Canada Fossil Fools Day 2010

FOSSIL FOOL NOMINEES

People for Climate Justice, a national coalition of concerned residents in Canada wish to announce the Fossil Fools of the Year, but who is it going to be? Please vote!

People for Climate Justice has nominated several tar sands supporters, all worthy of the dubious prize. It will be a tough choice. Who really and truly is the most foolish to be tangled up in the dirty fossil fuel industry? To make this easier for you, we have nomination videos and a little information about all of our nominees.

Read more, see the videos and vote at http://canadaclimatejustice.wordpress.com/find-your-target/

How you can support Skeptical Science

Keeping track of the ebbs and flows of the climate debate is more than one person can handle.

Consequently, I've tried to set up Skeptical Science in such a way that anyone can contribute to the content. So here are some ways you can help make Skeptical Science a comprehensive resource on climate science...

Read more here.

Arctic Summit told to leave it in the ground

The Indigenous Environmental Network, the Council of Canadians, and the Alaska based REDOIL Network have issued an open letter calling for an international moratorium on all new exploration for fossil fuel resources in the Arctic region. The letter is directed at the Foreign Ministers of Canada, Norway, Denmark, Russia and the United States who will be present at the Arctic Summit in Chelsea, Québec, March 29, 2010.

The discovery of 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Arctic region has triggered a rush to secure access that includes petroleum companies such as Shell and Exxon.
“New oil and gas development is anything but responsible in the face of a very serious climate crisis which requires governments like those meeting in Chelsea to rapidly reduce emissions,” says Andrea Harden-Donahue, Energy Campaigner with the Council of Canadians. “It is no small irony that increased access to exploit reserves in the fragile Arctic Ocean ecosystem is largely the result of melting sea ice.”

“We believe that a moratorium on fossil fuel development would be a first step to addressing the climate crisis we are in. Strong actions need to be taken now by Governments of the world to effectively address climate change. Indigenous peoples worldwide bear the consequences of Global Warming daily and we want concrete action now,” states Faith Gemmill, Executive Director of the Alaska based Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL).

“Climate change is responsible for increased levels of contaminants like mercury, DDTs and PCBs in staple edible fish species near my home community,” says Daniel T’seleie, a K’asho Got’ine Dene from Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories. “Increased development of Arctic oil and gas would not only contribute to the climate crisis that is devastating Arctic communities, it would also add more direct pressure to fragile ecosystems that are already stressed by the combined impacts of climate change and existing development. This would be an unconscionable infringement on the rights of Arctic Indigenous Peoples.”

Excellent photo opportunities: The IEN and the Council of Canadians will bring a message to Foreign Ministers to “leave it in the ground” Monday afternoon at the parking lot off of Meech Lake road near the road leading to the Arctic Summit meeting location.
For more information:

Clayton Thomas Muller, Indigenous Tar Sands Campaigner, Indigenous Environmental Network, monsterredlight@gmail.com, 1-218-760-6632

Water on the Table

More information at wateronthetable.com

EU considers easing environmental standards for fuel

By Mike De Souza
Canwest News

The European Union is considering weakening its proposed environmental standards for fuel in response to a lobbying effort from the Harper government to protect Canada's oilsands, newly released documents have revealed.

A new discussion paper to be debated by a panel this week suggests that European officials will remove restrictions on fuel from the oilsands in its draft legislation, pending "further review."

The standards must still go through a period of consultations and several months of debate prior to adoption or a veto by the European Parliament, but the concerns raised in the meantime by Canadian officials appear to have prompted a change.

"I must note Canada's concern regarding the measures currently under discussion," wrote Canadian Ambassador Ross Hornby in a Jan. 25, 2010, letter to the EU. "In the original consultation document, oilsands-derived fuels (erroneously labelled as 'tar sand') are treated as a distinct fuel source, separate from all other crude pathways for petrol and diesel fuels."

Hornby warned that the reporting requirements of the original European standards, as proposed in 2009, would result in a "costly and extremely complex" system for the North American oil industry.

"Such a system would be extremely difficult to implement and monitor and would in itself create barriers to trade, particularly in light of the highly integrated nature of the North American oil industry," Hornby wrote.

The original proposed standards from 2009 included a chart that estimated the extraction of fuel from the oilsands produced more than five times more greenhouse gas emissions than fuel from conventional oil or diesel, but that overall emissions from the Alberta industry were about 15 per cent higher. The new proposal has removed those references to the oilsands.
"Tarsands have magically disappeared," said Nusa Urbancic, a low-carbon fuels policy officer for Transport and Environment, an environmental research group in Europe.
Hornby's letter to the EU also said that oil producers had reduced emissions in the sector per barrel of oil produced, but did not mention that their overall emissions had almost tripled between 1990 and 2006.

