The Dominion - tar sands

"Green Bitumen?!"

Sandra — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:39:24 +0000

Nuclear reactors in the tar sands

SASKATOON—What do you get when you cross a nuclear reactor with a hydraulic shovel-full of tar sands? The answer, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, is "Green Bitumen."

The brainchild of the nuclear industry, this novel concept of deploying small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to replace natural gas is being sold as a solution to the tar sands' reputation for producing the largest carbon footprint on the planet. Nuclear is being touted as an environmentally friendly, "clean" energy source for the extraction process. But in order to make that claim, one must overlook the substantial carbon emissions in the nuclear "fuel cycle," from mining to ultimate disposal; the risks of weapons proliferation; the toxic radioactive footprint; and the legacy of highly radioactive waste left behind for many generations to come.

Several key players have expressed interest in deploying nuclear reactors in the tar sands, including: Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), a federal Crown corporation; SNC Lavalin Nuclear and its subsidiary Candu Energy Inc.; Bruce Power, one of Ontario's largest nuclear power generators and its parent company Cameco, the world's largest supplier of uranium; Toshiba, builder of the Fukushima Daiichi 3 power plant; Westinghouse; Aitel; Gen 4 (formerly Hyperion); and General Atomics. The governments of Canada, Alberta and Saskatchewan have at times all actively promoted this agenda. Also involved is the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a major US Department of Energy nuclear research facility.

The nuclear industry, government and academia are pitching "Green Bitumen" to the tar sands industry and anyone else who will listen. Dr. Warren Bell, founding president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, sees wide and grave implications for the environment and public health should this message resonate with its target audience.

"The federal and provincial governments are intent on tying the tar sands to nuclear power. Their forlorn hope is that the putative 'greenness' of the latter will counteract the overwhelming 'blackness' of the former," Dr. Bell told The Dominion.

Nuclear reactors have been proposed for three different functions in the tar sands. They could produce high-pressure steam to heat up the underground deposits, inducing bitumen flow from Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) mines. They could supply electricity to the mines. And they could generate electricity to produce hydrogen from water. The hydrogen is used to "upgrade" bitumen into a product similar to conventional crude oil.

But attention is currently focused principally on high pressure steam production. Single-mine electricity requirements are too small to justify reactor purchase, and current hydrogen production methods—from natural gas—are much cheaper. Since the high reactor temperatures required for high pressure steam production exclude conventional designs, the nuclear industry will look to universities for taxpayer-subsidized research and development based on as-yet unproven, "fourth generation" SMR designs.

A reactor would serve one tar sands mining complex, producing at most 30,000 barrels/day; a 375MW-thermal reactor would provide sufficient steam. The same size of reactor would be rated at about 150MW if used to generate electricity, with the other 225MW lost to the atmosphere. For comparison, modern full-size reactors generate 1000 to 1500MW.

The first sign of a concerted effort towards nuclear reactors in the tar sands came in 2006, when the Alberta Energy Research Institute, the energy-technology arm of the provincial government, announced plans to participate in a study with the industry to define nuclear options for the tar sands. This was followed by a private presentation by AECL and Energy Alberta Corporation—a company later linked to Ontario's Bruce Power—to the provincial Conservative caucus in 2007. Two days later, the Alberta Conservative convention passed a resolution to explore using nuclear power plants to assist oil sands development.

In 2008, the provincial government established the Alberta Nuclear Power Expert Panel to study the proposals. Three of its four members were drawn from the oil and nuclear industries. In 2007, with support from their federal counterparts, provincial government officials had already entered into discussions with the Idaho National Laboratory and had reached an agreement to study ways to use nuclear energy in Alberta's oil and gas industry.

The Peace River Environmental Society and other concerned citizens began an intensive public campaign to resist Bruce Power’s application to build a large-scale nuclear reactor in Peace River country, in north-western Alberta. They argued that the application and review process was riddled with a lack of transparency and integrity, undermining its credibility.

"It's a sad commentary on our society when government institutions meant to protect and inform us become puppets of the industries that harm us. Their obstruction of the truth compromised the best interests of Albertans for the benefit of an industry that has created massive debt and contamination for Canadians for the past forty years," Peace River anti-nuclear activist Pat McNamara told The Dominion in an interview.

Faced with effective public opposition, Bruce Power finally withdrew its application in December 2011. But by then the focus had already moved on to Saskatchewan.

Even before the election of his Saskatchewan Party government in 2007, Brad Wall had decided to embrace a nuclear future. "Small reactor technology is coming on fast and may present an opportunity for our province to develop our oil sands in an environmentally responsible way as the new technology produces much-needed steam as well as energy," Wall said in May 2007, six months before his election as Premier, according to a Saskatchewan Party Caucus news release. In 2008, Bruce Power made a pitch to SaskPower, a provincial Crown corporation, extolling the benefits of a large-scale nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan, with the potential to export electricity to the Alberta tar sands and beyond.

The Uranium Development Partnership, a Saskatchewan review panel comprising university and industry representatives, was keen on moving the nuclear agenda forward. Its report with 20 recommendations to "revitalize and capture growth opportunities across the uranium value chain" was released in April 2009 and followed by a public consultation process over the summer months. Just as had happened in Alberta, the Saskatchewan government had already signed an agreement with the Idaho National Laboratory, in March 2009. According to a Saskatchewan government news release, the Memorandum of Understanding would provide "a mechanism for the government and INL to consider research and demonstration projects on a variety of energy sources and resources, including uranium, nuclear energy, heavy oil, oil shale and oil sands."

Public reaction and opposition to the nuclear proposals was swift. The Saskatchewan government ultimately had to retreat from the Bruce Power proposal, but then pursued a different strategy from Alberta. Public funds were made available for nuclear research and development at the University of Saskatchewan. Largely outside public purview, and in close collaboration with the University administration, the Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation (CCNI) was established in 2011 with $30 million of government seed money, as was reported in Briarpatch earlier this year. In the CCNI Business Framework, the government establishes that CCNI must meet expectations for nuclear industry enhancement over the next seven years. In a linked move, the Hitachi business group was also funded to conduct "research into the design and feasibility of small reactor technologies," according to a 2011 Saskatchewan government news release.

In the short-term, nuclear reactors cannot compete with natural gas in the tar sands, but there is much dispute over the extent of gas reserves, adding uncertainty to plans for rapid gas-fuelled tar sands expansion. Industry experts worry that by 2030 there might not be sufficient natural gas to fulfil requirements, according to a 2006 Oil Sands Experts Group Workshop report by Len Flint. Studies continue to explore just when nuclear might become a viable option.

Irrespective of the economics, environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk told The Dominion that using nuclear power to produce bitumen is an absurd plan. "It's an insult to basic energetics and thermodynamics," he said.

This is not the nuclear industry's only target. In Saskatchewan, rapid, minimally regulated expansion of the oil, gas and potash industries will massively increase electricity consumption. SaskPower forecasts an 83 per cent increase in heavy industry's consumption by 2019, with 3750MW of new generating capacity required by 2033, citing nuclear as a long-term option, post-2023. SaskPower's grid management methodology would favour smaller (200 to 300MW), modular applications of existing reactor types. Hitachi has proposed to adapt a small conventional reactor design under the Saskatchewan agreement.

It is also important to recognize that the conventional power industry—nuclear, fossil fuels, pipelines and electricity—is becoming increasingly integrated. Along with Cameco and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust, TransCanada Corporation is a one-third owner of Bruce Power. Its proposed Keystone XL pipeline represents an important synchronicity of investment between oil and nuclear expansion. SNC Lavalin is already active in the tar sands, and dovetailing that business with their Candu nuclear interests could be a next step. SNC Lavalin now also owns AltaLink, the private electrical company operating most of Alberta’s electrical grid. Planned and existing tie lines into Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Montana will enhance that export capacity.

Some argue that the Western Energy Corridor proposal, designed to export electricity across the border into the United States, is an even bigger opportunity for nuclear expansion in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This explains the keen interest of the Idaho National Laboratory in collaborating with government and industry in Canada. INL sees potential for nuclear reactors in western Canada to fulfil future U.S. energy demand. It is not, however, clear how any nuclear reactor could be built without public subsidy.

