Canada: Climate Criminal

by Rex Weyler

This article was kindly shared by Rex Weyler, author and founding member of Greenpeace. A link to Rex's blog is at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to his Deep Green Column for Greenpeace International.

What Happened to Canada?: Oil.

At the dawn of the 21st century a new political regime has transformed Canada from global hero – once standing up for peace, people, and nature – to global criminal, plunging into war, eroding civil rights, and destroying environments.

What happened to Canada? Oil. And not just any oil, but the world’s dirtiest, most destructive oil. Canada’s betrayal at the Durban climate talks – abandoning its Kyoto Accord commitments – is the direct effect of becoming a petro-state.

By the late 20th century, oil companies knew that the world’s conventional oil fields were in decline and oil production would soon peak, which it did in 2005. These companies, including sovereign oil powers such as PetroChina, turned their attention to low-grade hydrocarbon deposits in shale gas, deep offshore fields, and Canada’s Alberta tar sands. Simultaneously, inside Canada, oil companies began promoting the political career of the son of an Alberta oil executive, the conservative ideologue Stephen Harper.

Shell Oil opened operations in the tar sands in 2003. In 2004, the same year Canada signed the Kyoto Accord, committing to reduce carbon emissions, oil companies began to form “think tanks” and astroturf groups in Canada to establish the oil agenda and promote Harper as Conservative Party leader. Two years later, in 2006,

Harper’s Conservatives formed a minority government with 36% of the popular vote and launched Canada’s petro-state era, slashing environmental regulations, joining US Middle East wars, and launching a tar sands campaign, one of the most ecologically destructive industrial projects in human history.

In Durban, in December 2011, after mocking climate science and common decency, Canada’s Environment Minister, Peter Kent announced that Canada would abandon the Kyoto deal, abrogating a legally binding international agreement, which Canada had signed seven years earlier.

The Canadian government has become the policy arm and public relations voice of the international oil industry, discarding its reputation as an ethical country. Millions of Canadians have expressed outrage at the government that abandoned them and shamed Canada on the world stage. These voices are rarely heard in Canada’s corporate media. Meanwhile, Canadians witness an erosion of free press and civil rights within their own nation. They should not be surprised.

Life as an oil resource colony

“Oil and democracy do not generally mix,” explains Terry Karl in The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Oil is a “resource curse” for local populations, as experienced by Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. Oil rich nations attract oil industry patrons, who tend to support dictators. Petro-states often lose local economic sovereignty, suffer human rights atrocities, and see their environments devastated.

In the 1970s, the UK and Dutch economies experienced the oil curse as the North Sea oil and gas boom gave the illusion of prosperity while eroding sovereign economic capacity. Britain’s petro-state leader Margaret Thatcher used oil revenues to wage war, create banking empires, and subsidize elite society, while plundering the environment and leaving common citizens dispossessed of their own national heritage.

In 1977 The Economist magazine coined the term “Dutch disease” to describe the social and manufacturing decline caused by extreme resource exploitation. Oil revenues make a nation's currency appear stronger for a while, but this makes their exports more expensive and undermines manufacturing and local economy.

In 2011, the Montreal Macro Research Board warned that the “petrolization” of Canada had created “A severe case of Dutch Disease,” weakening Canadian business sovereignty, “hollowing out manufactured goods exporters” and making Canada “increasingly reliant” on oil and coal exports.

Like Thatcher's England Canada launched a scheme to privatise profits and socialize the costs of oil development. In the last decade, Canada has handed out over $14 billion in tax subsidies to oil, coal, and gas companies, while losing over 340,000 industrial jobs. A University of Ottawa study shows that oil colony economics is the largest factor in these job losses.

“Petro-states,” writes Terry Karl, become “unaccountable to the general population.” To impose the oil company agenda on their citizens, petro-regimes tend to centralize power, avoid transparency, and create a politics of lies and deceit.

Politics as war

Twice, in 2008 and 2009, Harper shut down the Canadian Parliament to avoid inquiries into his international deals, finances, and scandals including abusive treatment of Afghanistan detainees. Canada now ranks last among industrial nations in honouring freedom of information requests.

Harper’s perverse secrecy is typical of oil politics. “This is how petro states are made,” writes Andrew Nikiforuk in one of Canada’s best news sources, The Tyee; “with a quiet infection that eats away a nation's entire soul.”

In March 2011, as Harper ran Canada from secret cabinet meetings, 156 members of the government found Harper and his minority regime in contempt of Parliament for its refusal to share legislative information with other elected members.

In April 2011, Canadians learned that Harper’s liaison to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers had previously been convicted of defrauding two Canadian banks, a car dealer, and his own law clients, and had lobbied the Canadian government on behalf of his ex-hooker girlfriend.

The convicted felon, Bruce Carson, served as chief tar sands promoter, claiming “The economic and security value of oil sands expansion will likely outweigh the climate damage that oil sands create.” Carson also opposed “clean energy efforts in the U.S.” Canadian lobbyists undermined US low-carbon fuel standards by lobbying the US government.

In June 2011, on national television, another Harper henchman, Tom Flanagan, advocated assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “I think Assange should be assassinated,” he told Canada’s CBC. Flanagan has been one of the lead architects of Harper’s war on his own people. Before the 2011 election, in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Flanagan wrote, “An election is war by other means.” He compared an election campaign to Rome’s destruction of Carthage, whereby they “razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again.”


Alan Whitehorn of the Royal Military College of Canada wrote, “This suggests a paradigm not of civil rivalry between fellow citizens, but all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the opponent. This kind of malevolent vision and hostile tone seems antithetical to the democratic spirit.” Harper’s government is now constructing barricades around the Parliament buildings, erecting more jails, and passing tougher criminal codes. The Canadian people, who once felt proud of their democratic institutions, now feel like the “enemy” of their own government.

Canada against the world

Outside Canada, the Harper regime has dismissed the United Nations and international opinion. Canadian government officials called the UN a “corrupt organization.” Former Canadian senior UN official Carolyn McAskie wrote in Canada and Multilateralism: Missing In Action that Canada, once respected as a UN leader, is now “spurning a whole system of organizations critical to world peace, security and development.”

Economic analyst Jim Willie wrote that Canada has “followed the Goldman Sachs path to the fields of corruption and fealty… Canada followed the Bush Doctrine of fascism, embracing the war footing … and tightening the security vice. Next they will become a Chinese commercial colony.”

When citizens around the world objected to the climate impact of the tar sands, Harper’s government attempted to rebrand the notorious carbon bomb as “ethical oil,” shamelessly ignoring the facts. The tar sands crimes against humanity and nature begin with obliterating boreal forests and soils, creating massive open-pit mines, and removing two tons of sand and soil for every barrel of oil. The thick bitumen is melted with natural gas, which requires one-third of the energy in tar sands oil to remove it. The project uses about 150-million gallons of water each day from the Athabasca river and aquifers, and the black waste turns boreal lakes into sludge pits, kills birds and other wild life, and contaminates the local ground water. Pollutants from tar sands smoke stacks have caused lung disease throughout the region and a 30% increase in cancers over the last decade. Mike Mercredi from the indigenous Fort Chipewyan Cree Nation calls the impact “slow industrial genocide.”

The crime continues with pipeline oil spills and oil tankers that threaten the entire coast of North America. Meanwhile, the tar sands project emits more that 45-million tons of greenhouse gases each year. NASA climatologist James Hansen has warned that if the tar sands are fully exploited, “it is game over for the climate.”

The French Foreign Ministry called Canada’s decision to renege on its Kyoto climate commitments, “bad news for the fight against climate change.”

Representative Ian Fry from the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu called Canada’s reversal “an act of sabotage ... a reckless and totally irresponsible act.”

The China news agency, Xinhua, called Canada’s decision “preposterous,” and China's Foreign Ministry urged Canada to “face up to its due responsibilities and duties... and take a positive, constructive attitude towards participating in international cooperation to respond to climate change.”

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned that Canada “has a legal obligation under the convention to reduce its emissions, and a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort.” UN Advisor on Water, Maude Barlow, called the tar sands “Canada’s Mordor.”

After Canada’s shameful showing in Durban, a Canadian businessman wrote to national newspaper, The Globe & Mail: “The pride of wearing the maple leaf on the lapel or backpack is gone. It's best hidden now. .. not one person in any country I have visited has been complimentary. Harper and his sheep will deny or ignore such facts while people like me lose business.”


Inside Canada, people are rising up, lead by The Wilderness Committee, Greenpeace, Council of Canadians, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Yinka-Dene Alliance, and others. These groups need international support to halt the tar sands crime and help Canada recover its lost reputation.



