The Have-Nots
David Francis makes about 45K per year as a painter, in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada on Conklin, Alberta, Canada on June 22, 2012. Most people in this oil boom town make over $100,000 per year. He says that he’s just barely making it in a town where a tract home costs $800,000. The local McDonald’s pays $19.00 per hour
By Michael S. Williamson
From that to
this
A Raven on a 60,000 dollar Tar Sands Tire
(and they say the ravens are a problem because they go through the human garbage — it seems to me that they need to work on their definition of terms)
VANCOUVER - First Nations along British Columbia’s north and central coast say it’s unfathomable that Transport Canada approves the use of oil supertankers in the province’s treacherous inlets and marine passages.
Coastal First Nations executive director Art Sterritt said Friday that the department ruling ignores safety issues such as poor weather, human error, and the narrow, unforgiving waterways.
Transport Canada filed its report on Thursday to the regulatory panel weighing Enbridge Inc.’s $5.5-billion proposal to ship Alberta crude to the West Coast by pipeline and export the oil to Asian markets via supertankers loaded in Kitimat.
The report does not identify any regulatory concerns and says residual risks are present in any project.
Sterritt said that’s nonsensical and shocking because a recent study by Coastal First Nations suggested a tanker spill could cost $23 billion, creating catastrophic economic, environmental and cultural damage.
(via B.C. First Nations angry as tankers win bureaucratic nod to ply coastal waters)
A look at the proposed Endbridge Gateway Pipeline — with a focus on a first nations viewpoint.
Despite everything Transport Canada has okayed this plan ship oil out through Kitimat.
This provides a great overview of the problem of the Alberta tar sands oil production in 11 minutes. The story is not a pretty one.
This article is several years old but it tells the important story of the development of the Alberta Tar Sands
The majority of the tar sands, however, can’t be dug up like Appalachian mountaintops. About 80 percent of the reserves lie so deep under the forest that they must be steamed or melted out of the ground with the help of a bewildering array of pumps, pipes, and wells. Engineers call the process in situ (in place) thermal, and it burns up nearly twice as much natural gas as the open-pit mines. The Canadian government recently estimated that it might take 20 nuclear reactors to replace natural gas as a fuel source in tar-sands operations by 2015, and companies are already putting forth proposals to build them.
…
Like most environmental indicators in the tar sands, the river is ailing. Since the 1970s the total summer flow downstream of Fort McMurray has declined by nearly a third. Yet every year the tar-sands operations withdraw 250,000 Olympic-size pools of water from the Athabasca. That’s enough water to service a city of two million people. (On average, it takes three barrels of fresh, potable water to make one barrel of oil from the sands.) One company alone, Syncrude, uses enough water each year — 2.5 trillion gallons — to supply the needs of a third of the residents of Denver.
…
Fred MacDonald, a 72-year-old descendant of Scottish and Cree fur traders, used to hunt duck and moose on Tar Island as a kid. He now lives in a bungalow overlooking the Athabasca River in Fort McKay, an Indian community pretty much surrounded by open-pit mines. Sitting in his kitchen drinking a glass of rat-root juice, an old aboriginal remedy made from a plant favored by muskrats (“It’s good for everything”), MacDonald told me how he loved that island. He recalled the days when Syrian fur traders on the Athabasca exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver pelts. Back in the 1920s and 1930s aboriginal families lived all along the river and frequently enjoyed feasts of rabbit and moose meat. They netted jack fish and pickerel all winter long. “Everyone walked or paddled and the people were healthy.” Now, he said, very few people bother to travel the river much. “There is nothing in the river. It is polluted. You could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can’t.”
MacDonald, like many aboriginal elders, fears the tar sands are draining the surrounding forest of its life-sustaining fens and bogs. “It’s our future source of water and it’s drying.” And he, like Schindler, can see the impact of climate change every season. Rising winter temperatures, he said, have transformed the once clear ice of the Athabasca into slush.
Photograph: Greg Smith/Corbis
A certain powerful North American country has been brazenly meddling in Europe’s affairs, bullying and twisting arms to advance a corporate agenda on the most pressing environmental issue of our time. A phalanx of its lobbyists has descended on European capitals to covertly scheme with oil companies and menace EU parliamentarians who would dare address climate change.
It’s not who you might think … but Canada. If any illusions remained about this country’s behaviour abroad, they should be put to rest. Newly released government memos have exposed a secret war that Canada is waging in Europe to kill clean energy policies and ensure no market closes to the dirtiest crude in the world – the tar sands of Alberta.
The decline of easily accessible oil has set in motion not a shift to renewable energy but a frantic race for the filthiest, hardest-to-extract and most geographically remote fossil fuels. The prize resource are the tar sands: a sludgy bitumen found in northern Alberta whose conversion to oil requires a uniquely destructive, energy-intensive and costly process. To extract the vast deposit – trailing only Saudi Arabia’s in reserves – the industry is stripmining a pristine Boreal forest the size of England, guzzling one of the planet’s largest watersheds, poisoning downstream native communities, and emitting three times more carbon than conventional oil production. The planetary scars from the largest industrial project in history can already be seen from outer space.
The dream of the tar barons scouring new frontiers should be familiar to the British: that the sun never sets on their pipeline empire. Canada’s laboratory has provided an environmentally disastrous but extremely profitable model – which they now want to export everywhere: Congo’s rainforests, Russia’s remote basins, the US desert, Jordan, Venezuela, Madagascar and even Trinidad and Tobago.
