by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 27, 2012 | Obstruction & Occupation
By Tim Groves / Toronto Media Co-op
Environmental justice protestors temporarily shut down a hearing into a proposal to have tar sand oil piped through Ontario. The hearing took place place in London, Ontario, on Wednesday.
The three day hearing, held by the National Energy Board (NEB), is examining a proposal by Enbridge to reverse the flow of an existing pipeline (Line 9), which currently carries imported overseas oil west. Enbridge wants to instead use the pipeline to bring tar sands oil east. This oil may then be exported to Europe.
After entering the hearing, protestors employed the People’s Mic, where the crowd would echo back whatever was said by a spokesperson in order to project their voices. After a few minutes of the People’s Mic commencing, most other attendees at the hearing exited the room. The NEB hearing was shut down for approximately an hour.
The spokesperson who led the Peoples Mic was arrested and then removed from the room. She was later released with a ticket for trespass.
The protestors raised concerns about the environmental impacts of the Alberta tar sands, the possibility of a spill in Ontario and the lack of prior and informed consent being sought from First Nations in Ontario.
“Six Nations rights already have been violated in this review process,” stated Wes Elliot, a resident of Six Nations in a press release. “Free, prior, and informed consent is not a factor in these hearings.”
Line 9 cuts through the Haldimand Tract, land which was deeded to Six Nations in 1784.
“We also must object to the illegitimate and anti-democratic conduct of the officials who are fast-tracking this review,” said Elliot in the release.
Following the protest, demonstrators held what they dubbed an unofficial “People’s Hearing on the Tar Sands Pipeline.”
“The current framework of the National Energy Board hearings does not allow us to draw connections between tar sands extraction, toxic refineries and upgraders, and various other downstream consequences,” said Taylor Flook a member of Occupy Toronto who attended the event in London. “The People’s Hearing was arranged as a more open forum, where anyone can share any of their concerns about relevant issues.”
“The tar sands industry is attempting to build as many pipelines as they can,” said Flook. “We should not accept the fast-tracking of these projects,” she said. “No tar sands operations should proceed without the consent of everyone who may be impacted.”
As the extraction of tar sands from Alberta has increased, a series of new pipeline projects have emerged to bring the dirty oil to refineries and ports across Canada and the US.
The Harper government has loudly endorsed these projects. But following a series of protests against TransCanada’s XL pipeline, which would send tar sands oil south, President Obama delayed approval for a section of the project that goes through the United States until after US elections, which will take place in November.
Opposition by First Nations and environmentalists to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would bring oil from Alberta to the BC coast for shipment overseas, has garnered attention across Canada.
Protestors worry the Line 9 Reversal could be rushed through before there is time to build awareness and opposition to the pipeline. But they say many of the concerns with the Northern Gateway Pipeline also apply to the Line 9 reversal.
The Line 9 approval process is taking place in two phases. The London hearing deals with bringing oil from Sarnia, Ontario, to Westover, Ontario. The second phase regards oil transport from Westover to Montreal, Quebec.
From The Dominion: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4482
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 10, 2012 | Climate Change
By James Hansen, for the New York Times
Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.
Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.
If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.
The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.
We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.
We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.
President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.
The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.
From The New York Times
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 30, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Steve Hargreaves / CNN
U.S. imports of what environmentalists are calling “dirty oil” are set to triple over the next decade, raising concerns over the environmental impact of extracting it and whether pipelines can safely transport this Canadian oil.
The United States currently imports over half a million barrels a day of bitumen from Canada’s oil sands region, according to the Sierra Club. By 2020, that number is set to grow to over 1.5 million barrels — or nearly 10% of the country’s current consumption.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s overall Canadian oil production numbers are in-line with the Sierra Club’s projected pace.
Bitumen is a heavy, tar-like oil. It needs to be heavily processed in order to be turned into lighter, easier to refine, crude oil. Because bitumen is so thick, to make it more fluid and easier to move by pipeline, it gets diluted with natural gas liquids.