The Alberta government said it was pleased about the latest news from Europe, suggesting it demonstrates the government's "campaign" was working.
"We're having an impact," said Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert. "We've managed to convince the New Democrats to quit calling it tarsands and start calling it oilsands. We've got the European Union starting to look at the need to reassess some of the initiatives they've taken, based on, I would say, not the best information, so we need to keep up the campaign."

Federal Natural Resources Minister Christian Paradis was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.

Canadian environmentalists blasted the Harper government, arguing it is misleading the international community, in this and similar letters to U.S. officials, about its efforts in Canada to crack down on pollution from industries such as the oilsands.
"It is bad enough that the federal government is doing nothing of consequence to fight global warming here in Canada. Now they are going to other countries and actively lobbying to weaken perfectly good climate-change policy in order to protect the interests of the tarsands," said Graham Saul, the executive director of Climate Action Network Canada, a coalition of environmental groups.
"The government of Canada is systematically misleading the European Union about the real impacts of dirty oil. They are saying they intend to clean up the tarsands, when they clearly have no plan in place to do so."
Urbancic said it would now be up to member countries of the EU to decide on whether to accept the new proposal, or veto the new version that exempts the oilsands.

'The Ice Passage' Thaws Some Hard Canadian History

Author Brian Payton on death in the Arctic, why ice is alive, our melting sense of nature, and more.
By Geoff D'Auria
TheTyee.ca

There are those who say the search for the Northwest Passage is the closest thing Canadians have to a creation myth, that in attempting to complete the line that circles the continent, we have a story that in some way tells of the birth of a national psyche, hardy but humbled in a frozen, natural crucible.

Not a bad idea. Not completely true, of course, but that's never gotten in the way of a good story, let alone a national myth.

The parts based in truth make for some compelling reading -- Pierre Berton's Arctic Grail and Ken McGoogan's Fatal Passage, for example, or even fictionalized accounts like Mordecai Richler's novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here, which uses the failed Franklin expedition as a backdrop against which a backwards and conflicted nation walks out of the white-out with a raven on its shoulder.

Stepping into the Arctic canon with a true story of high adventure is Brian Payton's The Ice Passage, just selected as a finalist for a B.C. Book Award. In Ice Passage, Payton tells the gripping tale of the McClure expedition, which set out in the 1850s to find the elusive Northwest Passage and the missing Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 looking for the same passage.

Except the expedition wasn't Robert McClure's when it began. The mission was supposed to be led by Captain Richard Collinson, who was captaining the Enterprise. It seems, according to Payton's telling, that McClure's boat, the Investigator, outraced Collinson's to the western entrance of the passage and plunged in rather than wait for the other ship.

McClure's ship, and his ambition, soon got stuck in the mouth of an icy-fanged Arctic.
And so begins this little-known tale of Shackletonian proportions, a story of historic firsts and human drama. Do they find traces of Franklin? Do they follow him to the grave? Are they actually the first through the passage? Because history has virtually ignored their efforts, Payton's able to construct a story that doesn't let you go until the very last chapter.

Relying heavily on the journals of a German missionary, a translator who, it was hoped, could communicate with the Inuit, Payton found a counter-point to the blustery narrative of the 19th-century British naval men. What emerges is a multi-layered drama that is as human as it is heroic, and Payton resists the temptation to mythologize.

I met with Payton in a fogged-up coffee shop on a mythically-soggy Vancouver winter's day to talk about his love for this nerdy German missionary, the dangers of being an 'ambitious dude' in the Arctic, competing versions of expedition history, and how best to tell the story of a melting Arctic.
Here's what he had to say:

Read the rest of this article at the Tyee here.

Stan Roger's great song below.

BOLIVIA: Activists from across the globe to attend Peoples Conference on Climate Change

Cambio

Renowned human rights activists, scientists, academics, and social organisations from various parts of the world have confirmed their participation in the Global Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which will be held in Cochabamba, April 20-22.

Among those who will be present are Naomi Klein, author of No Logo; Eduardo Galeano, author of The Open Veins of Latin America; Danny Glover, actor in films such as Lethal Weapon and 2012; Nobel Peace prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel; Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and NASA climate expert; Bill McKibben, director of 350.org; the philosophy Samir Amin, North American Jerry Mander and others.

