What are we leaving for future generations?

On the issue of climate change, Canada is failing our global community.  Canadians are failing future generations.  We are also failing ourselves.

Public figures as diverse as Prince Charles and Stephen Hawking have declared climate change the biggest threat to human kind.  A report published earlier this year estimates that even early, relatively subtle, climatic changes cause as many as 400,000 deaths a year, mostly as a result of associated hunger and communicable diseases. 

It should not be surprising that climate change could be responsible for so much death and destruction.  Hurricane Sandy is just the most recent reminder of exactly the type of the damage we can expect.  Hamiltonians and local farmers are sure to remember the strange, early, warm spring followed by a cold snap which devastated so many local fruit tree crops.  Images of dead corn stalks as a result of this hot dry summer should also be fresh in our memory.  Climate change has the ability to diminish our most basic necessities: food, water and shelter.

Many prominent figures in the military industrial complex refer to climate change as a threat multiplier.  Gwynne Dyer, in his book Climate Wars often repeats the chilling mantra that “people always raid before they starve”.  It is no wonder that the United Kingdom’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy has officially made the same declaration we heard from Charles and Hawking. 

More alarming still, Jared Diamond popularized the idea that our unsustainable practices could lead to a collapse of civilization as we know it.  The casualties of such a serious event would be unprecedented.  The truth is that it is impossible to know how climate change will impact human civilization and our biosphere.  All we know is that the risks we are exposing ourselves to are immense.

Our Prime Minister is focused on removing oil from Alberta as quickly as we possibly can at the expense of significant action on climate change.  Canada is repeatedly been given Colossal Fossil awards for being the most obstructionist nation at climate change conferences, like the most recent one in Durban.  We also recently made headlines for lobbying against an international ban on oil subsidies, which tax paying Canadians still provide to the tune of $1.4 billion a year.

Canadians are some of the highest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet per populace, emitting more than a hundred times more emissions than people in undeveloped nations like Bangladesh, who will probably suffer most as a result of climate change. 

As a 29 year old, my generation has often been referred to as the new lost generation.  I wonder how all Canadians, young and old, will be remembered if we continue to contribute so heavily to the problem of climate change.  Surely, our behavior is an insulting tribute to the great generation that won World War II.  Many died for the democracy and freedom we have today and we have the responsibility to put these gifts to good use.  Canadian citizens have a moral duty to confront a problem as immense as climate change.

Please join Hamilton 350 as we fast for 24 hours starting November 23^rd at 8am in an effort to highlight the relationship between climate change and food security.  This is just one small part of the response we, as Canadians, owe our global community.  Visit Hamilton350.org for more information.

Hamilton 350 Blog

Rally October 17th urging Council to Oppose the Line 9 Reversal

Wednesday October 17th, 9:00am
Hamilton City Hall (Main St, between Bay and McNab)
Join us for a half-hour rally before your workday starts

On Wednesday October 17, the General Issues Committee (GIC) of the
Hamilton city council will be receiving a report from their staff about
Enbridge's reversal of their Line 9 pipeline. Line 9 runs through Hamilton
and is being reversed to move Tar Sands oil to eastern Canada, ports on
the Atlantic, and the United States. After the Conservative federal
government cancelled the environmental assessment of this plan (along with
thousands of other EAs), Hamilton city council decided to commission their
own study of the issue.

We are optimistic about the council's decision to study the Line 9
reversal, and we are gathering on the 17th at 9am to ask council to do
everything in their power to oppose the Line 9 reversal and any attempt to
move Tar Sands oil through the Hamilton area. We will rally until about
9:30, then attend the meeting of the GIC to support the speakers calling
on council to oppose the Line 9 reversal. A representative from Enbridge
had been scheduled to address council as well, but after twice changing
the date, they have now backed out all together. This is a continuation of
Enbridge's plan of secrecy and dishonesty, as they refuse to reveal their
full plan for Line 9.

The Tar Sands produces the dirtiest oil in the world – its extraction has
devastated the Athabaska river, and accidents in transporting the toxic
goop have lead to more than a dozen deaths in Michigan, following a
pipeline burst into Michigan's Kalamazoo river. All pipelines spill. If
Tar Sands oil travels down Line 9, this thirty-five year-old pipeline will
experience more frequent leaks of more toxic oil directly into the Beverly
Swamp in the headwaters of the Spencer Creek, Hamilton's largest
watershed.

This dirty inefficient oil also drives the catastrophic climate change,
of which Hamilton got a taste this past summer with the record-breaking
heat and drought. We also call for the Federal government to respect the
sovereignty and treaty rights of Indigenous nations, both in Alberta and
locally. Line 9 crosses the territory of the Haudenosaunee, and in the
spirit of the Two Row wampum treaty, we call on the municipal government
to help see these treaties upheld.

