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Canada's PR Work for Tar Sands: Dirty, Crude and Oily
Another climate-related record will soon be broken, but it's not like those you've been hearing about: the heat waves, droughts and torrential floods setting calamitous precedents everywhere. For a change, mark down this next one as a sign of hope. It's that Washington will play host to the largest act of civil disobedience for the climate in US history.
From 20 August to 3 September, a wildly diverse range of protesters – Nebraskan ranchers and teachers from Wisconsin, Texan landowners and indigenous leaders in Canada, some of the country's top scientists and a few celebrities – will descend on the White House for a series of enormous sit-ins. Their demand: that President Obama deny a permit for a pipeline that would further hook the United States to the Albertan tar sands, the world's dirtiest oil. 
Oil swirls in the Yellowstone river after an Exxon Mobil pipeline ruptured near Billings, Montana. Campaigners argue that spillages from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would be a virtual certainty. (Photograph: Larry Mayer/AP)
TransCanada's 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline will carry as many as 1.1m barrels of crude a day to the Gulf of Mexico. It will cut through the sensitive heartland of the country. It will massively enrich big corporations. And it is certain to spill: the only question is when and how often and with what kind of human and environmental toll.
If that were not enough, the pipeline is also a surefire recipe to overcook the planet. World-renowned climate scientist James Hansen has concluded only drastic measures will prevent a catastrophic rise in temperature: phasing out coal over the next 20 years, and immediately ending the use of unconventional fossil fuels like tar sands. Burn the murky and gigantic pool of Canadian carbon, and it is "essentially game over" for the climate. The decision for the pipeline's go-ahead ultimately and fortuitously rests with Obama alone – and thus, so too the power to begin rewriting this ecological horror story. Organisers are hoping persuasion with their bodies will help: already, 1,500 have signed on to risk arrest.
They are up against a Canadian government that has become the foreign branch of the tar sands industry. It is scrambling to beat back the resistance – what officials describe in internal documents as a "ferocious attack by the US environmental movement". TransCanada has hired George Bush's former ambassador to Canada as a lobbyist, alongside Secretary of State Clinton's former deputy campaign director. Last week, Canada's foreign and natural resource ministers were dispatched to Washington to remind Clinton of their service to US "energy security" – the idea that the US can safely suck Canada's oil, instead of unfriendly Venezuela's or the unstable Middle East's.
This key message of Canada's global PR strategy aims to distract from the path to genuine energy security: that we speedily get off dirty crude and, eventually, oil itself, and get into renewables. Secret British memos have revealed that the Canadian government is "acutely aware" that "CO2-intensive oil sands exports might become less desirable to the US in the future." Canada knows European governments, which are trying to slap an unwanted label on the tar sands, have seen through their smoke and mirrors; they are worried the US may follow suit.
Stopping the Keystone XL's construction would be an emboldening victory. Alberta's energy minister, Ron Liepert, has confessed his anxieties about the non-violent resistance encircling the oil patch:
"If there was something that kept me up at night, it would be the fear that before too long, we're going to be landlocked in bitumen."
Pipelines are the central nervous system of the infrastructure of fossil fuel pollution. Cut the service points one by one, and you disable the destruction: keeping the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole and the tar in the sands.
But oil companies won't easily abandon the lucrative promise of perpetual fossil fuel addiction. And in a Washington dominated by the corporate class (among whom there is no shortage of climate change deniers), lobbying for strong climate legislation has proved an abysmal failure.
Hence the shift in strategy. It appears the Obama administration will only act like there's no Planet B if we mount a Project C – a plan for full-scale confrontation, along the lines of the civil rights movement's historic blueprint for action in Birmingham, Alabama. The potency of direct action is not that it will physically stop pipeline construction, just as it didn't by itself make racism evaporate in the savagely segregated deep south of the fifties and sixties. It is that it may so provoke a crisis as to make the issue unavoidable by the media, and force the hand of the US government. It's about time people-power returned to America.
8 Comments so far
Show AllUnfortunately for the planet, the citizens of Alberta are convinced that the XL Pipeline is key to their job security. Like Texas, the average Albertan will vote against their own interests as their employers convince them that any resistance to the pipeline is an elaborate, left-wing propaganda ploy designed to impoverish the populace.