Moveover, 8 “undeveloped” countries, as the UN refers to them, have confirmed their presence, among them Franck Armel, foreign minister of the Republic of Benin; Idi Nadhoim, vice-president and agriculture minister of the Union of the Comoros; Thant Kyaw, director of foreign relations of Myanmar; Konte Cheikh Abdel Kader, international expert on environment of Senegal; Brima Munda Sowa, general administrator of environmental issues for Sierra Leon; Abdullah Ali Fadhel Al-Saadi, Minister Plenipotentiary of Yemen; and Khampadith Khammounheuang Ang, director general of Laos, as well as a representative from Nepal.

Bolivia has invited the 192 member nations of the United Nations to participate in the summit that was convoked by president Evo Morales following the failure of the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen.

International social movements who felt defrauded by the document signed in Copenhagen have also confirmed their presence. Representatives from countries such as Belgium, France, Mexico, Malaysia and the US will attend the summit in Cochabamba.

There will be various working groups. In the working group “Reestablish harmony with nature” will be Frei Betto, one of the maximum exponents of Liberation Theology; Bolivian Foreign Minister, David Choquehuanca; and Nobel Peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchu.
In the working group “Rights of Mother Earth” will be Leonardo Boff, one of the main promoters of the rights of the Earth; Corman Cullinan, who in his Wild Law proposes not only changing jurisprudence in the world, but also creating a jurisprudence of the Earth.

As panelists in the working group “Climate Justice Tribunal” will be present the South African bishop Desmond Tuto; the ex-president of the General Assembly of the US, Miguel d’Escoto; and writer Adolfo Perez Ezquivel.

In the working group “Climate debt” will be the writer Eduardo Galeano; Michael Meacher, research on the social impact of the exploitation of oil; and Andrew Sims, among others.
In the working group “Climate migrants” will be the author of No Logo, Naomi Klein; and John Davidson.

In the working group “Forests, food and water under climate change” will be present Pat Money, Alberto Gómez, Hildebrando Vélez, Timothy Byakola and others.
In the working group “Do we need a referendum on climate change?” will be present Amy Goodman, journalist Ignacio Ramonet, Joao Pedro Stedile and Antonio Hill.
Moreover, 10 presidents have confirmed their participation in the summit, who will debate some alternatives to confront climate change.

Translated from Cambio

Flogging the Scientists

The SPP, Deep Integration and Corporate Control - The Agenda Continues

By Paul Manly and Jen Kirk
Synergy Magazine

The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) between Canada, the United States and Mexico is officially dead but the project of deep integration between the three countries continues, as does the overarching worldwide neoliberal agenda of privatization, harmonization, free trade and corporate control. In August of 2009, the www.spp.gov website announced that the SPP was no longer an active initiative of the US government and that this website was now an archive for the SPP. Since that announcement, there have been a number of indicators that what hasn’t already been implemented in the SPP process continues forward as separate initiatives.

Ship-Rider, a pilot project that became permanent in May 2009 allows the RCMP to ride on US Coast Guard vessels and US Coast Guard officials to ride on RCMP vessels so they can cross back and forth across the border without jurisdictional restraints. This is an example of a multitude of incremental changes, sold as crime fighting or security measures but which add to a continual erosion of Canadian sovereignty through the integration of police, military and security organizations between the three countries. In Mexico, the Merida initiative has included the involvement of the American military and the RCMP in the drug war inside Mexico. Will this mean we will see a boom in drug production in Mexico as we have seen in Afghanistan since the NATO led invasion in 2001?

The Harper government couldn’t determine it’s own position on climate change at the Copenhagen talks without knowing what the American position was because as the government stated ‘the Canadian position on climate change needed to harmonize with the American position’. Are our economies already too deeply integrated for Canada to be able to make important decisions all by itself? Canadian foreign policy also continues in lock step with the USA and in some cases takes an even more neo-liberal and militaristic stance.

The Climate Crisis or the Crisis of Climate Politics?

By Andre Pusey and Bertie Russell
Institute for Anarchist Studies






The threat of an impending climate crisis has rightly dominated the headlines over recent years – unabated carbon emissions, alongside peak oil, are leading us to a bleak, even apocalyptic scenario. In addition to this we are experiencing a crisis of neoliberalism, where the restructuring of capital is finding ways to exploit (and hence worsen) the ecological collapse it has fomented. Both in the UK and worldwide, we have seen the emergence of movements aiming to tackle climate change. These movements embody a politics that appears to cross the political spectrum, but in fact all gravitate around a single apolitical space, or as Steven has termed it, a “post-political space.”

As the UN prepared to meet for the COP15 in Copenhagen, we found our movements in a state of political crisis. Dominated by methodologies that rely on an emerging carbon consensus as the basis of their (a)politics, movements such as the Camp for Climate Action find themselves powerless to engage with the decentered problem of climate change. There is an urgent need to reassess climate change in terms of power and productive relations, and to move beyond the single-issue environmentalism that has isolated climate change as the preserve of a specialist eco-activist vanguard.