Rex Weyler's Deep Green Blog

Carism and Social Injustice

This article was generously shared by Arlene Tigar Mclaren, links for this article, and further information about the writer are posted at the bottom of the article.

Carfree!
After giving up our car almost a year ago, we wondered if we were carless or carfree. We’ve been surprised not only how painless it’s been to be without a car, but also how liberating. Without a car, we are free to explore other forms of mobility that are pleasurable and convenient. We rely now primarily on walking and public transit and occasionally use car rentals and carsharing such as Modo and car2go in Vancouver, Canada. Since the area in which we live is reasonably well designed for walking, biking, public transit and car sharing, these alternative options easily rival the car as desirable forms of mobility.


Auto domination
The bad news is that due to their subordination to the private automobile these mobility alternatives are severely limited. Separated sidewalks and bike lanes are well and good but are built to accommodate the automobile as an all-encompassing system that shapes land use and transportation options. If public transit and railways were the main forms of motorized transport, they could be far more effective than they are rather than being the second cousin to the private automobile and commercial truck.

For the past century in the West, the automobile has dominated all other forms of transportation in hearts and minds, in social interactions and spaces, in culture, design and art, and in the political economy. Authorities protect at almost any cost the automobile – and its commercialized counterparts such as heavy trucks – as a way of life despite the fact that they do not serve all citizens equally.

Authorities protect the automobile, not people
Those with influence and power who design land use and transportation systems, provide funding for them, support the automobile and trucking industries, make the laws and uphold and enforce them are predisposed to favour the private automobile. They are biased towards cars and against pedestrians, cyclists, public transport and railways. In a word, they engage in ‘carism’.

This bias is no more evident than in the ways that political and legal systems uphold a culture of complacency and turn a blind eye to carnage on the roads. According to World Health Organization statistics (which are under-estimates) about 1.3 million people die annually around the world from motor vehicle collisions. These statistics are mind-boggling and the tip of the iceberg inasmuch as: an estimated 50 million people worldwide suffer serious injuries each year from motor vehicle collisions; countless others suffer minor injuries; and many more experience near misses.

Are there any other dangers that authorities view with such complacent indifference as traffic deaths and injuries? None spring to mind. Despite the fact that private and commercial motor vehicles are the most injurious forms of transportation to human (and animal) health and safety, they are protected rather than the other way around. Even more troubling is the fact that, if authorities adjudicate blame, they often punish non-motoring, vulnerable victims.

Three recent cases – one in the US state of Georgia, a second in Foshan, China and a third in Toronto, Canada – help to illustrate carism and social injustice. This handful of tragic events reveals how the legal, political, economic and spatial environment is biased towards supporting the domination of private cars and commercial trucks on public roads and against pedestrians and cyclists.

Carism, racism, sexism and class inequality
The bias towards motor vehicles and against pedestrians could hardly be more vividly portrayed than in a 2010 Georgia case in which a prosecutor charged Raquel Nelson with vehicular homicide. She was not driving a vehicle. She was a pedestrian crossing the road with her three children after they had gotten off the bus. Rather than walk 3/10 of a mile to a crosswalk and another 3/10 of a mile back – she had packages with her, as well as her children – she tried to cross the street to her apartment building right across from where the bus let her off. When her 4-year-old son broke away from her and ran into the road, he was struck and killed by a driver who had been drinking.


The man driving the car, Jerry Guy, fled the scene after the collision but later admitted to being the driver. He had previously been convicted of two hit-and-runs in 1997. He served six months in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

What happened to Raquel Nelson? According to court records, the state charged her with three misdemeanors: second-degree vehicular homicide, failing to cross at a crosswalk and reckless conduct. An all-white jury convicted Nelson (an African-American). Although the prosecution did not recommend jail time, each count carried a potential sentence of one year in jail -- for a total of 36 months.

Nelson’s case attracted national attention from parents, the NAACP and transportation advocates who argued that she was being unfairly pursued for trying to cross the road as would any other pedestrian. In July 2011, Nelson obtained a victory of sorts. A judge sentenced her to 12 months of probation and 40 hours of community service and also said she could seek a new trial.

CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront program picked up the story on November 14, 2011, the day that Nelson’s lawyer filed an appeal to drop all charges. Burnett referred to the story as tough because of the situation where crosswalks don’t exist and busy roads run through poor neighbourhoods. The CNN legal contributor Paul Callan said the case is brutal: “Here's this poor young mother who has lost her son, her 4-year-old son run over by a hit-and-run driver and they charged her with vehicular homicide because she wasn't crossing at the crosswalk”. While Burnett wondered about racism being at work with a white jury convicting a black woman, Callan replied: “To me, it's more carism than racism” and explained, “The Georgia suburbs are built for the automobile. You know, they are big roads. They are fast roads. No crosswalks, minimal crosswalks. And she's someone who is poor. She relies on public transportation”. 



This case where a mother loses her child to a speeding car and in her grief is charged with vehicular homicide even though she was not the driver suggests that something is terribly wrong with the justice system. Callan’s use of the term carism helps to reveal how judicial and governing authorities privilege the automobile system at the expense of other forms of transportation. Municipalities continue to build roads with inadequate pedestrian crossings or sidewalks and governments vastly underfund pedestrian safety infrastructure, yet the court pointed the finger at a mother, blaming her for the death of her son on a road that was designed with no regard for pedestrian safety. As a poor African-American woman, she was caught in the intertwining forces of sexism, racism, classism and carism of an unjust judicial and political-economic system.

Motorized traffic is lethal to children
A collision that took place in China similarly illustrates how motor vehicles dominate other forms of mobility, resulting in terrible consequences. In October 2011, a child’s traffic injury, which was caught on video, was so shocking that it touched millions of people in China and reached the western media. In a local market street, a toddler, Yueyue, was struck by a hit-and-run driver of a delivery van and then run over by another hit-and-run driver. As she lay bleeding on the road, 18 passersby ignored her. Eventually a woman rescued the two-year old and called to her parents who were working in their nearby shop. They had not noticed that their daughter had wandered onto the street. She survived only to die a week later.

The media asked what this incident reveals about the soul of China in which passersby ignored the injured child. The case raises questions also about how private motorized traffic in every part of the world is taking over market streets and public space, and endangering pedestrians and children without adequate safeguards.


Because of carism, it is up to pedestrians and cyclists to accommodate to the risks posed by the car. Parents are forced to be forever vigilant and keep their children off streets and inside contained areas. As a result, children lose their independence and freedom to explore. When tragic collisions occur, a culture of complacent indifference flourishes.

Death and complacency
In Toronto, a recent collision between a cyclist and truck provides yet another example of how authorities are biased towards motor vehicles. On November 7, 2011, cyclist Jenna Morrison and pregnant mother of a 5 year old tragically collided with a truck turning right on a major Toronto street. Morrison was pulled under the truck and crushed beneath its back wheels.

According to the Globe and Mail, the incidence of death and injury as a result of collisions with heavy vehicles in Canadian urban areas is high: from 2004 to 2006, 77 pedestrians and 24 cyclists died and 1,410 people were injured from such collisions. Even though a 2010 report commissioned by Transport Canada shows that cyclist and pedestrian deaths and serious injuries involving trucks declined in Europe since side guards were introduced on the sides of most trucks in the late 1980s, Canada has not required side guards.

Parents in Canada who have lost children in similar collisions have been campaigning many years for mandatory safety guards. NDP MP Olivia Chow has tried three times to introduce a private member’s bill urging the federal government to require side guards. In 2006, the City of Toronto requested that Transport Canada mandate truck side guards. Prominent Toronto neurosurgeon Charles Tator has called for the federal and provincial governments to look more closely at the issue.

Transport Canada and the Canadian Trucking Alliance have so far been unimpressed with the research evidence and calls for action, upholding a culture of complacency about pedestrian and cyclist deaths. They claim that the evidence about side guards improving safety must be iron clad before they take action, even though the economic cost of side guards is not high and would clearly save lives. One would imagine that if any evidence suggests that truck safety guards are effective, responsible politicians would insist they be made mandatory. And some politicians are, just not enough.

Carism and social injustice
Here are three cases (and there are so many more) of families and children who have lost loved ones as a result of how motor vehicles dominate the roads. Such tragedies, which occur regularly and predictably, are not ‘accidents’. They could have been prevented yet the social and political responses to them are disturbingly inadequate and unjust. Carism, as a bias towards the automobile, helps to explain why authorities punish non-motoring, vulnerable victims, fail to protect children in the public space of roads, and are extraordinarily complacent in their indifference towards preventing traffic deaths and injuries.

Motor vehicle injuries and their consequences are only the tip of the iceberg of how the automobile dominates and diminishes daily life. People experience near misses as a daily contingency of walking, driving or cycling in a highly trafficked environment and must go to great lengths to avoid threats to themselves and others for whom they are responsible.

More generally, as the dominant mode of travel, the automobile disenfranchises those who do not drive whether due to age, ability, income, lack of opportunity, or choice. Carism has undermined what it means to be a citizen and needs to be challenged as a form of social injustice. If alternative kinds of mobility to the automobile had adequate public and political support, they would be far more egalitarian and accessible for all ages and walks of life.

Arlene Tigar McLaren is Professor Emerita at Simon Fraser University

She is the co-author of:
Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

For links to referenced stories or the author:

Georgia, Beijing, Toronto

Arlene Tigar McLaren

Debt, Human Rights & Nature

by Rex Weyler


This article was kindly shared by Rex Weyler, author and founding member of Greenpeace. A link to Rex's blog is at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to his Deep Green Column for Greenpeace International. This article was written last year but has much to say about current protests on the 1% and nature.

“For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider,
every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.” Martin Luther

In January, the bankers and corporate executives at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, presented a plan to create US$100-trillion (about 700-billion Euros or 7-trillion Chinese Yuan) in new international debt.

During the last decade, world debt nearly doubled from $57-trillion to $109-trillion. Banks created “toxic assets,” “mortgage derivatives,” and “default swaps” without substantial collateral to back them up. These schemes made bankers very rich, but helped collapse the world financial system 18 months ago. Public taxpayers have since bailed these bankers out with about $11-trillion in new debt. Now the financiers want more.

As some economies slightly recovered, energy prices rose to trigger inflation, slowing real recovery. Thus, the WEF bankers published “More Credit, Fewer Crises,” proposing that the world double its debt once again to $210 trillion by 2020. This debt would be over 3-times the entire world annual economy.

This debt, the printing of new money based on nothing substantial, has profound impacts on society and nature through resource inflation, the rising costs of food and energy, conflict, fraud, and ecological destruction.

Out of thin Air

These bankers are not proposing to loan their money to the world. Rather, they propose creating new money out of thin air, likely through International Monetary Fund (IMF) “Special Drawing Rights,” a synthetic currency beyond the control of any sovereign nation. By loaning currency rights to national treasuries, the bankers create $100-trillion with a few computer keyboard strokes. Then, they loan the fabricated money, collect interest payments, and demand the principle back in real money from the debtors. It’s a lucrative scheme if you’re on the inside.

What bankers call “Credit” the rest of world experiences as “Debt” owed to the bankers.

Interest payments alone on $100-trillion debt (at a modest 5% annual rate) comes to $400 billion per month. However, as the “Drawing Rights” pass down the chain of international, national, and local banks to become money in the hands of enterprising citizens, the total interest and fees to banks will be higher, perhaps 9 or 10 percent.

Furthermore, banks expect the principal back. To retire these debts over the next 20 years, the world’s borrowing enterprises would have to pay the bankers about $1-trillion per month. At the end of 20 years, bankers would have received about $140-trillion in interest payments and fees, plus the $100-trillion principal that they originally created out of thin air: $240 trillion profit (175-trillion Euro, 1.5 quadrillion Yuan) for creating money out of nothing.

The authors of the WEF debt proposal are executives from JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Rothschild & Cie, Deutsche Bank, Morocco’s Attijariwafa Bank, Russia’s Sberbank, China’s International Capital Corp., Shell Oil, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, BNP Paribas, and other international bankers, corporate capital funds, and national sovereign funds. These firms naturally stand to profit from the plan.

Even if some loans pass through the gauntlet of fraud and corruption to reach enterprising citizens, who create useful products and services for their communities, a harsh social and biophysical impact remains for communities and environments around the world. The quarter-quadrillion dollars that would be paid back to the banks becomes an endless debt burden for every project and every nation.

In the end, this debt-creation represents a massive transfer of wealth from global citizens to the world’s richest people. However, there is more.

The cost of debt

Forty years ago, Greenpeace was founded to campaign for peace and ecology. Today, Greenpeace continues those campaigns while working with communities around the world to retain civil rights and local autonomy. Massive debt undermines each of these social values:

1. Inflation:

Since this money is illusory, created from nothing, it dilutes all world currency and makes all citizens poorer through inflation. We have seen this in the last few months, as food and energy inflation has soared, caused by the last $11-trillion of debt imposed on the world to save the banks from economic collapse. The proposed $100-trillion of new money would have ten-times the inflation impact.

Debt causes inflation, inflation acts as a tax on the poor, and this leads to civil unrest. The Commodity Research Bureau food price index rose 44% this year and 22% in the last two months. In December, food prices in India rose 16% in three days. In Indonesia, rice prices rose 30% last year. In relatively rich Western Europe and North America families spend 12-15% of their income on food. In Egypt last year, families spent 40% of their income on food. The civil uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt began as food inflation crises. Eastern Europe, China, Jordan and Sudan face similar food-inflation unrest.

Inflation, linked to the creation of un-backed money and debt, taxes the poor most severely. We will discover that debt also leads to the depletion of resources, soil erosion, water shortages and other environmental impacts, which further advance inflation and the debt cycle.



2. Ecological destruction:

Nations must account for both private and public debt because during economic crisis, companies often default, and private debt becomes public. Many countries now possess public and private debt three to four times their annual gross economy. The UK debt is 6-times its gross economy and Iceland 12-times. Massive debts put pressure on countries to expand their economies. But they are caught in a vicious cycle. Debt depresses growth, so nations relax environmental laws to increase industrial projects, corporate profits, and tax revenues to pay off the debt.

Debt pressure drives nations deeper into the ocean after oil and gas and deeper into wilderness for minerals. Desperate nations bulldoze forests for cash crops, dam rivers and burn coal for energy, open parks to mining and logging, and obliterate national treasures to create cash to pay interest on debts.

In Canada, where I live, our public and private debt stands at about 2.5 times our annual economic production. To grow our economy at all costs, our government opened the boreal plains to tar sands production, reduced environmental standards, and created one of the world’s most ecologically destructive industries. The tar sands project devastates local indigenous communities, drains aquifers, pollutes groundwater, destroys rare habitats, fills lakes with black sludge, and heats the atmosphere with low-net-energy hydrocarbons.

Environmental destruction makes the debt cycle ever more vicious, as depleted environments provide less economic potential and rob indigenous and rural communities of self sufficiency. Governments may then find it expedient to suppress angry citizens, who have lost their local economic base.


3. Human rights:

A large portion of international debt goes to corrupt dictators, who restrain public resistance by suppressing human rights. In Odius Debt, Patricia Adams documents the human rights impact of debt. One-third of World Bank loans, over 65 years, ended up in the private hands of dictators and corrupt officials through bid-rigging, bribes, kickbacks, and outright theft.

Twenty to thirty percent of all developing nation debt over the last fifty years has gone to dictators such as Zaire’s Mobutu Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Indonesia’s Suharto, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov. The banks often justify loans to tyrants because they are “allies” of rich western nations. Mobutu stole billions of dollars loaned to Zaire; he jailed, tortured, and killed political opposition; and enslaved his own citizens. When International Monetary Fund (IMF) agent Edwin Blumenthal reported the loan theft and “sordid and pernicious corruption,” the IMF ignored him and awarded Zaire the largest African loan in history. Patricia Adams estimates that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos pocketed one-third of all loans to the Philippines during their regime. Once these dictators fall, the banks expect their victims to repay the loans.

Loans to corrupt dictators will likely get worse with the new SDR credits, set to be awarded by the IMF without even basic safeguards. The Wall Street Journal warns that “all governments qualify, including those that lock political dissidents in dungeons and steal from their own people.”

Cephas Lumina with the UN Human Rights Council, reports that private “Vulture funds” buy the defaulted debts of poor nations “at deeply discounted prices,” and then seek “repayment of the full value through litigation, seizure of assets and political pressure.” In the last ten years, 12 nations designated as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries have been served with 54 lawsuits by such debt profiteers.

Some African nations spend 40% of government budgets on debt service, draining money from much needed health and education, which average about 14% of budgets. Debt breeds poverty.

4. War:

We can see that the current structure of international debt creates inflation, poverty, fraud, oppression, and environmental destruction. Finally, through currency and resource crises, debt fuels war. The world, while increasing debt, spends over $2-trillion each year on military and warfare, exacerbating the vicious debt cycle.