We organize in Hamilton as part of a broader movement to stop the flows of
Tar Sands oil, of the natural gas that fuels its extraction, and the money
that props the industry up. This movement did not begin with Hamilton's
council and it will not end with it. But this is a chance for Hamilton's
government to be on the right side of this issue and to lend their support
to the grassroots struggles that will keep stopping the Line 9 reversal
and the Tar Sands – with or without them.

For updates about this and other events, get on the Hamilton Line 9 mailing
list by writing to hamiltonline9@ecologyfund.net or visit
hamiltonline9.wordpress.com   

Hamilton 350 Blog

Enbridge bails as opposition grows

Canada’s largest pipeline company has withdrawn its request to speak to councillors about planned flow reversal for its 37-year-old Line 9 running across rural Hamilton. But local opposition is growing, fed by the expectation that the pipe will carry diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to foreign markets. Opponents have called a rally at city hall on Wednesday morning and a protest next Sunday at Enbridge Inc’s pipeline hub in rural Flamborough.

A staff report going to the general issues committee on Wednesday says there are dozens of residential wells within a kilometre of the site where Enbridge will be carrying out construction activities near the village of Westover, as well as a Provincially Significant Wetland (PSW), and four city-designated Environmentally Significant Areas (ESAs). The construction activity is expected to employ 30 people for about four months and includes “installation of a short section of pipe”, but the report concludes that the city has no jurisdictional authority over federally-regulated pipelines and that no action is required by councillors.

“Based on the above, staff is satisfied that the National Energy Board has addressed the issues surrounding pipeline safety and emergency response protocol through their approvals process. Since there are no planned impacts to Hamilton’s Environmentally Significant Areas and/or to existing land uses, residents and water supplies as a result of Enbridge’s proposal to reverse the direction of flow within the existing section of pipeline between Sarnia and Westover, it is concluded that there are no foreseeable impacts to the City of Hamilton.”

While Enbridge has been unwilling to reveal what it plans to put through the pipeline, the Globe and Mail and other media have reported that it will carry diluted bitumen (also known as dilbit), an unrefined composite of materials extracted from the Alberta tar sands mixed with chemical solvents to make the heavy viscous material flow. The company is also considering expanding the capacity of Line 9 once it has approval to reverse the flows all the way to Montreal.

The eastern plan is apparently an option to the company’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline across hundreds of lakes and streams in northern British Columbia that is mired in controversy. Moving the unrefined tar sands material in that direction would also involve supertankers traveling through the Great Bear rainforest and other treacherous BC coastal waters.

Opposition to the Ontario flow reversal by Environmental Defence and others has focused on the shift from oil to the much more corrosive dilbit that also requires increases in both temperature and pressure in the pipeline. The staff report, however, makes no mention of dilbit, tar sands or bitumen, referring only to “crude oil” which it notes was transported easterly through the pipeline for many years after it was first constructed in the mid-1970s.

“However, in the 1990s, when off-shore oil from areas such as the North Sea, West Africa and the Middle East was more affordable, Line 9 was reversed to westbound to carry crude oil from the Montreal terminal to Sarnia.”

It was dilbit from the Enbridge pipe that feeds into Line 9 at Sarnia that contaminated over 60 kilometers of Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in July 2010, and sickened dozens of residents when the solvents spread into the local community. The company’s response to the spill has been lambasted by US regulatory authorities and last week the Environmental Protection Agency ordered it to expand a cleanup that has already cost the company over $800 million.

Huffington Post reported that “on the same day that Enbridge told its investors that its tar sands spill and cleanup had made the Kalamazoo River cleaner, EPA ordered the Canadian tar sands pipeline company to resume its cleanup of the Kalamazoo River after finding that submerged oil ‘exists throughout approximately 38 miles of the Kalamazoo’.”

Eight delegations have been approved to speak on the Enbridge report at Wednesday’s general issues committee that begins at 9:30 am in council chambers. They include representatives of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Opponents of shipping tar sands through Hamilton have called a rally prior to the meeting. They point to the cancellation of a federal environmental assessment of the Line 9 flow reversal and ask councillors to oppose the Enbridge project and to help uphold the treaties with indigenous peoples.

“This movement did not begin with Hamilton's council and it will not end with it,” their statement notes. “But this is a chance for Hamilton's government to be on the right side of this issue and to lend their support to the grassroots struggles that will keep stopping the Line 9 reversal and the Tar Sands – with or without them.”