But the tar sands, perched atop the federal agenda, remain a much-desired prize. SMRs constitute one of very few technologies that tar sands corporations can use to misleadingly promise a smaller future carbon footprint. Even if ultimately non-viable, the argument serves to promote continued rapid expansion of tar sands extraction.

While European countries such as Denmark and Germany are increasingly moving to a renewables-based future, few North American utility and grid management companies are working to overcome the technical challenges involved in making that transition. Unless this changes, many regions are left with a choice between coal, gas and nuclear. The high greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels provide the nuclear industry with an opportunity to promote itself and revive its flagging fortunes despite its prohibitively high price tags.

David Geary, an anti-nuclear activist in Saskatchewan, says there can be no "Green Bitumen" in an environmentally sustainable future.

"Nuclear energy is not clean or green – it uses up huge amounts of fresh water, routinely spews out numerous pollutants and carcinogens into the air and water, and leaves behind a legacy of highly toxic, long-lived wastes," he told The Dominion.

Time will tell whether the organized struggles against well-funded vested interests in western Canada will overcome the proposed publicly-subsidized proliferation of small nuclear reactors in the tar sands or anywhere else. The battle between truly sustainable energy options and the "Green Bitumen" of the conventional energy industry continues.

D'Arcy Hande is a retired archivist and historian, living in Saskatoon. Dr Mark Bigland-Pritchard is a Saskatoon-based applied physicist working as a sustainable energy and green building consultant.

Green Bitumen?!

Flawed Process, Flawed Project

dawn — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:17:31 +0000

Controversy flows on the Northern Gateway pipeline and Canada’s oil economy

VANCOUVER—Since January, the federal Joint Review Panel (JRP) has been touring Alberta and BC, accepting public statements on the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway project. The controversial pipeline would carry tar sands bitumen and chemical condensate from Alberta to the BC coast.

Although some observers are encouraged by the JRP and opportunity for open dialogue on the pipeline, many First Nations, legal experts and environmentalists say the review process and the project itself are deeply flawed.

"We think there's significant problems with the way the federal government has carried out its consultation," said Josh Paterson, legal counsel with West Coast Environmental Law.

"The JRP process itself has no authority to look at the impacts on First Nations rights and title that would be caused by this project. The federal government still has the duty to consult with First Nations regardless of what this panel does, and so far they haven’t shown that they're willing to have very serious discussions about the Enbridge issue or the impacts on rights and title."

If the pipeline is approved, Paterson predicts there will be legal challenges from multiple First Nations, who have already stated they would contest the federal government's failure to carry out constitutionally-required consultations. Paterson also said that those cases will likely go to the Supreme Court of Canada, although it's hard to predict how the court would rule.

There has been a record number of registrants to give oral statements to the JRP, more than 4,000, and a strong negative response against the pipeline in many communities. Nevertheless, the Canadian government has openly, and some say undemocratically, favoured the project during the regulatory process, calling it "in the national interest."

Paterson notes that the Harper government is attempting to give the federal Cabinet the final say on all future pipeline projects, instead of the National Energy Board (NEB). Currently, the JRP is considered an independent body and offers a recommendation to the NEB, which then rules on whether or not the project is in the public interest. The NEB is an independent federal agency; its funding comes from government, but 90% of costs recovered from industry.

Canada's regulatory process is already heavily influenced by industry, critics say, and giving Cabinet members the final say on projects rejected by the NEB puts more power into the hands of industry-friendly politicians, rather than an independent third party.

The proposed pipeline and resulting increase in oil tanker traffic on the west coast, along with a "streamlined" environmental review process, has experts declaring that a broad new discussion is needed on industry's relationship with government.

"Environmental Law is really being gutted and environmental protections... are just being erased in order to accelerate approvals of pipeline projects like Enbridge and we think that's really problematic," said Paterson. "We think that’s going to result in a legacy of poor decisions being made and that's going to affect Canadians well into the future."

Resource exploitation by large corporations on Canadian soil is nothing new and has been around since the country was founded, including the operations of the Hudson's Bay and North West companies. Environmental groups are saying the fight is more important than ever, with politicians pandering to Asian and other markets to sell Canada’s resources, while failing to deal with a number of fundamental issues.

"Obviously this is a pretty large-scale fight," said Ben West, campaigner for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. "We're talking about some of the wealthiest corporations in the history of industrial civilization. Increasingly we've seen our leaders from Canada... going to Asia and trying to make the case that this is a safe place to invest [in the pipeline and other resource industries] and to a certain extent I really think that's the nature of this conversation."

West says recent attacks from Conservatives against environmental organizations and the labeling of concerned citizens as "radicals" shows the current government feels threatened by those beginning to think beyond the oil economy.

"To me it’s a sign of desperation and a clinging to maintain the status quo," said West. "The big question that I think we're all going to need to deal with is: what does a different type of economy look like? Canada's economy is very much based around oil at the moment but that can't last forever."

West notes that while the Canadian government appears unconcerned about voices against the project, support is growing. Recently, several First Nations participated in theYinka Dene Alliance (YDA) train journey that ended at the Enbridge AGM in Toronto. The trip raised awareness and protested against the pipeline in a number of cities.

The JRP was slated to hear oral statements until March 2013 and make their recommendation in the fall, but the timeline and review process may soon be changed by aspects of the parliamentary budget bill, C-38.

Trevor Kehoe is a journalist from Calgary, now based in Vancouver.

The Yinka Dene Alliance

Plan to Pipe Tar Sands to East Coast Protested

dawn — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:59:40 +0000

Activists interrupt National Energy Board's hearing on Enbridge's proposal to reverse flow of Line 9 pipe

TORONTO—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 oil east. However activists are concerned that this will allow Enbridge to bring tar sands to the east coast for export 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.

Tim Groves is an investigative journalist and regular contributor to the Toronto Media Co-op, where the original version of this article appeared.

Protest against Line 9 reversal

African Activists Blast Unconventional Extraction

Tim McSorley — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:28:32 +0000

Tar sands highlighted in lead up to UN climate summit in South Africa

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA—In Durban this week, you're blinded by green. From billboards to uniforms, it's impossible to miss that this South African city is hosting the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

One would think you could not get any further from the northern hinterlands of the Alberta's Athabasca watershed. But in a city filled with palm trees and tens of thousands of delegates engaging in another round of high-level climate negotiations, environmental and community organizers from across Africa, the Middle East and North America came together over northern Alberta's tar sands and similar projects around the world.

“There's a lot of development right now globally around tar sands, oil shale, and other extraction projects,” said Oliver Meth, a Durban environmental activist and one of the organizers of Everyone's Downstream 5 (EDS).

Held for the past four years in Edmonton, Alberta, the annual conference was established to explicitly focus on the Alberta tar sands, both its impact on downstream communities directly affected by the project and its broader ramifications. It has gradually grown, and this year made the leap to a new location in order to build broader links with international communities, especially many African communities which are now seeing tar sands and other unconventional extraction projects beginning in their regions.

Presenters from areas including Congo-Brazzaville, Madgascar, Israel, Uganda and South Africa were all present to share the struggles they are facing against growing threats to human health and the environment, including wildlife, plant life and potable water.

While the diversity of participants pointed to the degree to which people are growing concerned, tar sands and unconventional oil extraction, and the specific issues they present, are relatively new to Africa and to environmental activists across the country. “We need to build more awareness about these projects,” Meth said. “Not everybody talks to each other.”

Clearly there are major differences from community to community, but many people echoed concerns heard in Canada for nearly a decade, as the Alberta tar sands has grown and its environmental impact has become more clear.

“If the extraction of 40 tons of conventional oil has not led us to economic development, it's clear that tar sands, which have led to negative impacts in Canada, and which are our best and only example we can look to, won't do so either,” said Christian Mounzeo, president of Engagement for Peace and Human Rights from Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo.

