#tar sands pipelines

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 9 June 2021, it was announced that the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would have carried petroleum over 1000 miles from tar sands in Canada to Nebraska, was to be scrapped. First Nations peoples in Canada had resisted oil extraction in the region for years, and were joined by Native Americans in the United States in opposing the pipeline. These included the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, Assiniboine, Aaniiih and Nez Perce peoples. Native American protests also inspired resistance from other environmentalists, who began a campaign of civil disobedience against the project. The pipeline was first scrapped by the administration of Barack Obama, but then resurrected by later president, Donald Trump. Following renewed protests, the project was finally scrapped by the administration of Joe Biden. The campaign was one of many Indigenous struggles over land, sovereignty, and the environment which has contributed significantly to the fight against climate change. One study found that Indigenous resistance in United States and Canada has helped prevent 12% of the combined carbon dioxide equivalent pollution of the countries. Learn more about Native American resistance in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/500-years-of-indigenous-resistance-gord-hill To access this hyperlink, click our link in bio then click this photo https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=641244214715464&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Chalk up a win for the provinces and a loss for the federal government's environmental ambitions.

In a 5-2 decision released on Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against Ottawa and in favour of arguments from provincial governments about how major projects are approved in the country.

The ruling focused on the federal government's Impact Assessment Act (IAA), which gives federal regulators the power to assess potential environmental and social impacts of various major projects, such as pipelines, power plants and airports. 

Experts say it's a setback, but not a critical blow to the federal government's environmental agenda, although it could have broader implications for other climate policies Ottawa is developing.

Meanwhile, it's a triumph for provincial autonomy. [...]

As CBC reporter Erin Collins more colloquially put it on CBC Radio, a few minutes after the decision was released, "this was really Alberta telling the feds to stay off their lawn and the local bylaw officer kind of coming by and agreeing with them." [...]

Continue Reading.

Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: Yay. Now Alberta gets full reign of their horrifically backwards tar sands environmental policies.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @abpoli

[dailyanarchistposts]

Ecological Reclamation and Reconstruction

Workers in specific industries will be crucial in reclamation and reconstruction activities in moving toward ecological futures. This is because of the unique knowledge they have of specific industries being ended or transformed or requiring clean up or restoration.

One example is the decommissioning of tar sands developments and the reclamation of ecologically devastated areas and wastelands that were created by tar sands development.

Organizing is always key. Because workers are uniquely placed to undertake and enact deep green social transformation does not mean they will, of course. Some workers are conditioned by capital to tie their supposed interests with the short term aims of the particular company or industry in which they work. And, under capitalism, when successfully selling your labor on the capitalist labor market is a prerequisite to survival, the treat of losing your job is a potent inhibition. And this can be, and is, manipulated toward anti-ecological ends. We have seen this in logging, tar sands, and pipelines. But we have also seen the opposite – workers allying with environmentalists and Indigenous activists to engage in eco-defense.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Mother Jones:

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the US has seen since the 1970s.

But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws.

Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration.

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.  

But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.”

The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields:

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the US. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the US Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case.

“We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.”

Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped.

None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public.

In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done.

[climatecalling]

It’s a lot easier to justify ripping an activist off the road by their hair, or punching them, when a prominent politician is comparing them to violent terrorists and a major media outlet is repeating that frame. ... What’s happening in Germany—public rhetoric vilifying climate activists, which the media then picks up and amplifies and, ultimately, leads to the criminalization of those activists—is a pattern we’ve seen play out in multiple countries, new research from climate news sites Drilled and DeSmog reveals. That pattern is thanks in no small part to the influence of this little-known network, which has powerful allies in the oil, gas, and extractive industries.  The Atlas Network describes itself as “a nonprofit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all individuals” through its global network of think tanks. ... This pattern also took place in Canada and the U.S. over the past decade, in response to First Nations and Indigenous-led protests rejecting the expansion of tar sands extraction, as well as the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline movement. A series of papers put out by an Atlas member think tank in 2013 and 2014 paints First Nations activists as potentially violent, cautioning of the havoc these “warrior societies”could wreak on Canada. ... Social scientists who study movements and social change have largely been confused by how much questions over the “civility” of climate protesters’ tactics have dominated the discourse. “There really hasn’t been much destruction of property—the climate movement’s tactics have been very tame so far,” says Dana Fisher, who heads up the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and has been researching protest in general and climate protest in particular for years.  The fixation on whether climate activists are “radical” makes a lot more sense in the context of the Atlas Network’s history. “It’s this method that you see over and over again over the years,” Walker, the Atlas researcher, says. “They’ll throw something out into the public sphere, which will get a little bit of press, and then before you know it, a new law has been written, possibly by one of them. And now you have the criminalization of what was previously seen as legitimate civil protest.”

No paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20230914013145/https://newrepublic.com/article/175488/meet-shadowy-global-network-vilifying-climate-protesters

[sataniccapitalist]

From the tar sands of Canada, through the pipelines of BP, on to the US sub-prime mortgage market of and the border with Mexico. Through the destabilisation of Central and Latin America, the deforestation of the Amazon and Pinochet’s Chile across the Pacific, to the Opium Wars in Hong Kong. From the American War of Aggression in Vietnam to Colonial India and the hundreds of thousands dead, maimed and traumatised in the Middle East, through Africa and the whole tragic history of that land, notwithstanding economic exploitation of domestic populations, capitalist ambitions have destroyed, devalued and dehumanised life.

[larkiethings]

it is kind of crazy seeing everyone tripping over themselves for Tim walz like are you the same people who were upset about line 3 in 2020??? Listen I forgot the name of the guy I was calling saying hey maybe don’t bring coal tar sands in a leaky pipeline under three native reservations too but uhhhh

like I’m still going to vote for Kamala dont get me wrong but man some of the stuff you guys are posting on here like. He’s still a politician who cares more about oil money than the environment and peoples lives. Stop acting like he’s gods gift to the presidential ticket

[hwenvs3000f24]

Unit 05 blog

Response to the readings for Unit 05- I agree. But also…

Unit 05's reading by Wals et al. (2014) addresses the need to bridge the gap between knowledge of environmental issues, and more people taking action to address them. This reminds me of something that has been on my  mind for a while— environmental awareness has existed in our society for decades, and most people in my generation not only understand the severity of climate change, but know to value conservation. So why aren't we seeing more change?

While I’m seeing lots of apathy, I don’t think it’s because of a gap in our values. like Wals et al. were getting at, it's important to seriously think about where that apathy stems from, rather than simply assuming it's a lack of knowledge or understanding.

In my opinion, apathy stems form a perceived lack of power. You know how they say, "with power comes responsibility?" Well, maybe people won't think of themselves as having responsibility if they don't think of themselves as having power. And how could we think of ourselves as having power over the outcome of climate change and biodiversity loss, when billionaires such as Taylor Swift emit an estimated 8,000-10,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, or when banks such as RBC have pouired over 250 million into fossil fuels financing since the Paris Agreement (and was the top financier of tar sands among all banks in 2023), or when oil and gas companies make record profits while ordinary people struggle to afford basic necessities such as food (thanks Galen Weston)?

How can we tell people to go pick up garbage or monitor some wildlife, when, in the face of everything I've described above, it would barely chip away at a problem we didn't create?

The thing is, I AGREE with taking care of nature in your own backyard. Not because it'll save us, but as a way of continuously affirming in our hearts, through our hands touching the soil, our understanding of why nature matters, as well as to model the values of the world we want to live in.

But what can we do if we're not even the ones with say over what happens-- when the emissions of the richest 1% equal more than 2x the emissions of the poorest 50%?

Well here's the thing-- we have more power than we think. We could shut down Canada if we wanted to-- we did momentarily in 2020, when railways came to a halt as allies blockaded all over Turtle island in solidarity with the Wet'suwet'en who were resisting construction of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline. And I think, if we can unlearn the sense of powerlessness and apathy, the individualism and the aversion to responsibility that are all too prevalent in our society, then maybe we can take back our power, and exercise our collective responsibility to steward the land. Maybe. I don't know…

My point is, climate chaos and mass extinction are not our fault; they're the fault of the 1% and the politicians who enable them. But who is going to do anything about it but us?

We absolutely need to keep interpreting so we can try to build a culture of care, appreciation, knowledge and wonder for the land that the Western "developed" society we live in has all but snuffed out. Yes to citizen science, invasive species removals, plantings. But also, yes to shutting. It. Down.