Sudan dictator Omar Al-Bashir, for example, received loans from the World Bank, China, and others, helping finance Sudan’s 20-year civil war, causing 2 million deaths and 4 million refugees. Meanwhile, Al-Bashir’s army bombed innocent villages, tortured and massacred opposition, and kidnapped citizens, particularly in the rich oil-producing regions of Sudan.

The U.S., meanwhile, spends about $12 billion per month to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, to secure oil fields and pipeline routes. European nations, Russia, China, and others have waged war to “protect national interests,” particularly dwindling resources. These large countries also arm the dictators that hold their debt, enabling more war and bloodshed.

Alternatives exist

Into this powder keg of corruption, violence, war, oppression, fraud, and ecological devastation, a few wealthy bankers want to inject another $100 trillion of debt burden on the world. Their scheme would not create “less crisis” as they claim, but more crisis, more financial bubbles, more corruption, more dictators, more war, more ecological destruction, inflation and poverty.

Alternatives exist. The poor nations of the world indeed need and deserve support to help develop their economies that have been wracked by colonialism, war, and resource plunder. The UN should manage international debt, base all money on real assets, and return profits to the human community. Loans can be designed to support local enterprise, solutions that benefit local communities, sustainable farming that protects soil, and localized self-sufficiency. The current international banking schemes undermine these community values.

Good economics will be good for everyone, not just enrich the wealthiest people on Earth.

================

Links in this essay:

WEF, “More Credit, Fewer Crises”
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70J6K520110120

Commodity Research Bureau, Foodstuffs index
http://www.crbtrader.com/data.asp?page=chart&page=chart&sym=BWY00


food prices in India
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/vegetable-food-inflation-spikes-a-teary-eyed-govt-blames-onions-74522?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ndtv/Lsg

Odius Debt, Patricia Adams
http://journal.probeinternational.org/odious-debts/read-odious-debts-the-book/

Rex Weyler: The Prius Fallacy

This article was kindly shared by Rex Weyler, author and founding member of Greenpeace. A link to Rex's blog is at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to his Deep Green Column for Greenpeace International.

This chart shows gasoline consumption per capita declining in Cascadia – Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Such graphs are sometimes used to support the idea that we are gaining transportation efficiency with new cars such as the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid. People point out that “switching to a Prius” could cut gas use by 70% and so forth, which would certainly be a good thing.

However, to analyse this correctly, one must make a full accounting both of energy use in general and the specific “solution” proposed. Will buying a Prius or other hybrid help stop global warming and save the planet? Let’s have a look. Here are some of the factors:

1. The above graph shows oil consumption per capita declining in a particular region (Cascadia) since the mid-1970s. This may simply reflect the fact that per capita oil consumption has declined globally since 1979, the peak year of global per capita oil use. This has been known for some time. Lester Brown mentions this in his 1981 book, Building a Sustainable Society. I have done my own calculations, confirming that 1979 stands as the year of peak petroleum use per capita. Total oil consumption increased, however, since we have added some 3 billion people to the planet since the mid-1970s.

2. Note the sharpest decline here is approximately 1976 - 82, which correlates with the OPEC oil embargo and the ensuing global recession. The decline in this particular graph also correlates with a severe Washington State recession in the early 1980s.

3. The recent decline on this chart reflects the fact that global oil production has been flat since 2005, so global per capita use is declining faster than ever, since population continues to grow at about 1.1% per year. The most recent steep decline in oil consumption per person correlates with recent oil price increases and now a global recession.

4. Global oil production has peaked, so this decline in petroleum use per capita will continue independent of all technical efficiencies gained in car design.

Thus, there remains considerable doubt that this chart's shape (or future shape) can be correlated to Priuses and other automobile designs. But there is more.

Full energy accounting

To determine if buying a new Prius (or any other mechanical efficiency) reduces global petroleum consumption or carbon emissions (and if so, by how much), one must perform a full life-cycle energy and carbon accounting for the Prius.

There are three classes of energy that a vehicle consumes in its lifetime: 1. “Embodied energy,” required by material mining, manufacture, shipping, and automobile infrastructure; 2. vehicle operation, and 3. disposal & recycling.

Depending on the model, 10-40% of the energy an automobile uses in its lifetime is “embodied energy” consumed before it is purchased to build the car alone. For a Prius, the manufactured embodied energy is about 25% of the vehicle’s lifetime energy use. On top of this, one must consider automobile infrastructure. No studies that I know of have yet allocated the embodied material and energy of the highway, service, and parking infrastructure to individual vehicles, but for a full accounting, this must be considered. Our highway system is not just a financial subsidy to the automobile industry, it is also an energy cost subsidy, the energy to mine, move, and assemble the resources to build the highways.

The actual energy cost of a new vehicle – hybrid or pure gasoline style – depends on the vehicle lifetime and the full materials and energy costs.

New high-tech steels and alloys used in a Prius require more embodied energy to produce and to recycle than conventional steel. Other factors include high-energy-use products such as batteries and electric motors.

The point is, basing a car purchase decision solely on fuel economy will not tell you the full energy cost of that vehicle.

The critical factor is total throughput of material and energy. A new car of any kind requires mining, shipping, manufacture of exotic alloys, batteries, plastic, shipping of parts, assembly, and finally, shipping the vehicle. A new Prius equals more demand on the planet, less perhaps than a Hummer, but orders of magnitude more than a bicycle or even a reasonable public transport system shared among millions of commuters.

Here are some other significant factors

5. Exported emissions: A Prius is not likely manufactured in the region it is purchased (even if some part of it is). Most of the Prius' embodied energy is accounted for around the world in mining, manufacture, and shipping of the materials, parts, and the finished car. On a global scale, North America has exported a large portion of its carbon emissions. So, for example, to accurately compare “China's” emissions to US or Canadian emissions, we must consider the portion of China (or India, or Mexico) emissions that are actually exported North American emissions, because we are consuming the products associated with the energy use that created the emissions. A product's total energy cost is global.

6. More cars. Any new car – Prius, Hummer, Smart Car, whatever – is one more car that the biosphere has to supply with materials, energy, and waste sinks. The old car is now a cheap option for someone down the economic line. Now there are two cars instead of one. The more ecological car is the one you already have. The most ecological car is no car. Get a bicycle, or walk. But buying a Prius is a little like recycling on the Titanic.

7. Rebound effect: Historically, mechanical efficiencies gained by industries have not translated into less throughput of material and energy, but more. Why? Because when we gain efficiencies, consumer items become cheaper, so more people consume them. This well-known phenomenon in economics is known as the efficiency “rebound effect.” It may appear counter-intuitive, but industrial efficiency results in more consumption, not less. The “gain” is not given back to the earth, but rather it goes to (a) corporate profits and (b) consumer savings, rarely, or never, to less consumption.

A modern example is the fact that computers never saved paper as we once believed they might. Computers led to greater paper consumption. In 1950, humanity used about 50 million tons of paper per year. Now, in the computer age, we use 250 million tons per year. Computers made it cheaper launch more activities that consumed more paper. Typical rebound phenomenon.

And then, there is still more to consider:

8. Substitute consumption .. The profits and savings earned by efficiency are used for other material and energy consumption. The corporate managers get bigger bonuses that go into private jets, yachts, summer homes, cars (Priuses!) for their kids, and so forth, all costing energy. Consumer savings go into the same types of things. Saved money from the more efficient car, is spent on holidays, a second car .. more consumption.

Historically, all efficiency gains translate into greater aggregate consumption. Why?

because our economics is dependent upon consumption, not restraint. When the economy discovers an efficiency, it takes the gain as profit. We don’t return the gain to our abused planet.

And since humanity is in aggregate overshoot, all these efficiency gains that yielded greater consumption have increased human overshoot, not reduced it.

There is much more to fully accounting for our so-called global warming “solutions,” but the above outline describes the critical point: To analyse a “solution” one must do the full accounting. If we account for only a part of the process, we are easily misled into false solutions.

For example, science has known for over a century that industrial CO2 in the atmosphere would cause global warming. Svante Arrhenius wrote about it in the 19th century. James Lovelock had the data in the 1960s. Nevertheless, after decades of science, protest, innovation, international negotiations, speeches, handshakes, and treaties, human CO2 emissions continue to increase at about 3% per year. Our emissions have showed not a waver of slowing down (except by recession, barely). Our “solutions” so far haven't added up to anything remotely promising. The entire Kyoto process was probably a net carbon emitter just in the airplane travel. Will the Prius, or windmill, or next technical solution do the trick? Not without a full ecosystem accounting.