Besides the sheer amount of energy and water needed to process and extract bitumen, environmentalists say it’s more dangerous to move because it’s more corrosive to pipelines than regular crude.
While the industry maintains bitumen is safe, the danger of transporting it is one of the reasons there is so much opposition to the Keystone pipeline expansion, which is supposed to carry it, among other oil products.
“We’ve got all this unconventional crude, and we’re completely unprepared for it,” said Michael Marx, a senior campaign director at the Sierra Club. “It’s definitely more dangerous” than regular oil.
Marx says bitumen is not only more abrasive than traditional crude, it’s 15 to 20 times more acidic.
The Sierra Club, along with other environmental groups, recently put out a report showing that pipelines in Alberta, where bitumen is commonly transported, had 16 times the number of leaks than pipelines in the United States, which generally don’t carry it.
Plus, when bitumen does leak, environmentalists say it’s harder to clean up. Unlike regular oil, they say it’s heavier than water, meaning it will sink to the bottom of lakes, rivers or bays.
“We just don’t have the technical sophistication to vacuum oil off the bottom of a river,” he said.
Bitumen currently comes into this country via a pipeline running from Alberta to Wisconsin and in the original Keystone pipeline that terminates in Illinois.
But Canada is planning on vastly increasing the amount of oil — and bitumen — that it gets out of its oil sands region. To get that oil out, more infrastructure needs to be built.
Along with the proposed Keystone expansion, other ideas call for pipelines to Canada’s West Coast, to the Atlantic Coast through New England, and an expansion of rail lines. All of these routes would pass through sensitive ecological areas.
Canada’s oil industry rejects the “dirty oil” moniker.
They say it is more energy and water intensive than some forms of light crude, but not more so than many of the other heavy oils used in the Untied States from places like Mexico, Venezuela, or even California.
The pipeline industry says transporting bitumen isn’t any more dangerous than transporting regular crude.
They point to other studies that show it’s not any more abrasive or corrosive to pipelines.
Read more from CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/30/news/economy/oil-imports/index.htm
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 3, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Rocky Kistner / Natural Resources Defense Council
In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation rose in protest this week to join a 48-hour hunger strike in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline—and all tar sands pipelines—they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.
On Sunday, dozens of hunger strikers and supporters marched at a rally against tar sands oil mining operations and pipelines in Eagle Butte, S.D., an impoverished community on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, close to TransCanada’s 1,700 mile proposed Keystone XL pipeline route to refineries in the Gulf.
Lakota tribal members and their children drove to a camp in the rugged hills near the Missouri River to fast in solidarity with a hunger strike at the Bella Bella Community School in British Columbia. Children at the school are protesting a plan to ship millions of barrels of oil through a potentially dangerous “Northern Gateway” pipeline that would pipe corrosive tar sands oil from Alberta to giant super tankers navigating Canada’s treacherous Pacific coast.
The massive environmental devastation caused by tar sands mining in Canada and oil company plans to ship it through the U.S. has united Native Americans against proposals to build tar sands pipelines here in the U.S. Here’s how veteran Lakota activist Debra White Plume described it at hunger strike near Eagle Butte:
“This pipeline is about rich people getting richer, this pipeline is about raping Mother Earth and feeding the machine. For us this pipeline is genocide for us and the First Nations people in Canada. I think our native nations will stay opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline and stay opposed to other pipelines that come through here because we understand that water is a gift from our Grandfather, it’s a gift of life. Our leaders understand that and they’re not going to make a deal. It’s a battle for our water, it’s a battle for our children. These are our grandchildren at the hunger strike, we’re really proud of them for going hungry for Mother Earth and for their elders who are doing this.”
Karen Ducheneaux, who lives on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, one of the poorest regions in the country, came up with the hunger strike idea after seeing a powerful video protesting tar sands oil by the children of the Bella Bella Community School in Canada. After talking to her family members and tribal leaders, Ducheneaux decided it was time to act in solidarity with the First Nation peoples of Canada.