Sources:

Wals AEJ, Brody M, Dillon J, Stevenson RB. (2014). Convergence Between Science and Environmental Education.  SCIENCE 344. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250515 

Merenlender AM, Crall AW, Drill S, Prysby M, Ballard H (2016).  Evaluating environmental education, citizen science, and stewardship through naturalist programs. Conservation Biology, 30(6): 1255–1265 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12737  

[cetra]

He's also a CLIMATE CRIMINAL who betrayed his Indigenous constituents as soon as he was elected governor

tim walz is credited for the free public school lunch program that was actually a years-long grassroots campaign by the mother of philando castille. her son would pay for kids’ lunches out of his own pocket was murdered in cold blood by the cops that walz has funded and protected as they terrorize black minnesotans and their friends and loved ones with impunity (to such an extent that the department of justice found the extrajudicial killings of minneapolis police to be exceptional). this election will be a special kind of hell for twin cities residents who have not seen any resolution to the summer that walz sent the national guard into our neighborhoods to fire rubber bullets at us on our porches. these people will not make our lives better. these people are not “easier to organize against”. harris and walz are blood-drenched terrorists with big cheesy grins on their faces

[dailyanarchistposts]

Emergent trust and responsibility: three examples

Indigenous struggles

In North America, the recovery of responsibility and interconnectedness is expressed most deeply and forcefully in Indigenous resurgence and other struggles where people are reasserting a profound land-based knowledge, revaluing traditions that have accrued through generations of reciprocal relationships with land. It is no coincidence that Indigenous peoples have been behind the most durable and militant resistance to ecological devastation, including pipelines, dams, logging, tar sands, fracking, and other forms of resource extraction. To be immersed in a web of reciprocal relationships is also to feel the responsibility to protect that web.

The Unist’ot’en Camp, for instance, is an Indigenous-led project that for years has been successfully resisting proposed fracked gas pipelines that would cross the territories of the Wet’suwet’en people in British Columbia. The grassroots Wet’suwet’en people leading the project have been clear that they are not protesting pipelines but reasserting their traditional responsibilities to take care of their territories, and re-establishing traditional protocols for entry. Several years ago, they created a checkpoint and began turning away those working for surveyors and others involved in pipeline construction, while inviting thousands of supporters onto their territories. Mel Bazil, a long-term supporter and a Gitxsan relative of the Unist’ot’en clan, speaks to the power of these land-based responsibilities:

It’s a reciprocal culture; it never really ended … To share that knowledge outwardly to other grassroots folks—migrants and grassroots settlers, as well as other Indigenous nations—it’s been very, very powerful to see our people come together. Not just in the face of devastation and destruction, but to survive and to understand each other.[112]

Not only have they been successful in halting pipeline construction; in the process, the Unist’ot’en Camp has constructed permaculture gardens, a healing center, and hosted annual action camps where hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters come from across North America (and elsewhere) to connect with each other, explore affinities, and deepen networks of trust and mutual support.

Similar processes are taking place at other camps across territories claimed by British Columbia and beyond, including the Madii Lii Camp and Lax Kw’alaams’s defense of Lelu Island, both part of a network of frontlines committed to stopping pipelines and fracked gas expansion. Furthermore, as we write this, there is a local and worldwide proliferation of solidarity actions, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Among non-Indigenous people, we also see expressions of land-connected responsibilities in the spread of communal gardening, environmental and climate justice, permaculture, regenerative farming, grassroots bioremediation, resistance to resource extraction, and animal liberation struggles, among others. Many of these struggles are simultaneously fighting the ecological devastation of Empire and its brutal forms of control and exploitation while making space for convivial forms of life.

[juniperharvest]

“I can’t speak about the pipeline thing” FUCKING LOOK IT UP

I spent what felt like years of my life screaming and calling Tim Walz constantly and it’s WILD seeing no one cares enough to google “Line 3 Tim Walz” “Line 3 Enbridge” “COAL TAR SANDS” “MISSISSIPPI RIVER”

Yeah he’s a corporate democrat. He is not White Jesus, nor is he Satan.

[climatecalling]

A non-violent environmental activist has been found guilty of felony obstruction for her role in trying to halt construction of a fossil fuel pipeline through Indigenous territory in Minnesota, in a trial beset by legal irregularities which ended with the prosecutor demanding jail time. Mylene Vialard, 54, was arrested in August 2021 after attaching herself to a 25ft bamboo tower erected to block a pumping station in Aitkin county, northern Minnesota. Her arrest was part of a crackdown on non-violent Indigenous-led protests opposing the expansion and rerouting on Line 3 – a 1,097-mile tar sands oil pipeline with a dismal safety record, that crosses more than 200 water bodies from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the US midwest. Despite the verdict, Vialard told the Guardian that she had “no regrets” and that the trial demonstrated what environmental and Indigenous activists “were up against”. ... “Jury returned a guilty verdict on felony obstruction, following a trial in which the prosecution engaged in repeated, flagrant and intentional misconduct throughout the trial and during closing arguments … the court turned a blind eye to the legal violations of law enforcement and the prosecutor, as well as its own legal errors, at the expense of Ms Vialard’s constitutional rights in this trial,” said Claire Glenn, Vialard’s attorney from the Climate Defense Project. ... Overall, at least 967 criminal charges were filed including several people charged under the state’s new critical infrastructure protection legislation – approved as part of a wave of anti-protest laws inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), a rightwing group backed by fossil fuel companies.