This essay understands the COP15 and its aftermath as a potential for revealing and overcoming the schizophrenic tension of environmental movements. We point towards the emerging climate justice movements as an opportunity to move beyond the post-political towards an antagonistic politics of the commons.

Read this article at The Institute for Anarchist Studies website.

Nuclear Power in Canada

The Federal Conservative government's March budget  has a major section on “Green Jobs and Growth” but once again there is virtually nothing here that is positive or of any substance.

Over 70% of the new money in this area is simply another $250 million plus to Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, which the government is planning to sell off, possibly to foreign interests. There are very small amounts for a great lakes action plan, more funding for tax depreciation for waste energy investments and some other announcements of ongoing programs.

The government’s emphasis continues to be funding for nuclear energy, carbon capture, ethanol and facilitating faster exploitation of oil and gas. The budget announces various funding programs to streamline regulation review and environmental assessments for resource projects in the north, which presumably involve a pipeline. And, unfortunately, the budget includes ultimately nothing to deal with the major environmental crisis of our time: climate change. (CUPE)

The Pembina Institute released a study a few years ago on the risks of nuclear energy. Here is what it concluded:

"This study has sought to portray, in as complete a manner as possible based on publicly available and accessible information sources, a picture of the environmental impacts resulting from the use of nuclear energy for electricity generation in Canada. It is intended to inform comparisons with other energy sources.

The study finds that nuclear power, like other non-renewable energy sources, is associated with severe environmental impacts. In short, the use of nuclear power for electricity generation cannot be considered “clean.” Each stage of the nuclear energy production process generates large amounts of uniquely difficult-to-manage wastes that will require perpetual care, and that effectively push costs and risks arising from current energy consumption onto future generations. The process also has severe impacts on surface water and groundwater water quality via a range of radioactive and hazardous pollutants, and results in releases to the atmosphere of a wide range of criteria, radioactive and hazardous pollutants as well as GHGs.

In addition, the technology poses unique occupational and community health risks, along with security, accident and weapons proliferation risks not shared by any other energy source.

Nuclear generating facilities suffer from high capital costs and long-construction times, with significant risks of cost overruns and delays. These are major barriers to private investment in the sector, particularly in combination with a history of poor facility performance in Ontario and emerging challenges regarding uranium costs and supply.

In the context of these impacts and risks, nuclear energy cannot be seen as a viable response to GHG emission problems associated with reliance on fossil fuels (e.g., coal) for electricity generation. In addition to the consideration that nuclear power is not itself a GHG emission-free energy source, a future path based on nuclear energy would simply replace one problem (GHG emissions) with a series of different, but equally unacceptable impacts and risks. These impacts and risks encompass everything from facility reliability and waste management to the potential for catastrophic accidents and nuclear weapons proliferation.

As a result, proposals for the retention and expansion of the role of nuclear power must be approached with the greatest of caution. Such proposals must be examined in the full light of their environmental, economic and security implications, not only for Canada, but the rest of the world as well. They must also be examined in the context of the full range of available alternatives. Such an examination is likely to conclude that better options are readily available. These options range from making the most efficient use possible of existing energy resources to expanding the role of low-impact renewable energy sources that offer far safer, cheaper, more reliable and more sustainable options for meeting society’s energy needs."
 
Read the full report here.

The Path to Human Development

The financial and economic crisis currently enveloping the world market is causing an enormous amount of social chaos. Workers and families are being dislocated from their communities as factories and workplaces are shutdown. Immigrants already forced to migrate to find work are amongst the first laid-off and pushed into even more exposed social settings.

Women's work is becoming increasingly precarious, and the pressures on women to undertake unpaid care work increasing. A vulnerable planet is under greater pressures as measures to improve the world's ecology are sacrificed to the need to restore corporate profits. As Mike Lebowitz notes in the pamphlet below, the logic of capital is opposed to the logic of human development. In an economic crisis, all is sacrificed to the restoration of capitalist profitability.

A new anti-capitalist movement is emerging. This is renewing the popularity of the writings of Karl Marx, and in particular his penetrating analysis in Capital, still the foremost analysis of why capitalist development inevitably leads to economic crises. The ideas of socialism are re-gaining popular resonance. New study groups and activist campaigns are growing daily. The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism? is a significant contribution to these efforts. Read it. Study it. Debate it. Circulate it among friends and comrades. Take part in the anti-capitalist movement that is emerging across the world. Alternatives to financial greed, economic chaos and barbarism are not only possible, they have taken on an urgency.
 
Read The Path to Human Development here.