“What they’re facing doesn’t just affect them, doesn’t just affect the west coast of Canada or Alberta where the tar sands are. It doesn’t just affect people along the where the pipelines are, it affects the whole world. What they’re doing, poisoning the water and polluting the earth affects all mankind, not just the Lakota or people of South Dakota, but everyone….I’m so proud of the group of school children in Bella Bella and so proud to be able to support them….we can’t drink oil, we’re going to destroy our own ground water and our own ecosystem and then we’re going to be stuck with nothing.”
So on an unusually hot April 1st in the Dakotas, a few dozen hunger-strikers and supporters gathered on family-owned land nestled in the rumpled hills near the Missouri River, land that has been a source of life and nourishment long before settlers invaded their Lakota Sioux territories more than a century ago. Lakota supporters built a sweat lodge and elders sang songs and prayers in support of hunger strikers in Canada over a thousand miles away. They were there to support and protect Mother Earth, a powerful Lakota tradition passed down through the generations, long before oil and mining companies came and polluted their land.
It is a tradition these hunger strikers say they will fight for until there are no Lakota left, a struggle we all should respect and support.
From EcoWatch
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 22, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Toxification
By Indigenous Environmental Network
Native Americans gathering in Cushing, OK today to protest President Obama’s words of praise for the Keystone XL pipeline were forced by local authorities to hold their event in a cage erected in Memorial Park. The protestors were stunned that their community, so long mistreated, would be insulted in such an open manner instead of being given the same freedom of speech expected by all Americans simply for taking a stance consistent with their values.
“A lot of tribal councils and Indian businesses struggle to find a balance between economic resources and our inherited responsibilities for the earth,” said Indian actor and activist Richard Ray Whitman in a statement. “How will the decisions we make now effect coming generations?”
“President Obama is an adopted member of the Crow Tribe, so his fast-tracking a project that will desecrate known sacred sites and artifacts is a real betrayal and disappointment for his Native relatives everywhere,” said Marty Cobenais of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Tar sands is devastating First Nations communities in Canada already and now they want to bring that environmental, health, and social devastation to US tribes.”
The President visited Cushing to stand with executives from TransCanada and throw his support behind a plan to build the southern half of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to move tar sands bitumen and crude oil from Cushing to the Gulf Coast refineries in Texas.
A major concern for Native Americans in Oklahoma, according to spokespeople at the event, is that Keystone XL and the Canadian tar sands mines that would supply it ignore impacts to indigenous communities and their sacred spaces.
“Natives in Canada live downstream from toxic tar sands mines,” said Earl Hatley, “and they are experiencing spikes in colon, liver, blood and rare bile-duct cancers which the Canadian government and oil companies simply ignore. And now they want to pipe these tar sands through the heart of Indian country, bulldozing grave sites and ripping out our heritage.”
The group points to a survey done by the Oklahoma Archeological Survey which found 88 archaeological sites and 34 historic structures that were threatened by Keystone XL. TransCanada was asked to reroute around only a small portion of these, leaving 71 archaeological sites and 22 historic structures at risk. The group says they have asked for a list of these sites and to oversee operations that might threaten sacred burial grounds, but neither request has been honored.
Beyond the threat to their own cultural heritage, the group voiced opposition to the pipeline’s environmental impacts.
“The Ogallala Aquifer is not the only source of water in the plains,” said RoseMary Crawford, Project Manager of the Center for Energy Matters. “Tar sands pipelines have a terrible safety record and leaks are inevitable.”
“We can’t stop global warming with more fossil fuel pipelines,” added Crawford. “The people who voted for this President did so believing he would help us address the global environmental catastrophe that our pollution is creating. He said he would free us from ‘the tyranny of oil.’ Today that campaign promise is being trampled to boost the President’s poll numbers.”
From Indigenous Environmental Network:
