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Currently viewing articles tagged with Tar Sands.
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From Cochabamba to Cancun
The Cochabamba Conference on Climate Change has issued a call to build “a global peoples movement for climate justice”. A novel feature of this call is that it is supported by progressive countries, mainly those of the Alba Alliance (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, etc), as well as by social movements, primarily but not exclusively, from Latin America.
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Taking on the Tar Sands
In his first speech to a business audience after his election in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement that Canada was an “emerging energy superpower” signaled his government’s commitment to unflinching support for the relentless expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, primarily to supply synthetic crude oil to the United States. Since then, the tar sands have been the subject of extensive national and international media reporting, even receiving attention in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, where his staff disparaged the tar sands as “dirty oil.”
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An Energy Security Program for Canada
We are seeing an international paradigm shift on climate change, which will bypass Canada if we remain locked into unlimited energy exports. Until Canada gets a “Mexican exemption” and exits NAFTA’s energy-proportionality clause, there is little chance of Canada fulfilling its modest, international Kyoto targets, let alone going far beyond them.
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Scouring Scum and Tar from the Bottom of the Pit
Faced with the undeniable reality of “Hubbard’s Peak” in global conventional oil supplies, the world’s largest multinational energy corporations are now hell-bent on squeezing oil out of tar in northern Alberta, like junkies desperately conniving for one last giant fix in a futile attempt to quench America’s insatiable “addiction to oil” (described so eloquently by President George Bush II). Along the Athabasca River near Fort McMurray, a sub-arctic town almost 1,000 kilometres north of the U.S. border, tar literally seeps out of the riverbanks where Aboriginal peoples once used it to patch their birch-bark canoes. But most of the tar sands lie hidden below northern Alberta’s boreal forest, in an area larger than the state of Florida.
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Northern Pipe Dreams, Northern Nightmares
For a moment in the seventies, the mystical North burst upon the Canadian consciousness, as “Justice Tom’s Flying Magic Circus” (a.k.a. the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry) wound its way across the country. In 1975, at community hearings throughout the Northwest Territories, fiery Dene activists like Frank T’Seleie from Fort Good Hope condemned Bob Blair, president of Foothills Pipelines Ltd.: “You are like the Pentagon, Mr. Blair, planning the slaughter of innocent Vietnamese. Don’t tell me you are not responsible for the destruction of my nation. You are directly responsible. You are the twentieth century General Custer. You have come to destroy the Dene Nation. You are coming with your troops to slaughter us and steal land that is rightfully ours. You are coming to destroy a people that have a history of thirty thousand years. Why? For twenty years of gas? Are you really that insane? The original General Custer was exactly that insane. You still have a chance to learn.”
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