James Hansen: Tar Sands and Dirty Tricks

by James Hansen, September 13, 2013

The New Yorker just published (16 September issue) an excellent article "The President and the Pipeline" on Tom Steyer and the campaign to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, advocates for the Canadian government's position ("industry officials") were able to slip in a statement that was not fact checked with me "They note that Hansen's dire warning about Canada's unconventional oil deposits was based on the assumption that every ounce of oil in the sands would be burned.

Only a small fraction of the total estimated reserves is recoverable, and doing so will take decades." First, note that the carbon from fossil fuel burning will stay in the climate system for more than 100,000 years before it is buried on the ocean floor as carbonates. So whether it takes a few decades (or even a few centuries) to extract the fuel is pretty irrelevant -- we would be screwing up the planet for our children, grandchildren and, as Native Americans say, the seventh generation.

Second, what I said is that oil in the total tar sands resource is more than double all oil that has been burned in the history of humankind, i.e., less than half of the tar sands is sufficient to match all oil burned so far. (And note that non-tar sands oil is being burned to extract the tar sands goop and process it to make oil, and forests above the tar sands are being destroyed, making the tar sandsimpact even greater.) If we build big pipeline infrastructure, you can be sure that technology developments will allow more and more to be extracted.

There is another error in the New Yorker article, an explanation of the origin of the name of Bill McKibben's organization 350.org: "The name is a nod to Hansen's calculation that once the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds three hundred and fifty parts per million, climate change could become uncontainable."

In reality, 350 ppm is the CO2 level that, other things being unchanged, would restore Earth's energy balance.

So 350 ppm is an estimate of the CO2 level needed to stabilize global temperature. 

Temperature is now near the upper end of its range during the Holocene, the interglacial period now more than 10,000 years long, which is the climate that civilization is adapted to. It may be necessary to go somewhat lower than 350 ppm to avoid multi-meter sea level rise, so 350 ppm is only an initial estimate for a long-term target. We will know better by the time we get CO2 turned around heading toward 350 ppm. It's unlikely we will want to go back all the way to pre-industrial 280 ppm, because there are other significant climate forcings. These include human-made change of the planet's surface albedo and natural forcings, which are providing a slight push toward global cooling. 

Yet the New Yorker's "climate change could become uncontainable," unfortunately, is not science fiction. If we are so foolish as to burn all fossil fuels, including all coal and unconventional fuels, that result is nearly certain. Our paper discussing that topic, "Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide," by Hansen, Sato, Russell and Kharecha, is finally being published next week in the Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A PDF of the article will be freely available from my web site (www.columbia.edu/~jeh1) or from the journal's web site.

The attached note ("Europe Standing Tall Against a Rogue State") was written to accompany "Tar Sands Debacle and the Hama-Hama-Hama Oil and Gas Corporation," which I hope to finish soon. I include the note now because the situation in Europe is fluid. The Canadian government (not representative of Canada, as I note) is trying to work a backroom deal to avoid an open vote on unconventional fossil fuels.

Does anybody have a guess as to why the Canadian Prime Minister jumped at the chance to line up Canada in favor of Obama's plan to bomb Syria?

I'm sorry to have been so slow in writing -- I have been snowed under working on several things at the same time, including finding support for a new organization -- but I hope to catch up soon.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130913_TarSands+NewYorker.pdf

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Naomi Klein: Green groups may be more damaging than climate change deniers

Enlarge Naomi Klein (Credit: Ed Kashi)

The "No Logo" author explains how environmentalists may be more damaging to their cause than climate change deniers

 This originally appeared on Earth Island Journal. 

 

by Jason Mark, Salon, September 5, 2013

Canadian author Naomi Klein is so well known for her blade-sharp commentary that it’s easy to forget that she is, above all, a first-rate reporter. I got a glimpse into her priorities as I was working on this interview. Klein told me she was worried that some of the things she had said would make it hard for her to land an interview with a president of the one of the Big Green groups (read below and you’ll see why). She was more interested in nabbing the story than being the story; her reporting trumped any opinion-making.

Such focus is a hallmark of Klein’s career. She doesn’t do much of the chattering class’s news cycle blathering. She works steadily, carefully, quietly. It can be surprising to remember that Klein’s immense global influence rests on a relatively small body of work; she has published three books, one of which is an anthology of magazine pieces.

Klein’s first book, No Logo, investigated how brand names manipulate public desires while exploiting the people who make their products. The book came out just weeks after the WTO protests in Seattle and became an international bestseller. Her next major book, The Shock Doctrine, argued that free-marketeers often use crises – natural or manufactured – to ram through deregulatory policies. With her newest, yet-to-be named book, Klein turns her attention to climate change. Scheduled for release in 2014, the book will also be made into a film by her husband and creative partner, Avi Lewis.

Klein’s books and articles have sought to articulate a counternarrative to the march of corporate globalization and government austerity. She believes climate change provides a new chance for creating such a counternarrative. “The book I am writing is arguing that our responses to climate change can rebuild the public sphere, can strengthen our communities, can have work with dignity.”