This full accounting appeared as one of the main points from Herman Daly's work, as well as the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Howard Odum, Hazel Henderson, Donella Meadows, Robert Costanza, Charles Hall, and other biophysical economists, who pioneered this common sense approach. The critical factors were worked out long ago, and the accounting is not particularly complex, it is just inconvenient for our industrial producers to face, and few consumers want to pay full cost if they can avoid it.

Consumption drives our economic system, so until we convert this system to something biophysically accountable, a system that rewards restraint, human enterprise will likely keep making these sorts of miscalculations about solutions to climate change and ecological destruction.

A good solution

In 1980, farmer/author Wendell Berry wrote an essay, “Solving for Pattern,” that outlined the features of “a good solution.” I consider this essay on the A-list for the 21st century. He showed that many problems we face today are the consequences of previous “solutions” that focused on an isolated, short-term gain. Toxic pollution, dying rivers, and nuclear waste provide examples.

Using farming examples, Berry demonstrated how a good solution preserves the “integrity of pattern,” improves balance and symmetry, and addresses the health of the whole system.

A false solution treats symptoms and only in a narrow focus. All problems are parts of a whole, and all systems are contained in larger systems. A good solution maintains the integrity of the larger systems.

In this way, a good solution solves multiple problems, and avoids “magic bullet” solutions that fail to account for their full impact. For example, a nuclear “solution” to an energy need creates new problems: radioactive fuel transport, public health, waste, security, decommissioning, accidents, insurance costs, evacuation plans, radiation exposure, and so forth. “In a biological pattern,” Berry writes, “the exploitive means and motives of industrial economics are immediately destructive and ultimately suicidal.” A genuine solution does not pollute or destroy a watershed, for example, to mine gold or generate power.

Real, integrated solutions tend to localize, accept limits, and use resources at hand. However, genuine solutions exist only in actual proof and cannot to be expected from absentee owners and absentee experts. People who will benefit from success or suffer the consequences of failure should guide local solutions with real work that fits the scale of their communities. Genuine solutions appear in harmony with a specific place, maintained with local knowledge. A solution, says Berry, “should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another.” The scale of a solution proves critical. Solutions that require massive, expensive, imported infrastructure often cause more problems than they solve.

Healthy, integrated solutions distinguish biophysical order from mechanical order. A mechanistic plan often works “on paper” by ignoring related systems. In crafting solutions, consider wisdom, not just calculation. Well-designed solutions maintain natural, organic pattern. Human communities exist only within large-scale layers of organic systems, with natural cycles and laws of material and energy exchange.

Systemic solutions satisfy multiple criteria. They consider form as well as function; they are healthy and pleasant to live around. On the other hand, large scale industrial solutions often create toxic waste, degraded environments, depressing work, designed obsolescence, and so forth, all in the pursuit of solving one single criteria: wealth for the owners of the firm. The service or product provided is a secondary purpose. The stated and actual primary purpose of modern corporations is the consolidation of cash wealth.

Avoid “going for broke” with single plan that could have large-scale negative impacts, but rather, design many small-scale solutions that can scale up and down, prove out, adjust for those that don’t work well, and augment those that do. Berry writes: “to have a lot of power should not make it impossible to use only a little.”

A good solution does not assume “More is better.” The growth solutions that do make this assumption destroy communities, families, cultures, and environments. Large-scale, centralized solutions allow wealth to be concentrated, but do not necessarily achieve optimum, systemic health. “The illusion can be maintained,” Berry points out, “only so long as the consequences can be ignored.” Thus, a series of village scale power systems that can be operated by village skills is more stable and more sustainable than a massive corporate industrial power system with invasive environmental disruption and long transmission lines that cut through wilderness ecosystems.

Restraint above all

Human solutions do not endure without human input, energy, organization, maintenance, and so forth. Wendell Barry points out that the integrity of human artifacts depends on human virtues: accurate memory, rigorous observation, insight, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity, and restraint. Here Berry emphasized “restraint above all.” We must learn to resist the temptation to “solve” problems by accepting “trade-offs” and bequeathing those to posterity. A good solution, Barry wrote three decades ago, is “in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.”

All proposed “solutions” to our ecological challenges should be assessed using criteria such as these.

The Action Plan for reversing overshoot in a biophysical system is fairly simple: Shrink and restore:

1. reduce consumption ( in nature this is done by limiting population, and learning to manage on limited nutrient, material, energy throughput). Growth is not a solution for this.

2. Restore the ecosystem, or at least don't destroy the natural ecosystem. (In nature, this is done through symbiosis). We need to reduce our ecological impact, not grow it.



Bonus comment from Dr. Albert Bartlett:

"Smart growth is better than dumb growth, but they both destroy the environment."

More growth equals more well-to-do people, more homeless people, more employed people, more unemployed people, higher average salaries, more people living below the poverty line, more traffic congestion, higher parking fees, more school crowding, more crime, more unhappy neighborhoods, more expensive government, more tax revenue, higher taxes, more fiscal problems for state and local governments, more tax limitation measures, more air and water pollution, higher utility costs, less reliable utility service, less democracy, more congestion on busy city streets and crowded highways, more unmanageable costs of maintaining public infrastructures, higher food costs and more destruction of the environment.

These problems can’t be solved by a nickel’s worth of “Smart Growth” tacked onto to billions of dollars worth of urban sprawl.

After maturity, continued growth is either obesity or cancer."

================
Links:
Rex Weyler’s Ecolog
www.http://rexweyler.com/blog-placeholder/

Rex's Deep Green Column can be found at Greenpeace International
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/deep-green/

How I Ditched my Fridge & Air Conditioner in Texas, Engaged in Civil Disobedience, all during Ramadan

This article was generously shared by Murtaza Nek.

Hi readers!

I don't know how you discovered this blog. If you're like me, you decided to Google "living without a refrigerator". After some reading, I emailed Andrea. Soon after, I started trying to wean myself off my fridge, and Andrea asked me to write something up about my transition. But my story is about more than unplugging my fridge! So here I go... here I present the month where I became an activist and began to boycotting nonrenewable Texas energy.

I live in South Texas, which was experiencing record-high temperatures last July. I preferred not to use my A/C, but when the temperatures were consistently in the high 90's Fahrenheit (high 30's Celcius), I kept the A/C on all day and kept it off during the night.
Photo: Tim DeChristopher
In late July, I got an email about a heroic environmentalist, Tim DeChristopher, who in 2008 attempted to derail an illegitimate US government bidding for public lands. Not surprisingly, the lands were to be given to oil and gas companies that sought to exploit the land for profit at the expense of the local community and the environment. He posed as a bidder (the famous Bidder 70), and won bids for a lot more land than he could pay for. The email indicated that he was sentenced to two years in jail for financial fraud.

The email really hit me. It was shocking to discover yet another low the Bush administration would sink to by selling off lands to oil and gas companies back in 2008, inspiring that Tim had the guts to do something so bold but risky to oppose it, and intimidating since I realized that if we are to pursue true climate justice, a lot of people are going to need to do difficult things, possibly risk arrest and jail, to really bring attention to the issues at hand... because somehow, the messages delivered by scientists and activists, and now ever more increasingly, by nature itself, aren't enough for the masses.

I was inspired and motivated, but scared! I wasn't ready to do what Tim did, nor was I bold enough to have the courage that Tim had to be able to say, on the day of his sentencing: "The people who are committed to fighting for a livable future will not be discouraged or intimidated by anything that happens here today."

Contemplating this, I looked around my room, irritated that I live only a passive environmental life and contribute to the profits of unsustainable electric companies by consuming energy with my AC, fridge, and other things. Renewable energy is at 6% in Texas, so one is trapped supporting non-renewable energy here.

From Tim's inspiration, I stopped using my A/C, and lo and behold, it wasn't so bad! I bore temperatures in the high 90's and even low 100's Fahrenheit (high 30's/low 40's Celcius), simply by keeping my doors open to take advantage of the breeze! But the fridge... I didn't know how. That's when I wrote Andrea:

"I wanted to say THANK YOU for your blog! It was so helpful and motivating! I've just recently heard about the prison sentence of Tim DeChristopher, and was reminded of the urgent necessity for uncomfortably difficult action for climate change, but unfortunately felt that I still lack the courage to engage in civil disobedience. Thinking about how I'd like to hopefully go off the grid, I googled "living without a refrigerator" and came across your blog. Reading it was for me one of the first steps towards attempting to go off the grid, thus doing a small part to further my carbon-neutrality."