The Hamilton 350 Committee on climate change is also inviting the public to a protest potluck picnic at Enbridge’s Westover hub at noon on Sunday, October 21. Cyclists are invited to ride there from Westdale, leaving at 10 am from My Dog Joe’s Café.

Hamilton 350 Blog

Our leaders fiddle as our planet burns

Have you noticed how the climate scientists keep getting it wrong?

Every prediction seems to come up way short.

The weird weather has come much faster and much weirder than expected. The Arctic ice cap was supposed to last until late in this century but now appears nearly certain to be gone by 2030 or maybe 2020. It hit a record low last week — with three more weeks of melting still expected. Greenland is also showing unprecedented melting, and sea levels are rising much quicker than anticipated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even in its most recent report.

The droughts and extreme rainstorms have even shown up to some extent in Hamilton. Local farmers have been clobbered by a lack of rain, and hundreds of homes were flooded in the July 22 deluge that dumped six inches of rain in three hours on Binbrook and upper Stoney Creek. That was the 18th time in the last 100 months that Hamilton homes have been inundated by storms. All of this was predicted by mainstream climate science — but not so quickly and dramatically. It was supposed to be a problem for our grandchildren, not us.

In hindsight, we should have expected prediction failures. Scientists are super cautious, unwilling to predict until nearly certain. That reluctance is magnified in the IPCC reports where every sentence is negotiated by researchers from over 100 countries under substantial political pressure to be the least disturbing possible.
But this is not news to political decision-makers. It can’t be surprising to an intelligent man like Stephen Harper who seems to have so much personal power over the government of Canada. And it can’t be surprising to our local councillors who have adopted Harper’s targets as their own and refuse to do anything that might cost money to reduce climate change, while being forced to spend millions because of flooding.

The weather events this year — especially the devastating drought that made over half the counties in the United States official disaster zones — are giving us a taste of what has already happened in other parts of the world over the last few years. And all of this is occurring when average planetary temperatures have gone up by only four-fifths of a centigrade degree. The official target is a maximum two degree increase, and the only hope of stopping there is with drastic steps taken almost immediately.

So why are our leaders doing so little? The public may still be unclear because of the confusion-mongering financed by big oil and other fossil fuel corporations to protect their obscene profits, but our governments should know all about that kind of corporate lobbying, and should assume those companies have no more ethics than the tobacco magnates demonstrated in the past.

Have the elites already decided not to act, and instead hope their personal wealth or status will protect them and their loved ones from the worst effects of the climatic catastrophes coming at us? There seems no doubt that the federal Conservative party has decided exporting tar sands bitumen is the top priority.

The United Nations calculates that tens of thousands of people per year are already dying because of climate change and it’s likely that a planet that’s even just two degrees warmer will mean death for tens of millions more. What’s worse is the growing likelihood that vicious feedback loops will drive temperatures beyond the control of humans. A four-degree increase is expected to convert most of the planet’s most productive areas to deserts.

There don’t appear to be any Winston Churchills in Canada or the U.S. who will lead us back from the brink. That leaves it up to us — not just to drastically reduce our personal emissions (even if that’s cancelled out by the tar sands expansion) but to force a fundamental change in direction.

The Occupy movement provides an example. Until that began, the gross differences in wealth were ignored. It didn’t take many people in the street to make inequality a public issue, although it will take a lot more to actually force change.

But at this point, only a handful are in the streets demanding real climate action. That has to change — very fast!

Hamilton 350 Blog

Who should pay for climate disasters?

The weird weather that all but wiped out this year’s apple crop is a disaster for local farmers and a setback for those of us who try to support them by buying local fruit whenever possible. But when are we going to start really sharing the pain of climate change and doing something serious about it?

In the last 100 months, we’ve had 17 rain storms severe enough to flood homes in Hamilton. Nearly half of those storms have been only supposed to occur once every 50 years. Most of the costs have been borne by those whose properties and possessions have been flooded.

It’s good to see local councillors seeking more information about flood dangers arising from more development of rural Stoney Creek, but it should be obvious by now that paving over agricultural land and natural areas will inevitably make things worse.

Beyond our community, the damages from extreme weather are far more severe. In the couple of weeks alone, 350 homes were destroyed in the Colorado wildfires and more than 40,000 people evacuated, while18 people were killed and two million left without electricity on the east coast as the United States suffered through a massive heat wave that set or tied over 2,100 high temperatures records.

Overseas flooding and drought clearly connected with climate change are killing tens of thousands every year according to the United Nations.

Everyone knows this is the ugly face of global climate change, but incredibly, the media barely mention this – apparently frightened that some Conservative ideologue will denounce them. Instead, the weather forecasters talk about the “new normal” and the “unusually warm winter/spring/summer.”