But the road to these spoils leads through Europe. While the continent doesn’t import any Canadian crude, the oil giants and their government backers realise a European fuel quality directive that would slap a dirty label on tar sands to promote cleaner transport fuels could set the global standard – and effectively shut the door on Alberta’s exports. “Our fear is that if something happens in the EU and it is spread in other countries … we could have roughly one third of the world’s population subscribing to regulation or legislation that mitigates against our oilsands,” a provincial minister in Alberta said last year. It is also sure to raise the heat on European oil companies to withdraw their enormous and growing investment in tar sands industries.
1. Lobbying As Usual
A series of emails requested by the NGO Friends of the Earth under the Freedom of Information Act shows a warm relationship between Trans Canada’s lobbyist and State Department officials. The New York Times reports that an official at State Department gave “Fourth of July party invitations, subtle coaching and cheerleading, and inside information about Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s meetings” to the Trans Canada lobbyist in Washington. An FOE spokesman claims the emails show “an absolute bias and complicity between the State Department and TransCanada, a company they are supposed to be acting as a regulator and an independent investigator on.”
2. State Department Hires Firm with Trans Canada Connections
The State Department was responsible for conducting Environmental Impact Statements and public hearings in the states where the pipeline would be built to gather public comment. The firm that State hired to conduct the environmental impact process, Cardno Entrix, lists Trans Canada as a client.
3. The Oil Isn’t Staying Here
The State Department is involved in the pipeline approval process because the project is ostensibly a matter of national security. Yet a new report from Oil Change International states that the oil from the pipeline, after being pumped 1,700 miles across North America, would be refined in the U.S. and sold abroad and will do nothing to wean Americans off foreign oil dependence; its primary purpose is to give the Canadian producers easier access to overseas markets via a tax-free trade zone in Port Arthur, Texas. Oil Change International Executive Director Steven Kretzmann states, “An honest assessment shows that rather than serving U.S. interests, Keystone XL serves only the interests of tar sands producers and shippers, and a few Gulf Coast refiners aiming to export the oil.”
U.S. national security depends on weaning the US and other countries off fossil fuel dependence. Caving in to the interests of businesses like Trans Canada and oil refineries is merely delaying the inevitable shock of peak oil and diverting time and resources from the search for truly sustainable energy.
Take Action
A major protest is being planned for November 6 in Washington by Tar Sands Action.
The problem is that the policy makers the world over are paying more attention to the fossil fuel lobbyists than they are to the well being of young people and nature, as my colleagues and I have described in the paper “The Case for Young People and Nature”.
Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.
That’s the point of the present action — to draw attention to the inter-generational injustice of current policies — our children and grandchildren are getting shafted by our well-oiled coal-fired politicians who do not look beyond their next election.
The tar sands verdict will show whether he really intends to move us to clean energy or whether he will instead support going after dirtier and dirtier fuels (tar sands, oil shale, mountaintop removal, long-wall coal mining, hydro-fracking, deep ocean and Arctic exploration, etc.).
I’ve reproduced the Nobel Peace Laureates’ letter to President Obama in full in case you want to read it. It’s not very long actually and is worth reading, as it sums up the Keystone situation quite well.
I’m sure this isn’t the kind of publicity the President wants at the moment…..
September 7, 2011
Dear President Obama,
We — a group of Nobel Peace Laureates — are writing today to ask you to do the right thing for our environment and reject the proposal to build the Keystone XL, a 1700-mile pipeline that would stretch from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast.
It is your decision to make.
The night you were nominated for president, you told the world that under your leadership — and working together — the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet will begin to heal. You spoke of creating a clean energy economy. This is a critical moment to make good on that pledge, and make a lasting contribution to the health and well being of everyone of this planet.
In asking you to make this decision, we recognize the more than 1200 Americans who risked arrest to protest in front of the White House between August 20th and September 3rd. These brave individuals have spoken movingly about experiencing the power of nonviolence in facing authority. They represent millions of people whose lives and livelihoods will be affected by construction and operation of the pipeline in Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
All along its prospective route, the pipeline endangers farms, wildlife and precious water aquifers — including the Ogallala Aquifer, the US’ main source of freshwater for America’s heartland. We are aware that Nebraska’s Governor Dave Heineman — as well as two Nebraska Senators — has urged you to reconsider the pathway of the pipeline. In his letter to you he clearly stated his concern about the threat to this crucial water source for Nebraska’s farmers and ranchers. The aquifer supplies drinking water to two million people in Nebraska and seven other states.
We know that another pipeline that covers some of the same route as the proposed pipeline, and built by the same company proposing to build Keystone XL, already leaked 14 times over its first year of operation.
Like you, we understand that strip-mining and drilling tar sands from under Alberta’s Boreal forests and then transporting thousands of barrels of oil a day from Canada through to Texas will not only hurt people in the US — but will also endanger the entire planet. After the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, the full development of the Alberta tar sands will create the world’s second largest potential source of global warming gases. As NASA climatologist James Hansen has said, this is “essentially game over for the climate.”
There is a better way.
Your rejection of the pipeline provides a tremendous opportunity to begin transition away from our dependence on oil, coal and gas and instead increase investments in renewable energies and energy efficiency.
We urge you to say ‘no’ to the plan proposed by the Canadian-based company TransCanada to build the Keystone XL, and to turn your attention back to supporting renewable sources of energy and clean transportation solutions. This will be your legacy to Americans and the global community: energy that sustains the lives and livelihoods of future generations.
Sincerely,
Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate (1976) - Ireland
Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Laureate (1976) - Ireland
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Laureate (1980) - Argentina
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Laureate (1984) - South Africa
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Laureate (1989) - Tibet
Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Peace Laureate (1992) - Guatemala
José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate (1996) - East Timor
Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Laureate (1997) - USA
Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Laureate (2003) - Iran
(Source: The Huffington Post)
