Great Wall of China.
I don't know how that changed, but my guess is that the wealth of the oil-sands had something to do with it. Canada's government doesn't want to hear from the rest of the world because paying attention to their legitimate fears might cost it some money.
To judge from Oliver's nasty little letter, those vast pits of bitumen across Alberta aren't just dirtying the sky, they're starting to do some damage to the country's soul.
Help start to undo that damage, and sign on today.
Onwards,
Bill McKibben for 350.org
P.S. If we're going to have any shot at stopping the wholesale burning of the oil sands, we're going to need a massive movement of Canadians willing to take a stand. Please help spread the word on Twitter and share it on Facebook -- it only takes a couple of clicks. Many thanks in advance.
MORE LINKS AND INFO
- Oil Lobby Lagging Reality - Financial Post
- An open letter from Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver - The Globe and Mail
It's time to fight back. Prime Minister Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver are waging a dirty campaign to discredit anyone who is opposed to burning the oil sands or building Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipeline.
Sign the petition to help build a groundswell of Canadians who are ready to stop the oil sands:
Sign the Petition
www.350.org/canadian-groundswell
I've been visiting Canada all my life, but I'm a little worried about my upcoming trip.
In late March I'm supposed to come to Vancouver to give a couple of talks. But now I read that Joe Oliver, your country's Minister of Natural Resources, is condemning "environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block" Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Pacific.
I think he's talking about people like me.
So I’m pushing back a bit, and I need your help. Let’s tell Joe Oliver that preventing the combustion of the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet isn’t “radical” -- it’s exactly the opposite. It’s rational. It’s responsible. And it’s just plain right.
Click here to sign the petition to Prime Minister Harper and Joe Oliver, and help show that Canadians everywhere are committed to stopping the oil sands.
Here’s the thing: I've spent much of the last year helping rally opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline from the oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico. I was arrested outside the White House in August, and emceed the demonstration that brought thousands of people to circle the White House in November. And just yesterday, I helped lead a crew of hundreds of "climate referees" to blow whistle on the influence that Big Oil has over our democracy. But this fight knows no borders, which brings me back to my concern about my trip to Canada in March.
When I come to British Columbia, I'll urge everyone I meet to join a growing movement standing in solidarity with First Nations Peoples across Canada who oppose Enbridge's Gateway project. Since a majority of Canadians, according to the polls, also oppose the pipeline, I'll be in good company. But Oliver, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the organizers of the “Ethical Oil” campaign don't want any outside voices. As the latter explained on its website, "It's our pipeline. Our country. Our jobs. And our decision."
Fair enough. But you know something? The atmosphere belongs to all of us. There's not some wall at the 49th parallel that separates Canada's air from everyone else’s. Since the oil sands is the second biggest source of carbon on the planet, that makes their development everyone's business. As NASA's James Hansen, the planet's premier climatologist, put it recently, if you heavily develop the oil sands, it's "essentially game over for the climate." That's why I'm doing everything I can do build this movement -- and that's why I need your help to unite a groundswell of activists in Canada.
Click here to add your name to the petition saying you're ready to take a stand to stop the oil sands -- if we can get 10,000 Canadians to sign on, we’ll stage a high-profile delivery that Joe Oliver, Prime Minister Harper, and the oil companies won’t be able to ignore.
It's much easier for Ottawa to pretend that anyone who raises doubts about the oil sands are ideological extremists who hate Canada, much easier to demonize the scientists and citizens who ask uncomfortable questions. You can judge for yourself, but I don't think I'm some kind of extremist. I'm a Methodist Sunday School teacher who happened to write the first book for a general audience on climate change.
To me, the extremists are the ones running the oil companies, because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere; those of us who want to keep the planet a little like the one we were born on seem more like conservatives.
I know I don't hate Canada. I spent five years living in Toronto as a young boy, while my father worked for Business Week magazine. I remember with great fondness Mrs. Reesor, Miss Beer, Miss Conway and Miss Wright, who taught my first four grades. I remember rooting for Davey Keon, the Toronto Maple Leafs centre, and I remember waiting with great impatience each summer for the CNE to open.
In later years I've traveled the country stem to stern, written about fishermen struggling in Newfoundland, hiked the mountains above Jasper, skied the trails of the Gatineau. The Canada I remember was open to the world: It welcomed the rest of the planet to Expo 67, it hosted the Olympics, it helped crack the Great Wall of China.
I don't know how that changed, but my guess is that the wealth of the oil-sands had something to do with it. Canada's government doesn't want to hear from the rest of the world because paying attention to their legitimate fears might cost it some money.
To judge from Oliver's nasty little letter, those vast pits of bitumen across Alberta aren't just dirtying the sky, they're starting to do some damage to the country's soul.
Help start to undo that damage, and sign on today.
Onwards,
Bill McKibben for 350.org
P.S. If we're going to have any shot at stopping the wholesale burning of the oil sands, we're going to need a massive movement of Canadians willing to take a stand. Please help spread the word on Twitter and share it on Facebook -- it only takes a couple of clicks. Many thanks in advance.