Since 2008, Italian corporation ENI has been developing a massive energy production undertaking, including palm oil plantations, natural gas and a major tar sands extraction project. Two months ago, the company announced it would be proceeding from the exploratory to extraction phase. But even though not a drop of tar sands crude has been extracted yet, there are already growing concerns, Mounzeo said.

The company has not been forthright on how an environmental impact assessment will be carried out, he said, and communities haven't been provided even the most basic information about the project itself or been involved in public consultations.

“There is a problem of access to information and public participation,” he said.

Such concerns are similar to the concerns expressed by many Indigenous communities in Canada, who have long called for the right to free, prior and informed consent before such major extraction projects take place on their lands, regardless of whether the project focuses on tar sands, conventional oil or mining.

Other activists from across Africa echoed similar concerns. They also discussed questions around government corruption, political instability and how to make trans-national companies—which often benefit from low tax rates, government corruption and the ability to work through a revolving door of subsidiaries—accountable for their actions.

In Uganda, environmental activists have been trying since 2000 to hold oil extraction companies accountable for environmental devastation, human rights abuses and tax evasion along the shores of Lake Albert. It is part of the water system that feeds from Lake Victoria in central Africa into the southern head of the Nile, featuring one of the most environmentally diverse ecosystems in the world.

Bwengue Rajab Yusuf of Nape-Oil Watch Uganda spoke about how a constantly changing corporate presence—from the Toronto Stock Exchange-listed Heritage Oil to Tullow Oil (South Africa) to Total (France) to, most recently, Chinese oil firms—has made it nearly impossible to seek financial compensation for the destruction of agricultural land and wildlife conservation zones. “Who do you pursue?” he asked, pointing out that it becomes even more difficult when confronted with corrupt government officials who refuse to uphold environmental assessment laws or to enforce the protection of wildlife sanctuaries.

As Mouzeno explained it, residents of the Congo and across Africa are up against the “link between oil exploration, conflict, debt, corruption and under-development.”

But if the challenges are shared, so is the willingness to build new, community-based means of resistance. In Uganda, it has taken the form of Sustainability Schools, where they are focusing on building “community resilience” by offering action training and providing research and investigative skills, said Yusuf.

Two members of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum in the Niger Delta spoke of the longstanding community mobilizations against oil development on their land, highlighting the fact that November marks the anniversary of the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Wiwa was a renowned environmental and human rights activist put to death by the Nigerian government in 1995 for his outspoken stances and non-violent campaigns, particularly against Shell.

Sorbarikor Demua told of how Ogoni women often bear the brunt of the oil development of their area, since they harvest the land that is often the most devastated by oil spills and chemical contamination. They also face extreme repercussions at the hands of military and para-military forces sent to punish protesting communities and who use sexual assault and rape as punishment for their activism.

Recently, women protested the impacts of oil development and the lack of resources for the Ogoni people by going naked. As Demual's colleague Celestine Akpobari stated, it is actions by women such as this that show the desperation and the extent to which they must go to ensure compensation for the destruction of their land.

Taking place for two days and involving 200 delegates just before a major international conference, Meth believes that EDS is necessary as part of the counterbalance to the bureaucratic, government-focused negotiation happening at the opulent Durban International Conference Centre.

A conference like EDS, he said, “gives us a chance to speak in peoples' own language and terms, in a way they understand best.” The government delegates and representatives of major international non-governmental organizations on the inside at COP17 are often far removed from the realities on the ground, he said, meaning different venues are needed to make concrete, on-the-ground change.

“We shouldn't be concerned or be bothered about COP17, but [we need to] challenge it for excluding communities that are being most affected,” he said, citing the example that there are representatives of the major South African utilities company ESKOM at the table, but that Indigenous communities are not officially represented.

And while some may question the impact of smaller events like EDS over the next week, many major delegations have already stated that they do not foresee any agreement to follow up on the Kyoto Protocol until 2020. If the major delegations are so effective, then, as Meth asks, “They have met so many times; why are we not making more headway?”

Tim McSorley is an editor with the Media Co-op. He is part of a six-person media delegation covering COP17 and parallel community-led conferences. You can find more of the Media Co-op's COP17 coverage at http://mediacoop.ca/durban.

Christian Mounzeo

Celestine AkpoBari and Sorbarikor Demual

Ethical Oil

Tim McSorley — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:30:21 +0000

ethical_oil_web.jpg

Pink Crude

Tim McSorley — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:30:39 +0000

Tar sands supporters criticized for using gay rights to mask environmental disaster

MONTREAL—As the negative environmental and health impacts of the Alberta tar sands grow, defenders of the huge oil extraction project continue to try to green-wash the endeavour by leaning on arguments that make it appear more environmentally friendly than it truly is. Recently, industry backers have added "pink-washing"—brandishing queer rights to promote Alberta's oil as an ethical choice.

This past September, former Conservative government aide Alykhan Velshi launched a media blitz to build on right-wing pundit Ezra Levant's push to re-brand the tar sands as “Ethical Oil.” The centrepiece of Velshi's campaign is a series of seven ads, presenting two images each: on the left, a frightening scene from a state in which conflict oil is produced; on the right, a polished image of a happy white Canadian worker or pristine landscape.

“[Canadians] have a choice to make: Ethical Oil from Canada...and other liberal democracies, or Conflict Oil from politically oppressive...regimes,” explains Velshi in a blog entry on The Huffington Post.

One of the ads focuses on the treatment of gays in Canada and abroad. This ad also features two images side-by-side. On the left, a scene in which two presumably gay men, faces covered, are in the process of being hanged. The caption reads, “Conflict Oil: Persecution.” On the right, an image of two people holding hands, both donning rainbow bracelets accompanied by the caption, “Ethical Oil: Pride.”

That Velshi would cite gay pride in his campaign against foreign oil may seem peculiar to some: as a former spokesperson for Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney, Velshi has defended Kenney and his colleagues' actions against LGBTQ communities. Examples from the past five years include attempting to repeal same-sex marriage, removing LGBT presence from a citizenship guide for new Canadians and appointing an opponent to same-sex marriage to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Over the past year, queer people in Toronto successfully rallied against the Harper government's attempted deportation of Alvaro Orozco, an undocumented filmmaker who received significant media attention in 2007 when his refugee claim was denied because “he didn’t look gay enough”. Conservatives also overwhelmingly voted against a federal bill which proponents argue would have helped to protect transgendered citizens against discrimination.

With this in mind, many are suspicious of Velshi's sudden defense of LGBTQ rights.

“The green- and pink-washing PR campaign is another manifestation of the racist, neoconservative ideology of people such as Kenney and Velshi, which involves the demonization of Arab and Muslim people and states,” says Claire Hurtig, member of Tadamon!, a Montreal-based solidarity collective. “It co-opts queer, female, and Indigenous identities to justify the ruthless exploitation of the world’s most unclean and unsustainable source of energy."

“The choice that exists is between ethical oil from Canada and conflict oil from politically oppressive countries,” according to EthicalOil.org. But the reality of many queer people in Canada under the Tory regime has been anything but glamorous. While mainstream gay rights lobbyists won the right to marry, those who do not fit into state-sanctioned regulations of assimilationist gay respectability remain out in the cold.

“The reality is that most queer people continue to be subjected to homophobia on a regular basis on both the institutional and interpersonal levels,” says Natalie Kouri-Towe of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, an organization that works in solidarity with Palestinian people, and has been active in resisting pink-washing.

“It hides the way being gay can be just as dangerous in Canada or in any other place around the world, and that Canada is not free from homophobic violence.” Increasing government cuts to major social services that support queer people have negatively impacts, says Kouri-Towe, pointing at sex education programs in high schools, HIV/AIDS and health programming, as well as support services for non-status and refugee people.

For Kouri-Towe, Canada’s use of pink-washing is hypocritical. “When Canada [is discussed] as a haven for gay refugees,” she explains, “what gets erased is the way Canadian immigration policies actually make it difficult for queer people to claim refugee status, and the types of racism and homophobia they face through the refugee claimant process.”

New statistics from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs and the National Transgender Discrimination Survey make clear that queer and trans- people of colour continue to disproportionately suffer violent hate crimes and murder. The Ontario-based Trans PULSE Project (transpulseproject.ca) recently revealed that trans- Ontarians attempt suicide at shockingly high rates.