Meanwhile Obama will most definitely sign off on the pipeline simply because he is beholden to corporate interests. His future political career is dependent on Alberta's oil being pumped to Texas. All the protests will lead to a colossal waste of time. Americans love their automobiles and damn the rest of the world. Only a well organized group that will physically sabotage the pipeline has any hope of success. Until a form of democracy returns to the U.S., I'm afraid that the pipeline is a fait accompli.
Sadly, that pretty much sums it up.
"Unfortunately for the planet, the citizens of Alberta are convinced that the XL Pipeline is key to their job security."
This is so true but does not only applies to Albertans. Here in New Brunswick many have gone to work at Fort McMurray. Not too many jobs available here.
The Dominion link at the bottom of the article has a story on the August 1 protest march in Frederickton against the Provincial government and the Frackers that have descended on New Brunswick. English, French, and First Nations coming together for clean water and their childrens future.
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4139
If Keystone gets blocked there will be enormous pressure for Canada to approve Northern Gateway to Kitimat. Asia is also looking for secure sources of oil and has invested heavily in oil sand infrastructure. They will provide major funding for any pipeline to the west coast. Given how important oil sand development is to the Canadian economy, government will approve either project. Both projects entail huge environmental risks and need to be stopped.
People in Alberta, just like those folk in the Appalachians, are held hostage by the need for jobs and labor.
In surrendering all assets and commonwealth to private hands, under the mantra that only private investors can create jobs, those Investors can do as they please and will be aided by the working men and women.
A livelihood is predicated on having a job. Jobs are predicated on there being an "Investor Class" seeking a profit on his or her investment. The economy as a whole relies on consumption. All of these have as the ultimate loser, the environment and ultimately our collective selves and and all of life.
All our problems derive from a long assualt in this country, and the world, upon democracy. Our nation has an assualt written into law, we need to fix it. Stop diluting democracy...Ratify Article the First.
http://voltairez.hubpages.com/hub/Stop-Diluting-Democracy
"...unfriendly Venezuela..." As though Venezuela were just irrationally "anti-American." Ever since it became clear that Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, was going to use his country's oil wealth to benefit Venezuela's people rather than let big oil companies plunder it, the United States government has been doing everything it can to destabilize the Venezuelan government. Their most spectacular effort was in 2002, when they coordinated a military coup that put in place an oligarchical dictatorship that lasted just two days before millions of Venezuelans rose up and restored their democratically elected president. They never let up. Currently the U.S. is spending millions on promoting opposition candidates to run against Chavez in next year's election, while they do all they can to isolate and denigrate Venezuela's democracy.
I have been to Venezuela a couple of times and I have seen the results of the Bolivarian Revolution (as they call it.) Free medical care, illiteracy wiped out, food subsidies that have promoted good nutrition for all, education for everyone, and much, much more. This has been accomplished in spite of the bitter opposition from the oligarchy, which continues to have freedom (and the money) to criticize the government that goes well beyond our own meager ability to disseminate our critical opinions of our U.S. rulers.
I regret that Common Dreams only rarely mentions developments in Latin America, and to my knowledge has never run an article revealing the many positive things happening in Venezuela. In fact the only thing I have seen about Venezuela was a bizarre article which managed to come upon a rare, out of context criticism of Chavez that Chomsky made about a very trivial matter. Venezuela is one of the few bright spots on the planet, where democratic, non-violent change is improving the lives of millions of ordinary people. Why doesn't Common Dreams report on this?
And, for that matter, why the silence about the valiant non-violent struggle of the Honduran Resistance against the repressive U.S. supported regime in Honduras, the genocidal actions of U.S. and Canadian mining corporations in Guatemala, etc., etc? It was nice to see an article on student protests in Chile, after the New York Times covered them, but Common Dreams should be doing more than echoing the Times. Why is Common Dreams all but ignoring a whole continent?
Haven't you been paying attention to the smiling "geologist" (maybe he is or just plays one) and others on TV telling us how safe and wonderful natural gas recovery (the bad word "fracking is never used) is and ALWAYS the Canadian oil source in Alberta is called Oil Sands when they are, in fact, Tar Sands. Doesn't sound so pleasant, does it?