[martysmusic]

Since 1970, humans from around the globe have recognized the need to address pollution and environmental degradation. Earth Day is more important now than ever. From GreenParty.org: “Climate change is the gravest environmental, social and economic peril that humanity has ever met. Across the world, it is causing vanishing polar ice, melting glaciers, growing deserts, stronger storms, rising oceans, less biodiversity, deepening droughts, as well as more disease, hunger, strife and human misery. It is a tragedy unfolding in slow motion.

Greenhouse gases warm the Earth by trapping heat in the atmosphere. Much of that heat is initially absorbed by the ocean, creating roughly a 30-year delay in the impact of that heat at the surface of the planet. Practically speaking, that means that the melting glaciers and expanding deserts of 2009 were the result of greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere in the late 1970s, when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was below 350 parts per million (ppm). To return to a safe level of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, we must reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases as quickly as possible to levels that existed before 1980, to 350ppm carbon dioxide.

Greens support science-based policies to curb climate change.“

Support efforts to:

Enact an emergency Green New Deal to turn the tide on climate change, revive the economy and make wars for oil obsolete. Initiate a WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change, the greatest threat to humanity in our history. Create 20 million jobs by transitioning to 100% clean renewable energy by 2030, and investing in public transit, sustainable agriculture, conservation and restoration of critical infrastructure, including ecosystems.


Implement a Just Transition that empowers those communities and workers most impacted by climate change and the transition to a green economy. Ensure that any worker displaced by the shift away from fossil fuels will receive full income and benefits as they transition to alternative work.


Enact energy democracy based on public, community and worker ownership of our energy system. Treat energy as a human right.


Redirect research funds from fossil fuels into renewable energy and conservation. Build a nationwide smart electricity grid that can pool and store power from a diversity of renewable sources, giving the nation clean, democratically-controlled, energy.


End destructive energy extraction and associated infrastructure: fracking, tar sands, offshore drilling, oil trains, mountaintop removal, natural gas pipelines, and uranium mines. Halt any investment in fossil fuel infrastructure, including natural gas, and phase out all fossil fuel power plants. Phase out nuclear power and end nuclear subsidies. End all subsidies for fossil fuels and impose a greenhouse gas fee / tax to charge polluters for the damage they have created.”

HAPPY EARTH DAY TODAY AND EVERY DAY! And of course, I have a playlist to help you celebrate.

APPLE

SPOTIFY

[weirdoofoz]

"Mr. Angler it's very good to see you." The senator was practically beaming as he offered his hand.

Angler hesitated for a moment, before grasping the hand as firmly as he could muster, "And you too senator Jefferson, I'm sure today's meeting will be beneficial for both of us."

Outside a crowd of climate protestors had been gathering for hours, cycling through different chants. Jefferson had heard them all enough to know which words matched with which chant regardless of how disorderly the crowd was in their chanting. At the moment it sounded like they were shouting "Tar sands kill! Pipelines spill!"

The meeting progressed as intended, cost benefit analyses were strewn across the table, along with maps of where the pipeline could run as well as estimations of the costs incurred by popular pushback against each option. Angler was a little put off my Jefferson's attitude, the man simply did not believe in climate change, which was ludicrous, but it made the proceedings go by more quickly, and that's all he could have asked for.

The crowd persisted, playing songs, giving speeches, chanting about the impending doom of the planet. Which Angler found a little bit alarmist.

Jefferson nodded, "So if you think the planet's really on fire or whatever these people think, doesn't them being out there bother you?"

Angler frowned and said "Not at all, not at all, if they really wanted change they would be protesting at capital hill. This pipeline is profitable, and while the government allows it to be profitable it'll be built regardless of what I do."

"I agree entirely, that's a wonderful way to look at things." Jefferson smiled.

Angler was excited to get home, he loved his wife's meatloaf, he sincerely didn't understand why there was such a fuss about his work. He had driven here in his tesla and he would drive back in his tesla, 0 emissions. The meatloaf at home contained no red meat whatsoever, he was doing everything he could in his position.

Outside the crowd chanted "Hey Angler! fuck off and go fishing!" which was childish. The blue-haired nuts wouldn't have the time to be shaming him if they had jobs anyway.

The protestors kept begging for the world to be saved, the world burned on, there were crises creating crises, and to Angler it was all normal, comfortable even. At home there was meatloaf.