Blood Services Canada still has restrictions regarding which queer bodies can donate blood. People with HIV/AIDS continue to be stigmatized and criminalized. Sterilization is required for trans- people to legally change their gender. High populations of trans- youth are homeless.

While several queer organizations are actively resisting Israel’s use of pink-washing in Canada, few responses have moved beyond poignant online commentary to Velshi’s campaign as of yet. But for all the media attention the Ethical Oil campaign has garnered, it’s not clear how effective it will be.

As Hurtig explains, “Israel’s pink-washing campaign has backfired completely. [Since] it has launched, queers have been organizing [across] Canada [to] denounce Israel’s pink-washing and have in fact used the ‘gay branding’ campaign to highlight both Israel’s hypocrisy and its apartheid system.”

“I am not aware of any extensive successes [of pink-washing] campaigns,” she says.

jesse grass is a genderqueer, working class fuck-up.

Not fabulous

Oil Gateway

Tim McSorley — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:05:38 +0000

Stop the Flows is the working title for subMedia.TV's next project. Over the next five years we will document resistance movements that are working towards stopping the flows of hydro carbons, mineral extraction, natural resources and capital, through grassroots and underground organizing. We will publish our dispatches as we complete them with the goal of compiling them into a feature length documentary to be released on 2016.

In this dispatch we look at how members of the Unis’toten nation are pre-empting the construction of 4 pipelines through their traditional territories

To help make these reports a reality, please visit STOPTHEFLOWS.com

For more background on BC's oil infrastructure visit the links below:

Aboriginal groups in Canada challenge tar sands projects

Grassroots Gathering to Resist Proposed Pipelines

In BC, Pipes Spell Double Trouble

This video report was originally published by the Vancouver Media Co-op

Witnessing the Tar Sands Dead Zone

dawn — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:48:05 +0000

Asserting the need to heal

FORT MCMURRAY, AB—In the face of the enormous devastation that is destroying forests across northern Alberta, a peaceful group of people are steadfastly asserting the need to heal the land and waters. On June 25, 2011, the second annual Healing Walk for the Tar Sands brought together Indigenous people, Keepers of the Athabasca, elders, children and supporters, who walked 13 kilometres through the heart of where Syncrude and Suncor extract bitumen on a massive scale.

Bitumen, a tar-like substance that holds petroleum, sits below what the industry, in an Orwellian turn, calls “overburden”—not forest

The destruction we saw is so vast it goes far beyond the visible horizon. The urgent need for healing is evident to anyone who visits this barren expanse. People from many places came to support and join in—including activists who participated with Zapatista Indigenous communities and the movement in Oaxaca, Mexico. Together they chanted, “Zapata vive! La lucha sigue!”

The Healing Walk for the Tar Sands was led by elders such as Lillian, a Cree woman, and Violet, an 83-year-old elder and the oldest woman in the community of Fort McMurray First Nation. These elder women possess a wonderful sense of humor and sharp minds, and with other elders, guided the traditional prayers, smudge and ceremonies. This walk faced the enormity of the land stolen from Indigenous peoples that is now destroyed, lifeless, and empty save for ugly scarecrows called “bit-u-men” to keep out the birds from its poisoned soil. Horrid continuous booms from sound cannons scare the birds from landing in the enormous reservoirs of toxic waste. We marched beside the machinery of destruction, the surreal gigantic Tonka trucks, cranes and pipes. The air pollution, a putrid stench, gave a headache to many of the people who participated in the healing walk.

The day was rainy with occasional bursts of sun, but the walkers were not deterred by the weather. A couple walkers had brought protective dust masks, remembering how terrible they felt last year after the six-hour walk, their lungs absorbing toxic dust from the tar sands. However, it was not appealing to wear wet masks so we continued, mostly mask-less, through the rain along the shoulder of Highway 63, accompanied by a heavy police presence.

This walk was started by people heartbroken by what has happened to their traditional homelands. One of the organizers, Cleo Reece, helped to start the Memorial March for the Murdered and Missing Women when she lived in Vancouver years ago. She spoke of the murdered and missing waters in northern Alberta: an eerie, disturbing connection between the violence against Indigenous women and against Indigenous land. Colonization is not a thing of the past; it continues today in virulent, violent forms and materializes in the increased rates of cancer found in communities downstream from the tar sands.

Resistance and commitment to peace also continue, as they have for the past 500-plus years. This is a form of power that is based in love for community, a community of the living that includes not just people, but bears, eagles, rivers, wind and forests. It is a deeply humble, peaceful power that stands in ethical contrast to the forms of power that greedily exploit and forcefully violate the land and those who live on it. It is a power that cannot be bought or sold because it is freely shared, residing in a respect and a grief for the land that gives us life.

We began and ended the day at the Nistawoyou Friendship Center in Fort McMurray where a feast for the walkers had been prepared by a chef with a joyful laugh and a team of dedicated volunteers. At the closing circle, Cree Elder Lillian Shirt was presented with tobacco in gratitude for her leading the day’s ceremonies, and she shared with us stories of survival and creativity.

We learned a lot from the tar sands healing walk and from visiting the surrounding Indigenous families, some who live in crowded old trailers, accessible by unpaved, muddy roads. The living conditions on some of the reserves are not unlike those in poor communities in Latin America.

Where are the economic benefits of the tar sands to these communities? What have they gained from these industrial projects? Witnessing the poverty, health problems and environmental destruction in person helped us respond to these questions. A huge economic gap remains between the living standards of Caucasian and Indigenous communities. Indigenous communities are marginalized in Canadian politics and are fighting institutional racism as their long-term interests are undermined.

On the walk, an elder weighed the cost of lost culture, water and foods and asked what all this destruction has been for. The question points to the global interests that have developed the Alberta tar sands in order to sustain a privileged way of life for some at the expense of others. We had travelled from Vancouver, a landscape dramatically different from the tar sands wasteland but which is nonetheless endangered by the latter's economic grip on land. Our Pacific Coast is threatened by proposed pipelines, with their inevitable spills, and a rapid increase in tanker traffic. In an era of climate change, those of us who live in urban centres cannot afford the disconnect between our cities that reap the temporary benefits of this destruction and the Indigenous homelands that have been desecrated. Through global waters, winds, and ethical human relations, we are linked with the people who are witnessing the eradication of their boreal forests, traditional hunting grounds and once-pristine waters.

On the edge of the dead land and toxic reservoirs, wild flowers, forests and Indigenous families live in trailer homes. Life here is simple, humble and warm, filled with good humour and jokes. Inside, Indigenous artwork on the walls portrays wolves, traditional carvings and pictures of ancestors and grandchildren.

In this community, women, men, children, young people and elders resist their displacement and speak up about the destruction of their land, water and wildlife.

“Giving up is not an option,” said Dene Suline Elder Warrior Brian Grandbois from Cold Lake, Alberta. Brian’s community is struggling to protect Berry Point at English Bay in Cold Lake, the land where they hold ceremonies and sacred burials, smoke fish and gather medicinal plants. This sacred land is threatened to become an RV park by ministerial order. Indigenous peoples of the area have set up their peace protection camp with tipis, tents and campfires, even though police are pressuring them to leave. Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and capitalism are killing Indigenous peoples, destroying our planet, La Pachamama—our Mother Earth.

That the pollution from tar sands extraction projects has spread to affect the waters of the Athabasca River and Fort Chipewyan is no secret. Beginning in the 1990s, these waters became unsafe to drink, and people are sick as a result of their toxicity. These polluted waters empty into the Arctic. This is a fact of hydrology. Tar sands pollution as a source of acid rain in Saskatchewan is a meteorological certainty. Airborne pollutants are also reported to be concentrating in lake water in neighboring Saskatchewan, reducing the availability of certain fish species.