MORE LINKS AND INFO
- Oil Lobby Lagging Reality - Financial Post
- An open letter from Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver - The Globe and Mail
It's time to fight back. Prime Minister Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver are waging a dirty campaign to discredit anyone who is opposed to burning the oil sands or building Enbridge's Northern Gateway Pipeline.
Sign the petition to help build a groundswell of Canadians who are ready to stop the oil sands:
Sign the Petition
www.350.org/canadian-groundswell
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Pipe Dream to Nowhere
The good news for now is that on January 18, 2012, US President Barack Obama rejected the application from TransCanada Pipelines to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Texas. But now is not the time to celebrate. There is still another battle being fought right here at home in Canada, the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline planned to stretch across Alberta and British Columbia to the Pacific coast.
On January 9, 2012, federal Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail.
On January 18, 2012, Joe Oliver spoke on CBC Radio, The Current, with host Anna Maria Tremonti defending his government's position on the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
What Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver had to say reeks with the stench of dirty oil for big profits for Big Oil companies.
"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth."
"These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest."
Joe Oliver states that "radical" environmental groups are delaying the review process.
In the minds of Joe Oliver, Stephen Harper and his government, the Northern Gate Pipeline is a "done deal". The review process is a hindrance to corporate progress. Why have a review process for the public to tell the government it is dead wrong? The review process is there as an opportunity for both sides to voice their arguments. It is the Harper government that wants to curtail the due process in order to accelerate its own agenda.
"In many cases, these projects would create thousands upon thousands of jobs for Canadians, yet they can take years to get started due to the slow, complex and cumbersome federal Government approval process."
What jobs? All of these so called jobs are temporary, transient jobs. Once the pipeline is built, these jobs will be gone. The jobs and legacy that will be left behind will be the ones to clean up the ongoing pollution, contaminated water system, environmental damage and escalating damage to human health and well-being.
"For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country. We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies."
Nonsense. You cannot fool the public all the time. The Northern Gateway Pipeline and the entire Alberta Tar-sands project is all about big profits for Big Oil Companies. We give away non-renewable resources to Asian countries for what?. We supply Chinese manufacturing industry with cheap energy in exchange for cheap plastic goods that end up in landfill after less than a year of usage. We are not creating jobs in Canada. No, we are exporting jobs to China.
The Keystone XL Pipeline is the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet. The Northern Gateway Pipeline is the Harper government's backup fuse.
We have already released a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere from the Saudi Arabian oil deposits. If we release the carbon from the Alberta Tar-sands you might as well kiss your kids goodbye. The best place for fossil fuel is to leave it in the ground.
Dr. Jim Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA has said, "Einstein said that to think and not act is a crime."
Now is the time for all of us to act and stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
Hamilton 350 Blog
On January 9, 2012, federal Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail.
On January 18, 2012, Joe Oliver spoke on CBC Radio, The Current, with host Anna Maria Tremonti defending his government's position on the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
What Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver had to say reeks with the stench of dirty oil for big profits for Big Oil companies.
"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth."
"These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest."
Joe Oliver states that "radical" environmental groups are delaying the review process.
In the minds of Joe Oliver, Stephen Harper and his government, the Northern Gate Pipeline is a "done deal". The review process is a hindrance to corporate progress. Why have a review process for the public to tell the government it is dead wrong? The review process is there as an opportunity for both sides to voice their arguments. It is the Harper government that wants to curtail the due process in order to accelerate its own agenda.
"In many cases, these projects would create thousands upon thousands of jobs for Canadians, yet they can take years to get started due to the slow, complex and cumbersome federal Government approval process."
What jobs? All of these so called jobs are temporary, transient jobs. Once the pipeline is built, these jobs will be gone. The jobs and legacy that will be left behind will be the ones to clean up the ongoing pollution, contaminated water system, environmental damage and escalating damage to human health and well-being.
"For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country. We must expand our trade with the fast growing Asian economies."
Nonsense. You cannot fool the public all the time. The Northern Gateway Pipeline and the entire Alberta Tar-sands project is all about big profits for Big Oil Companies. We give away non-renewable resources to Asian countries for what?. We supply Chinese manufacturing industry with cheap energy in exchange for cheap plastic goods that end up in landfill after less than a year of usage. We are not creating jobs in Canada. No, we are exporting jobs to China.
The Keystone XL Pipeline is the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet. The Northern Gateway Pipeline is the Harper government's backup fuse.
We have already released a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere from the Saudi Arabian oil deposits. If we release the carbon from the Alberta Tar-sands you might as well kiss your kids goodbye. The best place for fossil fuel is to leave it in the ground.
Dr. Jim Hansen, head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA has said, "Einstein said that to think and not act is a crime."
Now is the time for all of us to act and stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
Hamilton 350 Blog
Wednesday, 11 January 2012
Oil in Eden: The Battle to Protect Canada's Pacific Coast
Stop the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines Project
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