And our politicians aren’t much better – especially the bunch in charge in Ottawa who only seem to work for the big oil companies, and who ‘combat’ climate change by firing or silencing the federal scientists gathering evidence about it.

So have we decided – without any official admitting it – that we’re not going to do anything and just hope that it won’t get really bad?

The fossil fuel corporations make billions digging out tar sands, coal, natural gas and other causes of the problem, but no one dares demand that they at least be forced to pay the bills generated by their mad rush for profits. On the contrary, the Harper government continues to provide over a billion dollars a year in subsidies, and eliminates any environmental laws that might slow them down.

There’s a rumour out there that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet.

Too bad.

Hamilton 350 Blog

How do we stop Bill C-38?

 

Tar sands pipeline through Hamilton

Hamilton is being tossed into the middle of the latest tar sands battle, as Canada’s largest pipeline company shifts its attention to Ontario in response to the growing opposition to the proposed Northern Gateway route through British Columbia. The first step is a proposal to reverse the flows in the Enbridge Inc pipeline from Hamilton to Sarnia so it can carry diluted tar sands bitumen (dilbit) toward the east coast, and the hearing on that application opens this week in London.

The village of Westover in Flamborough is the hub of several Enbridge pipelines including line 9 which connects Sarnia to Montreal, the parallel line 7 between Westover and Sarnia, line 10 from Westover to New York State, and line 11 from Westover to the ExxonMobil refinery in Nanticoke. The portion of line 9 between Westover and Sarnia is the focus of the National Energy Board (NEB) hearings scheduled for May 23-25 in London’s Hilton Hotel.

That 37-year old pipeline currently carries imported crude oil west to Sarnia. Enbridge is seeking permission to reverse that flow in a move widely reported to be part of a strategy to ship tar sands products to Portland Maine for export to global markets. In a potentially related move, Enbridge is also seeking to double the capacity of a pipeline running across Michigan into Sarnia – the same line that ruptured in 2010, dumping more than 800,000 gallons of dilbit into the Kalamazoo River and costing the company over $700 million. 

The implications of routing the highly corrosive “dilbit” through Ontario has caught the attention of the London Free Press which announced Friday that “Enbridge pipeline battle comes close to home” and noted the Westover-Sarnia pipe goes under the city’s Thames River. It is also being challenged by Environmental Defence, the Pembina Institute and Equiterre, as well as a Cambridge community newspaper.

If approved, Enbridge says line 9 will transport between 50,000 and 90,000 barrels per day, but acknowledges that it is capable of carrying “beyond 150,000 bpd”. The flow reversal will mean higher pressures in the pipeline and some modifications to the Westover hub and a nearby densitometer located close to the intersection of Kirkwall Road and the 6th Concession of Flamborough.

An environmental assessment document submitted by Enbridge notes the presence of two environmentally significant areas and a provincially significant wetland near the Westover installations, as well as portions of both Spencer Creek and Fairchild Creek. However, crossings of major rivers such as the Thames, Grand and St Clair are likely of greater concern, as well as the prospect of tar sands refining in Ontario near the Great Lakes such as at the Nanticoke facility of ExxonMobil.

National and international attention has been focused on two other proposed routes for export of dilbit – the Keystone XL pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Gateway pipeline across Alberta and northern BC to Kitimat on the Pacific coast. Both have generated massive opposition – with the Keystone XL blocked at least temporarily by environmental concerns in the United States, and the Northern Gateway facing unequivocal refusals by multiple First Nations to allow use of their lands.

The latter route would cross more than 1000 lakes and rivers on the way to Kitimat, but the use of supertankers to carry the bitumen to China and other markets is particularly controversial. Their passageway would be through the Great Bear Rainforest and other narrow and often storm-wracked coastal waters, and the memory (and the on-going ecological effects) of the disastrous Exxon Valdez crash in 1989 loom large in the debate.

Alberta media, on the other hand, are pointing out that the pipeline connections to the east coast of the continent are already in place and thus could prove easier for Enbridge to win the required approvals. That approval process is also about to get much easier as the federal government pushes through an omnibus budget implementation bill that transfers final decision making from the NEB to the Harper cabinet.

The omnibus bill – labelled the Environmental Destruction Act by Green Party leader Elizabeth May – will change more than 70 pieces of legislation in a single swoop, including a complete re-write of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act that makes all assessments an option of the federal Minister of the Environment. The bill also eliminates habitat protection features of the Fisheries Act, shifts the start of the old age pension to age 67, rewrites unemployment insurance rules, and eliminates long-standing institutions such as the National Council on Welfare and the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

Hamliton 350 Blog