While the ailing of these once-healthy waters is cause for alarm, corporate negligence has been responsible for at least three recent pipeline spills in Canada and the US. In July 2010, Enbridge spilled 3.1 million litres of oil into Tallmudge Creek and the Kalamazoo River, Michigan. In May 2011 in the Plains Midwest, 4.5 million liters of oil were spilled in Lubicon Lake Cree territory, the homeland of Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a young woman from the Lubicon Cree Nation who spoke eloquently at the Friendship Center. She described the horror of experiencing 28,000 barrels of oil spilling right beside her family’s homes, in the largest oil disaster in Alberta since 1975. In June 2011, Enbridge was also responsible for about 1,500 barrels spilled near Wrigley in the Northwest Territories. This last spill is said to have been kept out of waterways, but still seeped into the soil.

Horrific spills are not the only danger posed by industrial activity in Northern Alberta. In December 2010, a gushing saltwater aquifer at Shell’s Muskeg River operation raised questions about ground water contamination. This incident was preceded by another round of duck deaths in October 2010 in a Syncrude tailings reservoir. It’s a tragic irony when cultures that see water as something that comes from a tap have to learn about the interconnectedness of the earth’s waters through violent corporate operations that destroy Indigenous people’s homelands and cultures.

The Second Annual Healing Walk in Alberta’s Tar Sands was deeply inspiring. In the midst of massive greed and destruction, a community gathered to transform ground zero into a place of solidarity and social change. The call for healing is compelling, as simple and as necessary as breathing clean air and drinking clean water. The walkers shared an understanding—respect for ecological integrity must come first.

Aidee Arenas subscribed to the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, Christine Leclerc organizes enpipeline.org, Choo-kien Kua is an artist and Rita Wong is a poet. They are all based in Vancouver. This article was originally posted on the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Tar Sands Healing Walk

Tar Sands Healing Walk II

Canada on Secret Oil Offensive: Documents

Martin Lukacs — Wed, 25 May 2011 05:11:40 +0000

Foreign ministry's tar sands team rebranding Alberta oil in Europe

MONTREAL—The Canadian government has been carrying out a secret plan in Europe to boost investment and keep world markets open for the Alberta tar sands, collaborating with major oil companies and aggressively undermining European environmental measures, documents obtained by The Dominion reveal.

In 2009 the federal government launched a strategy to “protect and advance Canadian interests related to the oil sands," fearing that growing protest could curb European investment in the industry and that EU restrictions on tar sands imports could be mimicked globally.

“Oil sands are posing a growing reputational problem [in Europe], with the oil sands defining the Canadian brand,” states one document released under the Access to Information Act. “Canada’s reputation as a clean, reliable source of energy may be put at risk.”

Run by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAIT) and involving eight foreign missions, working alongside Natural Resources, Environment Canada and the Albertan government, a European “Oil Sands Team” has gone on the offensive against threats to the tar sands: they have monitored green groups, responded to “significant negative media coverage,” helped Canadian policymakers lobby European parliamentarians and organize trips to Alberta, worked to “enhance cooperation” with oil companies, and coordinated regular meetings between top European oil executives and Albertan and federal ministers, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The “pan-European oil sands advocacy strategy” was launched in December 2009 around the time of the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen. Hundreds of civil society groups there gave Canada a “Fossil of the Year” award for being "the absolute worst country at the talks," fingering a powerful tar sands industry as the driving force behind Canada’s hardline stance against ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.

The extraction of Alberta’s vast deposits of bitumen, which hold the second largest supply of oil after Saudi Arabia, has been widely criticized as the world’s most environmentally destructive and carbon-intensive industrial project.

One of the main targets of the strategy has been a EU energy law—the Fuel Quality Directive—that would slap a dirty label on tar sands oil as a way of promoting cleaner transportation fuel in Europe.

Europe does not import tar sands oil from Canada, but Canadian policymakers are worried a measure categorizing tar sands oil as an undesirable fuel could spread to other continents. With the Albertan fossil fuel industry—and supportive provincial and federal governments—increasingly looking to Asian markets to sell their crude such precedents would spell trouble.

The obtained documents further reveal that the diplomatic campaign by the Canadian government to “prevent discriminatory treatment of the oil sands under the EU Fuel Quality Directive” was much more co-ordinated than previously understood.

The mission in Brussels took the lead: lobbying the European Commission, engaging in “regular information sharing with industry,” organizing “high-profile events,” and Ministerial visits. The mission provided “reporting with intelligence, analysis and advice” to the Canadian and Alberta governments while the larger Oil Sands Team played a “very useful coordination mechanism” in the campaign.

They appear to have been so aggressive that a European parliamentarian told the Globe and Mail in March that Canada’s lobbying had been “unacceptable.”

The Canadian government was also concerned that a dirty label on the tar sands could galvanize pressure to curb investment by European companies who have been subject to increasingly noisy environmental campaigns calling for divestment.

With the end of cheap, easily accessible oil, European oil giants have scampered to extend their lifespans by turning to unconventional gases and investing billions in the Alberta industry.

A mid-year report of the Oil Sands Team, covering activities between January and July 2010, paints a picture of a Canadian government eager to work closely with these companies to ensure the money keeps flowing.

One section reads less like international lobbying records than a joint playbook. In Oslo, Canada’s mission “holds regular meetings” with largely state-owned Norwegian oil giant Statoil to “update on each others activities and co-ordinate where appropriate.” Statoil has invested more than $2 billion in tar sands operations.

A Wikileaks cable has revealed that in November 2009, a month before the European strategy was launched, then-Environment Minister Jim Prentice described his shock to U.S. Ambassador Jacobsen on witnessing Norwegian public sentiment against investment in Alberta’s “dirty oil,” during a visit to the country. The experience had “heightened his awareness of the negative consequences to Canada’s historically ‘green’ standing on the world stage,” and he believed the Canadian government’s reaction to the dirty oil label was “too slow” and “failed to grasp the magnitude of the situation.”

Each barrel of bitumen Statoil produced in the Alberta tar sands in 2010 released 85 times more carbon than a barrel of conventional North Sea oil, according to company figures.

At Statoil’s annual general assembly last week, shareholders representing nearly 20 per cent of private capital voted in support of a resolution calling for the company to withdraw from tar sands operations.

This was the third year in a row that motions campaigned for by Greenpeace and the Indigenous Environmental Network have dominated the meetings. In November 2010, Statoil buckled to campaigners' pressure and sold 40 per cent of its Alberta tar sands portfolio.

When Prime Minister Harper flew to France for a few hours on June 4, 2010, to meet with President Nicolas Sarkozy in the run-up to the G8 and G20 meetings in Canada, he found time for an unpublicized meeting with Christophe de Margerie, the CEO of France’s oil major Total. Top Total executives have also met with Canada’s Deputy Minister of Trade and regularly meet with Canada’s ambassador.

The released documents do not reveal anything about the nature of the PM's discussions. The company, however, recently announced they plan to spend $20-billion in the oil sands by 2020 in hopes of boosting their production to 200,000 barrels day.

In recognition of the tar sands' new importance to their portfolio, Margerie and the company's international advisory board spent last week in Alberta. During a speech to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, he acknowledged that environmental criticism has impacted the company's reputation. "In terms of image, it's not good," he said.

Shell, the biggest energy company in the world, holds the most land leases in the tar sands and plans to triple production to more than 750,000 barrels a day. They have been named in five lawsuits related to environmental damages and violations of Indigenous rights, and have faced shareholder resolutions demanding disclosure of the social and environmental risks of their projects.

The Hague mission is “enhancing its engagement with the sector, and with Shell recently.” The London mission is “in regular contact with the private sector including meetings with Shell, BP, and Royal Bank of Scotland [RBS] as well as Canadian oil companies,” and participated in Shell’s Stakeholder dialogue where they were able to “gather intelligence.” Brussels has “worked with Shell by hosting complementary events” including a multi-stakeholder workshop and dinner.

The released documents indicate that government officials believe their efforts have failed to fully “defend Canada’s image as a responsible energy producer and steward of the environment including climate change issues.” They cite tight budgets and a lack of resources. The oil sands team, according to DFAIT, is composed only of 11 officials, working part-time, spread across Ottawa and the European missions.