She encouraged me with her reply:

"Ideally, what we each do may be difficult but should not be overwhelming. Compact fridges or going off completely have been a good way for me to get involved, while getting more involved in activism."

I started making preparations to turn off my fridge. I expected it wouldn't be too hard, because as it happens I live alone, and hardly use my fridge. Furthermore Ramadan was about to start, and my local mosque provides free dinners for the month so I didn't have to worry about cooking. I unplugged in August, and for the first few days I kept the fridge off all day except for 5-7 hours. Every few days, though, I needed to store leftover trays of food from dinners from the mosque, so I needed to keep the fridge on continuously.

In the middle of Ramadan I received a call to engage in civil disobedience in Washington to draw attention to the environmentally disastrous tar sands in Alberta, Canada. The call also urged us to stop a Canadian company called TransCanada from building a 1,700-mile (2,700km) pipeline from the tar sands in Alberta, through Montana, and all the way to Texas, with dangerous consequences all the way down the line. So far, the US Government seems inclined to approve the pipeline.
Photo: Murtaza Nek
The Alberta tar sands region happens to be one of the largest pools of potential greenhouse carbon in the world. With the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere, the expansion of the tar sands means it's over for us as a species, for the climate, essentially for life as we know it. The organizers called for a 15-day protest in front of the White House in Washington, DC, one in which the protestors would be risking arrest. See www.tarsandsaction.org for more details. By the way, for those of you in Canada, there is a similar such one-day action happening in Ottawa tomorrow! For further information, see this link: http://tarsandsaction.org

Long story short, I thank God for bringing me from the point where I was writing Andrea about how I thought something needs to be done, to signing up to participate in the White House protests only a few weeks later, to unplugging my fridge, to protesting and subsequently getting arrested on Monday August 29. I thereafter returned, more resolved to do greater things in pursuit of climate justice.

Back from DC, it turns out that I might be braver than I thought, my fridge is presently off, Ramadan's over, and the rest of life is before me. And as far as fridge-ditching goes, I'm no longer getting free food from my mosque, so now the *real* challenge of going fridge-less begins. Let's see what happens next.

The Worlds Biggest Carbon Bomb: Canadian Tar Sands

And the fuses that threaten to set it off
 

This article was kindly shared by Rex Weyler, author and founding member of Greenpeace. A link to Rex's blog is at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to his Deep Green Column for Greenpeace International.

====================
 
Three long fuses lead back to the world’s biggest carbon bomb: The Canadian Tar Sands. The fuses are pipelines – existing and proposed – that run from the black sludge lakes and devastated landscape of northern Alberta, Canada to marine ports where oil producers hope to ship tar sands crude oil to world energy markets.
Tar Sands Before and After, photo by Peter Essick

Releasing the ancient tar sands carbon into Earth’s atmosphere threatens every man, woman, and child on Earth as well as every other creature. NASA climatologist Dr. James Hansen has warned that if the tar sands is fully exploited, “it is game-over for Earth’s climate.” The carbon contained in the tar sands is enough to send Earth’s atmosphere into runaway heating, releasing ancient methane and killing sea life and forests, so that humanity could not reverse the heating regardless of what we do.

The fuses to this carbon bomb, the pipelines and tankers, include:
 
1. Keystone XL: An expansion of the existing Keystone pipeline from Canada, through the central US to Port Arthur, Texas, where the crude oil can be refined or loaded onto oil tankers for the global market.
 
2. Enbridge pipeline, a proposed route over the Rocky Mountains, across Canadian boreal forests, wild watersheds, and indigenous territory to the marine port at Kitimat, British Columbia for export. And:

3. Kinder-Morgan TMX Trans-Mountain pipeline, also over the Rocky Mountains, into the port of Vancouver, British Columbia. This pipeline/tanker route is already operating and Kinder Morgan has applied for an expansion. In 2010, 71 large oil tankers shipped tar sands crude oil through the Port of Vancouver and the Georgia Strait to global markets.
 
These three pipelines threaten to detonate the world’s biggest carbon bomb, but they face resistance from indigenous nations, rural communities, farmers, unions, scientists, and private citizens in Canada and the United States.
 
Resistance

This summer, in front of the U.S. White House, police arrested 1,252 citizens – including Athabasca Chipewyan indigenous leader Gitz Deranger, NASA meteorologist Dr. James Hansen, writers Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben, actress Daryl Hannah, and Greenpeace USA director Phil Radford – demanding that US President Barak Obama refuse the Keystone pipeline expansion. Nine Nobel Peace Prize winners – including the Dalai Lama, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Iran’s Shirin Ebadi – signed a letter urging U.S. President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone proposal.

Two major US unions joined the protest. James Little, president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) issued a statement opposing the pipeline expansion. “We call on the State Department NOT to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline or to take any actions that lead to the further extraction of Tar Sands oil [and] impacts to groundwater resources from pipeline spills [and] the high levels of GHG emissions... The Tar Sands has destroyed vast areas of boreal forest and inflicted havoc on local communities…We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil.”

Athabasca Chipewyan leader Gitz Deranger declared, “I have seen the devastation of our environment and people's health with increased cancer deaths… If Obama approves this pipeline, it would only lead to more of our people needlessly dying.”

“A movement is being born right here in front of the White House,” said Bill McKibben, 350.org founder, who helped organize the protest. “We're at the White House because Keystone is the pipeline Americans have a real hope of stopping, because our president must give his specific approval. Tar sands mining has wrecked native land in Alberta; endangers farms, wild areas, and aquifers along its prospective route; and poses a danger to the whole planet. Keystone XL is one of three pipeline routes that lead back to the world’s biggest carbon bomb, so we’re working in solidarity with the indigenous people and other citizens in Canada.”

Canadian pipelines and tankers 

Last year, in British Columbia, 61 Indigenous nations signed an historic “Fraser River Declaration,” promising to stop a proposed Enbridge pipeline from Alberta to the port at Kitimat, B.C. Chief Jackie Thomas of Saik’uz Nation declared, “Enbridge has spills all over North America… We refuse to be next.”

Enbridge attempted to purchase indigenous consent with a “partnership” deal worth millions of dollars, but in September, the Yinka Dene Alliance – Nadleh Whut’en, Takla Lake, Wet’suwet’en, Saik’uz and Nak’azdli nations – turned down the Enbridge offer, which they called a “desperate and disrespectful attempt to buy our support for this pipeline.” Chief Larry Nooski of the Nadleh Whut’en said, “The Enbridge pipeline would risk an oil spill into our rivers and lands that would destroy our food supply, our livelihoods, and our cultures… There is not any amount of money that compares to the possible damage should an oil spill happen.”

The proposed pipeline would deliver tar sands crude oil to tankers. From Kitimat, these tankers would travel 150 kilometers down narrow Douglas Channel and around coastal islands, through treacherous waters and severe tidal currents, in a region of extreme weather. Thirty-four years ago, in 1977, Greenpeace joined an alliance with fishermen and the Gitga’at indigenous nation at Hartley Bay, B.C. to blockade an oil consortium vessel at the mouth of this channel. Four years later, Greenpeace vessels blockaded an oil tanker entering Georgia Strait.

The oil companies have persisted, but the indigenous nations of western Canada have taken up the challenge, insisting that this pipeline will never be built.

Floating oil

The third main pipeline from the tar sands runs over the Rocky Mountains into the Port of Vancouver, B.C. This Trans-Mountain (TMX) pipeline, owned by US company Kinder Morgan, is already operational.

In 2005, Kinder Morgan bought BC’s Terasen Pipelines, part of a privatization scheme by the BC Liberal government to sell public and natural assets. Kinder Morgan received approval to increase pipeline capacity to 260,000 barrels per day and began turning Vancouver into a tar sands shipping port. In 2007, without any public or indigenous consultation, tar sands crude oil began leaving Vancouver on Panamax and Aframax oil tankers. The US company has applied to dredge Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet to make way for 1-million-barrel Suezmax tankers.

Company founders Richard Kinder and Bill Morgan are ex-Enron billionaires. Enron swindled some $11 billion from their own shareholders. Richard Kinder was chief counsel for Enron from its founding in 1985 until 1996, when he received a $30 million retirement package and left Enron to start his pipeline company. He is now worth over $2.4-billion. The company has left a trail of oil spills and environmental disasters throughout the US.