The report states that they will need an injection of “significant resources” and also suggests that “a professional PR firm may be able to assist us in moving forward strategically with the use of approved but sharpened messaging.” With a "recent increase in the NGO campaigns targeting public [sic], we anticipate increased risk to Canadian interests much beyond the oil sands (e.g. recent campaign targeting tourists to Alberta).”

Rethink Alberta, co-ordinated by an international network of green groups, has run a billboard campaign in Europe and is mailing postcards to travel agents and tourism operators to discourage tourists from visiting Alberta.

European countries have seen a “resurgence of highly critical public campaigns,” including protests that “have become a regular occurrence in London mostly towards BP, Shell and RBS but also towards the High Commission.”

The report also points to “growing media attention to environmental aspects of oil sands developments in Europe,” resulting in “enhanced media monitoring” by most Canadian missions. Media coverage in Paris was especially bad in their eyes: “the negative articles are essentially about pollution, the wildlife, and the health of native peoples and the destruction of the boreal forest.”

Their campaign against the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive law also appears to be failing. The law aims to force fuel suppliers to cut carbon emissions by six percent by 2020. In initial evaluations EU officials assigned tar sands production a high carbon footprint, meaning suppliers would shun tar sands oil in favour of lower-emission fuels from conventional sources of petroleum.

Canadian policymakers jumped into action against the initiative because they worried other countries like the United States and China—who has previously mimicked European emissions standards on air pollution in the 1990s—might adopt the model.

“Our fear is that if something happens in the EU and it is spread in other countries—not only members of the EU—we could have roughly one-third of the world’s population subscribing to regulation or legislation that mitigates against our oilsands,” Alberta International and Intergovernmental Relations Minister Iris Evans told media in the fall of 2010.

Canadian and industry officials have vigorously contested that the carbon footprint of tar sands is higher than traditional sources, but European policymakers gained new ammo when an EU study released this February concluded that production creates 23 per cent more emissions.

After aggressive lobbying from Canadian officials resulted in the removal of the dirty fuel label on tar sands crude in the fall of 2010, a re-emboldened European commission announced this spring that they would move ahead with the plan to discourage tar sands fuel imports.

Ensuring open markets, however, is also the objective of the ongoing free-trade negotiations between Canada and the European Union, which would involve eliminating environmental “barriers” to trade like the Fuel Quality Directive. Negotiators have frequently raised the issue of the Fuel Quality Directive and recent media reports indicate they even threatened to scrap the agreement if the issue was not resolved to their satisfaction.

DFAIT officials told the Dominion that the advocacy plan is an “official level” strategy at the departmental rather than ministerial level, meaning Cabinet would not have any oversight.

The seeds for it may have been planted in a Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s (DFAIT) planning document from March 2008. DFAIT's Report on Plans and Priorities for 2008-2009 states that one of its priorities is to “enhance international commercial opportunities for Canadian companies.” It suggests developing an “energy advocacy strategy to brand Canada as a leader in best practices for the development of oil sands reserves, energy research and development, advanced energy technologies, energy-efficient technologies, renewable energy and alternative energies.”

Download the documents: Pan-European Oil Sands Advocacy Strategy & Pan-European Oil Sands Team Mid-Year report.

Martin Lukacs is an independent journalist and a member of the Dominion editorial collective.

clayton climate camp

Bike Lanes Tarred

hillarybain — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 04:09:31 +0000

Tar sands are good, but bike lanes? Not so much

Did you hear the one about the tar sands project and the bike lane?

About 13 years ago, a company called ExxonMobil thought it would be a really good idea to start a tar sands project in Alberta. Five years earlier, in Toronto, a report for the City concluded it would be a really fine idea to put a bike lane along major downtown streets called Bloor and Danforth because so many cyclists used this popular east-west route.

There are actually a few differences between a tar sands project and a bike lane:

Oil from the tar sands is used by people to fuel their cars; bike lanes let people ride their bikes so they don't need oil from the tar sands.

A tar sands project uses huge amounts of water and natural gas while destroying forests, wetlands, and wildlife habitat; a bike lane needs a painted white line.

The ExxonMobil project would emit 3.7 million tonnes (Mt) of greenhouse gases (GHGs) each year—about the same as 800,000 cars—for 50 years; bicycles don't emit GHGs.

Now, in a sophisticated country like Canada you can't just decide to mine a tar sands deposit—or to take over a bit of the road to make it safer for cyclists.

We've got rules.

For the giant open pit of a tar sands project there has to be an environmental assessment (EA) so that governments can make smart decisions that avoid damaging the environment. For the painted white stripe of a bike lane you probably don't need an EA, but you can't be too careful—so the City decided to do a rigorous EA.

In 2006, a panel of experts was appointed to study the impacts, including GHG emissions, of the tar sands project (now involving Imperial Oil). A number of months later, the experts concluded that 3.7 Mt of GHGs wouldn't cause significant negative effects on the environment. They didn't say why, they just said it didn't. The government in Ottawa carefully read this report and decided it looked really good, and approved it. Around the same time, concerned groups asked a court to review the panel's decision.

The judge ruled that the panel couldn't just decide that 3.7 Mt of GHGs was insignificant—it had to give reasons. So the experts got back together in 2008 and said it wasn't significant because there wasn't much evidence that it was significant and, anyway, the government of Alberta was on top of the problem. Ottawa decided these reasons also sounded really good—and they gave a green light to the project.

Meanwhile, back in Toronto, the bike lane wasn't doing as well.

After the 1992 report, City Hall kept saying that cycling was a really good thing and more people ought to do it. More people did cycle and in 2001 the City said it would put in lots of bike lanes, except it didn't (but that's a different joke).

Finally, in October 2007 Toronto's council ordered a study to see if it was feasible to find a bit of room for bikes on Bloor-Danforth. About a year later, the report concluded a bikeway was feasible and would hardly even interfere with car traffic. The head of the city's bicycle committee announced a bikeway would finally happen. But some councillors and other folks were unhappy so in 2009 the City said it would do another study to look at the environmental impacts of the bikeway.

It took a full year to choose a consultant to prepare the EA—maybe because studying the environmental consequences of pedaling two-wheelers is a complex business.

The City was in no rush to have the EA started, and certainly not before the fall 2010 municipal elections. (Debating issues during an election can be awkward.) The EA was scheduled to be finished in 2011. In the meantime, some candidates running for mayor* said the City already had too many bike lanes, meaning bike lanes on two per cent of the city's 5,600 kilometres of roads was excessive. Apparently bikes were causing congestion. (It hadn't occurred to the candidates that bikes need far less room than cars, and with more people on bikes there would be more room for cars.)

The tar sands project is now under way with strong government support. Cyclists in Toronto, on the other hand, are mostly left to fend for themselves while breathing the fumes of ever-increasing amounts of tar sands fuel.

Funny, eh?

Albert Koehl is an environmental lawyer, an adjunct professor in natural resources law at Osgoode Hall Law School, and a founding member of the cycling group Bells on Bloor. This article was originally posted on Rabble.

*Since this article was published, Rob Ford, a loud critic of bike lanes, was elected Mayor of Toronto.

Bike Lanes

Stopping the Flow

Cameron Fenton — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:24:19 +0000

Quebec Climate Action Camp takes on the Enbridge Trailbreaker project

DUNHAM, QC—From August 7 to 23, the Quebec Climate Action Camp took root in Dunham, QC—an hour drive southeast of Montreal. The camp aimed to continue to build opposition to the construction of a pumping station in Dunham, a key piece of infrastructure in the Enbridge Trailbreaker project.

The Trailbreaker pipeline project would reverse the flow of existing pipleline infrastructure, moving tar sands oil from Alberta through the United States, Ontario, and eventually crossing through Montreal and Quebec's Eastern Townships region. It would then be piped to Portland, Maine, to be loaded onto tankers destined for Texan refineries.

Community organizers from Dunham joined the Climate Camp to build momentum in a growing local movement against the pumping station. On August 15 over 100 people marched from Parc L'Envol, down Dunham's Rue Principal to Town Hall. Dunham Mayor Jean-Guy Demers ended the march by voicing his support for the camp and for the campaign opposing the pumping station.

Over the two weeks of the Climate Camp, over 300 people visited the camp from across Quebec, eastern Canada, the northeastern United States and coming from as far as California and Austria. The visitors came not only to take action themselves, but also to work towards building a broad, empowering climate justice movement. The camp, powered by solar, wind and kinetic energy, was organized as an exercise in collective self-management.

Climate Camp ended with a march to the site of the proposed pumping station, and the launch of the Trailbreaker Pledge of Resistance. The pledge states that "because of the grave threat the Trailbreaker project poses to the climate, the community and all others in its path, we pledge to engage in non-violent direct action to stop the pumping station should they ever attempt to follow through with its construction without community consent."

systematic changes

March leaving 2

Marching through Dunham

Pledge of Resistance

campsite

Fiyah

Sovereigntists, Environmental Groups Oppose Trailbreaker

dru — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:08:22 +0000

Pipeline reversal would bring 200,000 barrels daily of tar sands crude through Quebec

MONTREAL—Opposition is mounting to a planned pipeline reversal that would bring 200,000 barrels per day of tar sands bitumen through the island of Montreal and Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Environmental groups, Quebec sovereigntists and small-town mayors have been mobilizing opposition to the proposal known as the Enbridge Trailbreaker project.

The reversal of the Portland-Montreal pipeline is part of a large initiative to reverse and augment pipelines to carry tar sands crude from Chicago to Portland, Maine, where it would be loaded on tankers and transferred to refineries in Philadelphia and on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.

Bloc Quebecois Member of Parliament Christian Ouellet, speaking at a public meeting in Granby on April 24, said the decision to reverse the 60-year-old pipeline is being made by the National Energy Board in Ottawa. Approximately 200 people attended the meeting at the Hotel le Granbyen.

“The decision-making is going over the heads of Quebeckers,” said Ouellet. “We want a public hearing in every community along the pipeline route.”

Quebec’s Liberal government has so far refused to hold its own consultations.

“[Enbridge and Portland Montreal Pipeline] say that they’re good corporate citizens, and they say that’s good enough, but in the Gulf things broke, and they’re good corporate citizens over there, too,” said Ouellet, referring to the Deepwater Horizon, a BP oil-drilling platform that recently exploded, spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Guy Durand of the Environmental Committee of Dunham said that “people were already worried” about the pipeline proposal during an August 2008 information session, which in his opinion provided “incomplete information” to Dunham town council.

Dunham elected Jean-Guy Demers as Mayor in 2009. Demers campaigned against the pipeline reversal and the construction of a pumping station in Dunham, saying, "I will do everything in my power” to reverse the previous council’s decision to move forward with the pumping station. Since the election, the town council has voted five:two against the pumping station.

Citizens and elected officials in the region are worried that a flow reversal in the 60-year-old pipeline, coupled with the increase in pressure necessary to cross the Sutton Mountains, would increase the risk of a spill. In 1999, the pipeline, which currently flows from Portland, Maine, to Montreal, ruptured near St-Cesaire, leaking 45,000 litres of oil into the adjacent marsh. Twenty other spills have been reported during the pipeline’s operation.

Several attendees at the Granby public meeting expressed concern over potential water contamination in the event of a spill, since the pipeline crosses several rivers.

“Simply installing a toilet in a national park requires an environmental impact assessment,” said Daniel Cyr of COVABAR, a group dedicated to the protection of the Richelieu River. “Why is it unreasonable to ask for one for the pipeline reversal?” Cyr added that one litre of oil can contaminate as many as 2,000,000 litres of water.

Presenters warned meeting attendees about the ecological impacts of the bitumen to be passing through southern Quebec, including massive strip mining, runaway carbon emissions, and large-scale water pollution. One presenter referred to the tar sands as “Canada’s Mordor,” an allusion to the dark, mutant-infested industrial wasteland featured in The Lord of the Rings.

Jean Binette of the Environmental Committee of Dunham presented examples of past pipeline accidents, citing dramatic spills of thousands of barrels of oil from modern pipelines in Alaska and Minnesota. According to a Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration report, more than 2,000,000 barrels of oil were spilled as a result of pipeline ruptures in the US between 1986 and 2007, causing over $1 billion in damage.

“We don’t get a cent; the oil goes through—that’s it,” said Bloc Quebecois Member of Parliament Robert Vincent. “If it fails, we’re the ones who pay. It’s our drinking water that is contaminated.”

Dru Oja Jay is an Editor at The Dominion.

Anti-trailbreaker info-session

Greenwashing at the Games

dawn — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:19:22 +0000

Heavy polluters look lighter as Olympic sponsors

VANCOUVER—As the debate about global warming heated up on the road to climate talks in Copenhagen, companies with investments in Alberta’s tar sands were scrambling to clean up their image as dirty oil producers.

Sponsoring the 2010 Olympics—frequently proclaiming themselves the "Green Games"—has become a convenient branding tool for companies profiting from the increasingly controversial tar sands, according to a University of Toronto professor who has written several books on the Olympics.

“Big corporations can milk that green image, and they have an excellent venue to do so with the Games because there is so much world attention,” said Professor Emeritus Helen Lenskyj.

Petro-Canada, which recently merged with Suncor to create a tar sands giant, is one of only six national partners sponsoring the Games. After expressing interest in an interview, Petro-Canada spokesperson Dany Laferriere refused to answer questions from The Dominion about his company’s Olympic sponsorship.

Becoming a national partner cost Petro-Canada $62.5 million, but there is a payoff, according to Lenskyj. “I think companies have a fair amount of success in greenwashing, with light green corporate environmentalism,” she told The Dominion in a phone interview.

Companies such as Petro-Canada need all the greenwashing they can get. The Alberta tar sands has the highest carbon footprint of any commercial oil project on the planet, according a recent report written by award-winning business reporter Andrew Nikiforuk. If the world’s largest energy project continues on its current growth path, the tar sands alone will produce more greenhouse gas emissions than Ireland, Austria or Portugal by 2020.

“Petro-Canada has been involved with the Olympics for a long time, before it merged with Suncor,” said Harjap Grewal, a member of the Olympics Resistance Network. Petro-Canada sponsored the 1988 torch relay for the Calgary Winter Games.

The Lubicon Cree, an Indigenous nation still fighting for a Treaty recognition, protested the 1988 torch relay with a campaign called “Shame the Flame,” accusing Petro-Canada of stealing their land rights and resources, according to Lenskyj.

Today, Native rights activist Mike Mercredi accuses companies such as Suncor of committing a “slow industrial genocide” by poisoning the water supply of Fort Chipewyan, a native community downstream from the tar sands.

“Around 11 million liters of toxic chemicals, including carcinogens and other deadly poisons, are leaking into groundwater and the Athabasca and poisoning entire communities,” said a Greenpeace representative in a press release.

In 1988, Lubicon protesters and their allies were banned from Olympic venues and public spaces at the University of Calgary after protesting Petro-Canada. A similar scenario may occur in Vancouver, where the University of British Columbia is taking a prominent role in the Games, to the chagrin of some student activists.

The Royal Bank of Canada, another national Olympic partner, is the prime financier of the tar sands. Canada’s largest bank directly funds fossil fuel extraction with $15.9 billion per year, creating 198 million tonnes of climate changing carbon dioxide emissions, according to a 2008 report from Rainforest Action Network.

Promoters of the "Green Games" are not talking about the tar sands, however. The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) touts that some rain water from Richmond’s ice-skating rink, a prime venue, will be pumped into the building’s toilets and that waste wood from constructing the Whistler Creekside development will be chipped and reused on site.

“Organizers trot out a list of simple things [that seem green] for people who don’t know the difference between dark green and light green environmentalism,” said Lenskyj.

“The Vancouver Winter Games will be featuring more than just Gold, Silver and Bronze in 2010. Green will also be very much part of the mix,” explains General Motors, another national Olympic partner, on its website. The auto giant promises that 30 per cent of its Olympic fleet will be hybrids.

But activists have the power to turn Olympic greenwashing on its head, according to Grewal.