The Burrard Inlet is home to three indigenous nations: The Musqueam on the Fraser River, the Squamish along Georgia Strait and Howe Sound coastlines, and the Tsleil-Waututh, the “People of the Inlet.” The Musqueam Nation signed the “Fraser River Declaration,” which declares they will help protect their lands, territories, watersheds, and “the ocean migration routes of Fraser River salmon.”

Rueben George, Sundance Chief and Director of Community Development at Tsleil-Waututh Nation recently told the Vancouver City Council and mayor, who have launched a “green city” project: “We came from these waters… We took care of the Inlet and only took what we needed. How can we be the greenest city when there are oil tankers going through our traditional territory … which we share with every one of you?”

In August, Squamish Elder Robert Nahanee welcomed and blessed a “No Tankers, No Pipelines, No Tar Sands” gathering at the Kinder-Morgan oil port. “We’re going to protect the sacredness of our dear Mother in a good way,” he said, and led a song his ancestors sang when they rescued white settlers from a fire a century ago.

“I’ve been fishing in BC since 1973,” said Canadian fisherman, Ron Fowler, who serves on the Pacific Salmon Commission and as Director of the Area-F Trollers Association on BC’s west coast. “If we get an oil spill anywhere in these waters, it would wipe out every fishery we have, shellfish, salmon, herring, and the plankton that they feed on. There is no sound reason for floating oil and risking our entire coastline.”

Follow the Money

The reason these companies risk oil spills to float oil is simple: Money. Right now, the European price for crude oil is about $24 more per barrel than the North American price. For a million-barrel Suezmax tanker, that price difference is worth $24-million per tanker. For this reason, all tar sands oil is destined for global markets where it will fetch the highest price. Thus, the producers want the pipelines to ports in Texas and British Columbia. It is a deception that this oil will help US or Canadian “domestic energy security.”

Promoters of the Keystone pipeline claim in the US that there is “no global warming impact” to the pipeline because if the US doesn’t approve the Keystone line, they will lose the business to Canadian pipelines. This is another deception. The three pipelines are not mutually exclusive; they are cumulative, and tar sands operators want them all and more. In a Financial Times article, Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert acknowledged the tar sands goal of producing 4-5-million barrels of crude oil per day. To move this oil, the producers need the Canadian pipelines and, according to Liepert, “By 2020, we may need three Keystones.”

Every pipeline or tanker that is stopped represents ancient carbon that stays in the ground and less global heating impact. More pipelines mean more tar sands development, more atmospheric carbon and more heating of Earth’s atmosphere.
 
 ===================
 
List of Groups involved in Stopping the Tar Sands

Tanker Free BC
http://www.tankerfreebc.org/

Wilderness Committee
http://wildernesscommittee.org/tankers

Council of Canadians, Tar Sands Action
http://www.canadians.org/energy/issues/tarsands/

Greenpeace Canada: pipelines and tankers in B.C.
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/campaigns/greatbear/Resources/Fact-shee
ts/Oil-development-in-British-Columbias-coastal-waters/

Four Worlds International
http://www.fwii.net/video/video/show?id=2429082%3AVideo%3A66500&xgs=1&xg_so
urce=msg_share_video

Indigenous Environmental Network http://www.ienearth.org/tarsands.html

Fraser River Declaration http://savethefraser.ca/fraser_declaration.pdf

Rueben George Speaks to Vancouver City Council
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZh3p0mKGws

Squamish elder Robert Nahanee, pipeline/tanker protest
http://www.fwii.net/video/spiritual-leader-robert-nation-no-tankers-in-burr
ard-inlet?commentId=2429082%3AComment%3A70508&xg_source=activity

Fake
http://www.tankerfreebc.org/ "Ethical oil" campaign

Tar Sands Action, US
http://www.tarsandsaction.org/

Tar Sands Action, International
http://stoptarsands.yolasite.com/

Video: Rally Against Oil Tankers and Tar Sands
http://thecanadian.org/k2/item/994-video-rally-against-tar-sands-tankers-in
-vancouver


=======================
Links to writings by Rex Weyler:
Rex Weyler’s Ecolog
www.http://rexweyler.com/blog-placeholder/

Rex's Deep Green Column can be found at Greenpeace International
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/deep-green/
 

Ozone Decision Spikes Arrest Numbers at White House Pipeline Protest

This article is a press release taken from Tar Sands Action organization, for more details, see the bottom.

244 Arrested on Saturday; 1,252 Arrested over the Last Two-Weeks

WASHINGTON– The largest environmental civil disobedience in decades concluded at the White House this morning with organizers pledging to escalate a nationwide campaign to push President Obama to deny the permit for a new tar sands oil pipeline.

“Given yesterday’s baffling cave on ozone standards, the need for a fighting environmental movement has never been more clear,” said Bill McKibben, who spearheaded the protest. “That movement is being born right here in front of the White House and reverberating around the country.”

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has become the most important environmental decision facing President Obama before the 2012 election and sparked nationwide opposition, from Nebraska ranchers to former Obama campaigners. A petition with 617,428 names opposing the pipeline will be delivered to the White House today.

Over the course of the two-week sit-in 1,252 Americans were arrested, including top climate scientists, landowners from Texas and Nebraska, former Obama for America staffers, First Nations leaders from Canada, and notable individuals including Bill McKibben, former White House official Gus Speth, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, actor Daryl Hannah, filmmaker Josh Fox, and author Naomi Klein.


“Back home we are fighting to protect our land and water. This week, we decided to bring that fight to the President’s doorstep,” said Jane Kleeb, Director of BOLD Nebraska, who led a delegation of Nebraskans who were arrested this morning. “We are acting on our values and expect our President to act as well.”

Protest organizers are already planning ways to capitalize on the surge of energy the sit-in has created. In a number of cities, people have already begun to visit Obama for America offices to tell the campaign they will volunteer and donate only after President Obama stands up to Big Oil and denies the Keystone XL permit. Along the pipeline route, groups are preparing to drive turnout to State Department hearings later this month. Thousands are expected to descend on Washington, DC for the final hearing on October 7.

Last week, nearly every major environmental group in the country signed on to a letter demanding President Obama deny the pipeline permit. “There is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone XL pipeline, and those of the protesters being arrested daily outside the White House,” wrote the groups in their letter.

Vice President Al Gore also added his support to the protest, writing, “the leaders of the top environmental groups in the country, the Republican Governor of Nebraska, and millions of people around the country—including hundreds of people who have bravely participated in civil disobedience at the White House—all agree on one thing: President Obama should block a planned pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. The tar sands are the dirtiest source of fuel on the planet.”

Many of the people arrested at the White House wore Obama 2008 buttons as they were taken away in handcuffs.

“We are not going to do President Obama the favor of attacking him,” said McKibben. “We are going to hold the Obama campaign to the standard it set in 2008. Denying this pipeline would send a jolt of electricity through the people that elected this president.”

Executive director of the 1.4 million-member Sierra Club, Michael Brune, warned of the consequences if President Obama approved Keystone XL: “We will see an enthusiasm deficit. We won’t see our members volunteering 20 or 25 or 30 hours a week. We won’t see the same passion and intensity.”

Courtney Hight, a former Youth Vote Director in Florida and White House Council on Environmental Quality staffer, now co-director of the Energy Action Coalition, said,

“Young people mobilized in record numbers in 2008 to elect a leader they believed would fulfill his promise. Yesterday, I was arrested with other young voters to call on President Obama to fulfill his promise and stand up to Big Oil.”

The White House is receiving pressure from citizens north of the border, as well. Activists in Ottawa are planning a civil-disobedience protest on Parliament Hill this September 26.

“The Canadian government is acting as the global advertising agency of the tar sands oil industry,” said author and activist Naomi Klein, who was arrested Friday. “Canadians have come to appeal directly to President Obama, to demand that he stop this pipeline and make good on his 2008 election promises.”

The proposed 1,700 mile Keystone XL pipeline would carry dirty, tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. A rupture in the pipeline could cause a BP style oil spill in America’s heartland, over the source of fresh drinking water for 20 million people. NASA’s top climate scientist says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

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For more information, please visit tarsandsaction.org.

CONTACTS FOR REPORTERS
Daniel Kessler, 510-501-1779, daniel@ran.org
Jamie Henn, 415-601-9337, jamie@tarsandsaction.org

When Scientists, Daryll Hannah, and hundreds of US Citizens turn to Civil Disobedience: To stop a Deadly Pipeline

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Vandana Shiva: Earth Democracy, and Preserving our Food Independence

This lecture was originally given and hosted at Portland Community College

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Rex Weyler on Living Systems: No more "Paper Parks"

This article was kindly shared by Rex Weyler, author and founding member of Greenpeace. A link to Rex's blog is at the bottom of this article, as well as a link to his Deep Green Column for Greenpeace International.