“Most of the world is aware that the development model practiced by these companies is causing the climate crisis,” he said. “The fact that they are pretending to be green gives activists a chance to highlight their actual policies.”

Chris Arsenault is the author of Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange. He is currently writing a history of sabotage in the oil patch.

Greenwashing at the Games - tar sands

Olympic Torch Dispatch #1

Moira Peters — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:03:08 +0000

First dispatch from the Torch Relay kickoff from Victoria, on occupied Coast Salish territories, October 30, 2009.

This is a joint production of Victoria Indymedia, B-Channel News, Vancouver Media Coop, and subMedia.tv.

Sabotage in Peace River

Tim McSorley — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:53:40 +0000

Bombings in northern BC/Alberta put spotlight on controversial pipelines

POUCE COUPE—The Peace River region, a rugged frontier on the Alberta-BC border, is anything but peaceful these days. Six hours from Edmonton, once serene cattle and canola country, the area is in the midst of a massive transformation, fueled by vast unconventional sour gas reserves lying some two kilometres under the earth’s surface.

Since October 2008, someone has blown up six sour gas pipelines operated by EnCana, North America’s largest gas corporation, in controlled acts of sabotage. In Wild West fashion, EnCana is offering a one million dollar bounty for information leading to a conviction. It is likely the largest reward in Canadian history.

The Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET), a mix of top law enforcement officials investigating the attacks, have sent some 250 officers to the region. The force includes masked officers with high powered machine guns who have been spotted in the woods by local residents, and a sniper flown back directly from Afghanistan. INSET labels the sabotage as “eco-terrorism” even though no one has been hurt.

The bomber apparently sees it differently. “Return the land to what it was before you came every last bit of it… before things get a lot worse for you and your terrorist pals in the oil and gas business,” wrote the bomber in a July 15 letter sent to the Dawson Creek Daily News. The badly printed hand-written letter demanded EnCana cease operations in the area. The alleged bomber promised to suspend attacks during a three-month grace period so “we can all take a summer vacation.”

At a July press conference, police accused the saboteur of “terrorizing these communities of Pouce Coupe and Dawson Creek.” But the mayor of Pouce Coupe, a village of 749 residents at the epicenter of Peace River gas activity, does not see it that way.

"I have discussed this [sabotage] with some pipeline workers," said Mayor Lyman Clark, a vocal supporter of the gas industry, during an interview at the village’s office. "One just frankly told me ‘I am more afraid of the bears.'" He added, "The whole area is in a boom right now, unlike the rest of the world economy."

While Alberta’s finance minister complains that low natural gas prices have been a “real kick in the head” to the provincial treasury, drilling activity continues at an almost frantic pace on the BC side of the border. Shiny new pickup trucks line the roads from Dawson Creek to Fort St. John. In 2008, the BC government collected more than $3.6 billion from selling drilling rights and reaping royalties. But some locals are unhappy with changes brought by sour gas.

“Sour gas is deadly; 500 parts per million will kill you dead,” says Woody Ewert, an organic farmer living near Pouce Coupe. Natural gas extraction “became the prime economic driver of the Peace River country just kind of overnight,” says Tim Ewert, Woody’s father, over cups of black coffee at the family’s farm house. “There were never any baseline studies done on air or water. They never checked to see what size or how deep the local aquifers were before starting the whole drilling program.”

Industry’s incursions into previously pristine land is “changing the way of life, our hunting, trapping, berry picking, even just going camping,” says Cliff Calliou, hereditary Chief of the Kelly Lake First Nation, an aboriginal community 30 minutes away from sabotaged sites with some 500 residents.

After the first attacks in fall 2008, police and media speculated—without evidence—that the bomber came from Kelly Lake. “They [police] threw two people in jail with no charges,” said Chief Calliou during an interview at Kelly Lake’s community centre. He describes police actions in the community as a “witch hunt.” In addition to the unwarranted jailing of Kelly Lake residents, which hadn’t until now been reported in the media, police also accused 76-year-old Regina Mortensen, a grandmother recovering from hip surgery, of sabotaging the pipelines.

The Kelly Lake First Nation, which maintains traditional governance structures outside of the Indian Act, has not surrendered its traditional land base via a treaty. Yet despite the region’s resource wealth many houses in Kelly Lake are ramshackle trailers. The community says the gas is being stolen from their unceded land and they have launched a $5.2 billion land claim for compensation.

Most people who live near sabotaged sites are not against extracting gas, per se. Rather, they say regulations favor corporations over landowners and the environment. Companies, with their teams of lawyers, engineers and experts, often understand the regulations better than the government who is supposed to be overseeing extraction.

Making laws less favorable to oil companies is not easy, especially for provinces dependent on petroleum revenues. An article in the Journal of Environmental Management argues that Alberta is a “first world jurisdiction” with a “third world analogue” in its lax environmental and political regulation of the oil industry. Farmers say BC is even worse than Alberta in its third world analogue.

Drilling rigs are moving from Alberta across the border to BC in record numbers, says EnCana’s Brian Lieverse. “The BC government has some excellent programs to stimulate their economy and oil and gas activity in the area,” he said during an interview at EnCana’s field office in Dawson Creek.

Critics of the current regulatory regime say gas companies can buy political support at their expense. EnCana, as one example, donated $255,470 to the governing BC Liberals between 2005 and 2008. The Liberals, in turn, have used monies from their economic stimulus to build roads and other infrastructure primarily to facilitate gas extraction in the region.

Ewert says EnCana has done a good job trying to deal with basic concerns such as dust from oil service trucks and speeding from contractors. But the company has not dealt with larger issues, such as potential water contamination or flaring from natural gas wells.

While not one Peace River resident, including harsh critics of the oil industry, supported sabotage, some were happy that complaints are finally being noticed.

“I don’t condone what this person [the bomber] is doing,” said Rick Koechl, a junior high school teacher living 40 minutes from the bombed sites and an activist pushing for sour gas wells to be set back at least a kilometre from houses and schools. “But at least it’s bringing attention to the situation up here; we’ve had legal organizations help us with this fight, but that’s not very sexy, is it?”

Sabotage, as a means of demanding action, is nothing new. Nor is it exclusively a tactic of environmentalists and the marginalized. In an interview with Al Jazeera, leading Republican Newt Gingrich recently advocated for American sabotage against Iran’s gas facilities in order to create social unrest.

Nor are the attacks in northeastern BC the first case of high profile sabotage against Canadian sour gas pipelines. On April 20, 2000 an Alberta court convicted Wiebo Ludwig, a farmer and preacher, of bombing gas wells owned Alberta Energy Co. Ltd. (AEC). Ludwig claimed his wife miscarried a child because of sour gas exposure. During their investigation of Ludwig and his associates, police admitted to blowing up a gas well themselves in order to gain credibility for an informant.

In 2002, AEC merged with PanCanadian to form EnCana, initially valued at $30 billion dollars. EnCana reps refused to comment on what, if anything, the company learned from the Ludwig saga.

In Alberta alone there were “more than 160 incidents of sabotage” against resource industries (oil, gas, hydro and forestry) between 1997 and 1999 causing “millions of dollars in damages,” according to documents released from a freedom of information request to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The heavily censored documents do not provide figures for 21st century sabotage. Sources familiar with the issue say the numbers are far higher than 160 incidents.

Sucking unconventional gas from the ground is expensive: up to $10 per well compared with $1 dollar for conventional shallow wells. World gas prices have fallen drastically in recent years, but drilling continues in the Peace River region due to a combination of low royalties, new technologies for accessing gas, and political stability.

Stability: an asset Canadian petroleum producers seem to value above all else. But stability is what is under attack in northeastern BC. Pipelines can be repaired, bounties offered, elite police sent in, but once investors loose confidence in stability, Canada’s petroleum industry will change drastically. This is what worries EnCana and the rest of western Canada’s oil patch: that fear will trump greed in the psyche of investors thus reversing the current market paradigm. Costs will increase; investment will drop. The market will demand the same thing environmentalists in both Alberta and BC have been demanding: slow down.

Chris Arsenault is a graduate student writing a history of sabogate and the oil patch.

School teacher Rick Koechl