Piecemeal ecology isn’t working.

Forty years have passed since the founding of Greenpeace and the first UN environment meeting in Stockholm, fifty years since the landmark Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and 115 years since Svante Arrhenius warned that burning hydrocarbons would heat Earth’s atmosphere.

Today, we have more environmental groups and less forests, more “protected areas” and less species, more carbon taxes and greater carbon emissions, more “green” products and less green space.

The human demand for land, materials, and energy has consistently overwhelmed our collective efforts to preserve and restore Earth’s environmental health.

For example, the “Living Planet Index” of species diversity reveals that since 1980 – even with new endangered species regulations and protected areas – terrestrial and marine species diversity has plummeted and the rate of decline has accelerated. We create more protected areas, but lose more species.

We gain 30% energy efficiency in buildings but double the average space-per-person and then add more people. After twenty years of Kyoto talks and deals, we have more CO2 emissions each year, not less. After forty years of international ocean dumping bans, the oceans are more toxic, not less.

Why?

Paper parks

The failure of protected areas to save endangered species helps explain our challenge. In July of this year, Camilo Mora, at the University of Hawaii and Peter F. Sale from the UN University in Ontario, Canada, published “Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas.”

Their report shows that since 1965, land based “Protected Areas” (PAs) have grown by 600% to 18 million square-kilometers. Marine PAs have grown by 400% to about 2.1 million sq-km. However, in both cases – on land and in oceans – biodiversity has declined, and the rate of decline has increased. Since 1974, the terrestrial biodiversity index has declined by about 40% and since 1990 the marine index has plummeted by about 21%.

Mora and Sale cite problems with the size and management of the protected areas and the disintegration of large scale ecosystems. The biologists trace these impacts back to growing human populations and growing demands on vulnerable ecosystems.

The authors support the establishment of protected areas but warn that these areas alone will not stop biodiversity decline without larger, systemic programs. Mora points out that most protected areas are only “paper parks,” legislated but not truly protected.

Sale says flatly, “Protected areas are a false hope in terms of preventing the loss of biodiversity.” The 2010 global biodiversity protection agreement signed in Nagoya, Japan pledged to preserve 17 % of land area and 10 % of oceans. Sale says it is “very unlikely those targets will be reached,” due to the growth of human demand for resources. Furthermore, “Even if those targets were achieved, it would not stop the decline in biodiversity.”

In “paper parks,” plants and animals disappear to poachers, development, and industrial pressure for logging and mining. Often, without adequate enforcement, industrial developers simply ignore protection rules. For example, in the 1980s, environmentalists won international bans on pelagic whaling and toxic dumping, yet those bans are routinely ignored by whalers and the toxic waste industries.

Furthermore, park boundaries cannot restrain pollution and global warming impacts. Typically, when a forest or coral reef is protected, the neighbouring area is overharvested and often decimated, breaking natural ecosystem links. Finally, this study points out that ecosystems require appropriate scale to allow for variations in ecological diversity, richness, abundance, synergies, and co-dependence.

Even so, Mora, Sale and many other biologists and ecologists have warned that we cannot stop biodiversity decline without putting limits on human population and consumption growth. “There is a clear and urgent need for additional solutions,” the authors warn, “particularly ones that stabilize ... the world’s human population and our ecological demands.”

Ecosystems

In practice, human efforts to protect and restore Earth’s ecological health have focused on a “species,” a “habitat” or some isolated thing that needed protection. But this has failed to account for the fundamental nature of living systems.

Earth’s ecology is not a collection of things. Rather, Earth’s ecology operates as co-evolving systems, shaped by feedbacks and interactions.

The systems remain always dynamic, never completely stable, always correcting for instability, as a hummingbird in flight or a bicycler.

Every subsystem in Nature interacts with others. Nothing exists alone in nature. Nothing survives alone in Nature. Biological and physical sciences do not describe “things.” Science tracks and describes relationships. Nature – from cells and bodies to communities and empires – is a web of relationships.

Global environmental strategies to date reveal isolated efforts and a few successes but systemic failures. As planners and implementers of ecological wisdom, we have not yet grasped the rules and demands of systems, the feedback mechanisms, co-evolution, and dynamic complexity.

In short, human environmentalism has yet to embrace Earth’s biosphere as a living process. The biosphere itself survives nested in a geosphere and solar system, which generate materials, energy and information for all the subsystems. Deep within the biosphere, communities, families, organisms, organs, and cells represent finer subsystems, each level nested in larger, more complex networks.

Nature is a continuum. Ecosystems are not “managed” by any of the parts. An ecosystem represents the highest level of complexity we know, orders of magnitude more complex, for example, than human societies or economic systems, which we struggle to manage. An ecosystem is not a thing. It is a web of interactions, drawing resources across boundaries; decoding information, responding to randomness and chaos, making collective decisions, and passing new information, products, and waste, back into the system.

Ecosystems have “rules” but do not determine absolute outcome because of “stochastic” or random inputs, similar to the process of a chess game or a hurricane.

Nature follows patterns and creates variations on themes as a jazz musician.

The random inputs give rise to new patterns, called “emergent behaviour,” which can influence the system in radically novel directions. The variations and patterns that replicate themselves become living systems, never just “things.” Every subsystem within an ecosystem, from cell to society, remains an interactive process.

Living systems do maintain states that ecologists call “dynamic equilibria” – a body, a forests, a community – during which system instabilities oscillate within mutually supportive limits for long periods of time. Even so, because of random factors, ecosystems are not entirely predictable, even if one could know all the rules, which we cannot. Thus, systems themselves evolve, and for human planning, we need to understand that the emergent relationships that follow disruption almost always include unintended consequences.

Accounting for human impact

In 1971, the year of the first Greenpeace campaign, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and Harvard ecologist John Holdren proposed a formula to account for human impact on the environment. Their famous formula, published in the journal Science, stated that the Human Impact (I) equalled the Population (P), times average Affluence (A), times a factor for Technology (T), so the formula looked like this:

I = PAT

The factors of the formula can be difficult to quantify, but provide a reference tool to think about and discuss human impact on the environment. We can’t just blame population, because wealthy societies consume far more resources than more modest communities. We can’t just blame consumption, because sheer numbers of people – or any species – can and do impact a habitat. We cannot just blame technology (such as fossil fuel machinery) because history shows us that humans degraded habitats long before modern technologies. The Syrian desert, for example, used to be a cedar forest before human communities obliterated the forest with hand axes and goats. Animals with no technology at all can deplete an environment if they grow in numbers beyond the habitat’s capacity.

The formula is useful, but something is missing from this way of thinking. Given our discussion above regarding living systems, it appears that the formula requires another factor that we could call “S” to account for the systemic reactions within the system itself. Thus:
 
I=PATS

The system factor would prove even more difficult to quantify than the others, but it should appear in the formula nevertheless. Although we cannot reduce our environmental impact to a simple formula, the point of the “Systems” factor is that our impacts on the environment are not linear. The impacts often multiply among themselves, so that a polluted river depletes fish, which may deplete birds, which allows certain insects to overpopulate and destroy plants, which can cause soil erosion, and so forth.

We must not forget to include the fact that every time we disturb nature, we set in motion a sequence of system responses, reactions, and feedbacks, which may have their own impact independent of human activity.

 
Global heating feedbacks provide a disturbing example. As we heat the atmosphere with CO2, the permafrost melts, releasing methane, which increases the heating. Melting sea ice increases Earth`s heat absorption. Depleted forests absorb less CO2. Increasing heat causes more fires; acidic seas kill algae, reducing carbon capture; and so forth. We need to account for such system feedbacks when we reflect on our environmental impact. We cannot control most of these systemic processes, so good ecological planning will leave a margin of safety to allow the larger system to adjust to our activities.

So far, our ecological protection has failed to account for the fact that human society exists inside a complex living system. If we continue to ignore this fact, the system itself may reject the human presence.

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Links:
Rex Weyler’s Ecolog
www.http://rexweyler.com/blog-placeholder/

Rex's Deep Green Column can be found at Greenpeace International
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/deep-green/

Living Planet Index:
J. Loh, et. al., Royal Society, Biological Sciences,
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/360/1454/289.full.pdf+html

UN, graph, from Loh, Goldfinger
http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/the-living-planet-index-measures-trends-in-the-abundance-of-species-for-which-data-is-available

C. Mora & P.F. Sale, “Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas.” http://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m434p251.pdf

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