First, though, she has to finish the reporting. As she told me, speaking about the grass-roots response to climate chaos: “Right now it’s under the radar, but I’m following it quite closely.”

During your career you’ve written about the power of brand names, populist movements around the world, and free 
market fundamentalism. Why now a book and film on climate change?

You know, The Shock Doctrine, my last book, ends with climate change. It ends with a vision of a dystopic future where you have weak infrastructure colliding with heavy weather, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina. And rather than working to prevent future disasters by having lower emissions, you have all these attempts to take advantage of that crisis. At the time, it seemed to me that climate change was potentially going to be the biggest disaster-capitalism free-for-all that we’ve seen yet. So it was quite a logical progression for me to go from writing about disaster-capitalism in The Shock Doctrine to writing about climate change. 

As I was writing The Shock Doctrine, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina. There are chapters in that book on both of those events. Then I came to the idea that climate change could be a kind of a “people’s shock,” an answer to the shock doctrine – not just another opportunity by the disaster capitalists to feed off of misery, but an opportunity for progressive forces to deepen democracy and really improve livelihoods around the world. Then I came across the idea of “climate debt” when I was doing a piece on reparations for Harper’s magazine. I had a meeting with Bolivia’s climate negotiator in Geneva – her name is Angélica Navarro – and she put the case to me that climate change could be an opportunity for a global Green Marshall Plan with the North paying climate debts in the form of huge green development project.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy you wrote about the potential of a “people’s shock.” Do you see that it’s happening, a global grass-roots response to some of the extreme weather we’re experiencing?

I see a people’s shock happening broadly, where on lots of different fronts you have constituencies coming forward who have been fighting, for instance, for sustainable agriculture for many, many years, and now realize that it’s also a climate solution. You have a lot of reframing of issues – and not in an opportunistic way, just another layer of understanding. Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change – they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies. But the fact that it’s also ruining the planet adds another layer of urgency. And it’s that layering of climate change on top of other issues that holds a huge amount of potential.

In terms of Hurricane Sandy, I really do see some hopeful, grass-roots responses, particularly in the Rockaways, where people were very organized right from the beginning, where Occupy Sandy was very strong, where new networks emerged. The first phase is just recovery, and now as you have a corporate-driven reconstruction process descending, those organized communities are in a position to respond, to go to the meetings, to take on the real estate developers, to talk about another vision of public housing that is way better than what’s there right now. So yeah, it’s definitely happening. Right now it’s under the radar, but I’m following it quite closely.

In a piece you wrote for the Nation in November 2011 you suggested that when it comes to climate change, there’s a dual denialism at work – conservatives deny the science while some liberals deny the political implications of the science. Why do you think that some environmentalists are resistant to grappling with climate change’s implications for the market and for economics?

Well, I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme – we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right on all counts. Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do lower emissions. So I think it’s a really important question why the green groups have been so unwilling to follow science to its logical conclusions. I think the scientists Kevin Anderson and his colleague Alice Bows at the Tyndall Centre have been the most courageous on this because they don’t just take on the green groups, they take on their fellow scientists for the way in which neoliberal economic orthodoxy has infiltrated the scientific establishment. It’s really scary reading. Because they have been saying, for at least for a decade, that getting to the emissions reduction levels that we need to get to in the developed world is not compatible with economic growth.

What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late ’60s and in the ’70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called “command-and-control” pieces of legislation. It was “don’t do that.” That substance is banned or tightly regulated. It was a top-down regulatory approach. And then it came to screeching halt when Reagan was elected. And he essentially waged war on the environmental movement very openly. We started to see some of the language that is common among those deniers – to equate environmentalism with Communism and so on. As the Cold War dwindled, environmentalism became the next target, the next Communism. Now, the movement at that stage could have responded in one of the two ways. It could have fought back and defended the values it stood for at that point, and tried to resist the steamroller that was neoliberalism in its early days. Or it could have adapted itself to this new reality, and changed itself to fit the rise of corporatist government. And it did the latter. Very consciously if you read what [Environmental Defense Fund president] Fred Krupp was saying at the time.

It was go along or get along.

Exactly. We now understand it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, “sue the bastards;” it’s, “work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.” There is no enemy anymore.

More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of this solution. That’s the model that has lasted to this day.

I go back to something even like the fight over NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Big Green groups, with very few exceptions, lined up in favor of NAFTA, despite the fact that their memberships were revolting, and sold the deal very aggressively to the public. That’s the model that has been globalized through the World Trade Organization, and that is responsible in many ways for the levels of soaring emissions. We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.

It’s not that the green groups were spectators to this – they were partners in this. They were willing participants in this. It’s not every green group. It’s not Greenpeace, it’s not Friends of the Earth, it’s not, for the most part, the Sierra Club. It’s not 350.org, because it didn’t even exist yet. But I think it goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of these conservation groups began there was kind of a noblesse oblige approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and deciding to save nature. And then the elites changed. So if the environmental movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their elite status. And weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are.

At least in American culture, there is always this desire for the win-win scenario. But if we really want to get to, say, an 80 percent reduction in CO₂ emissions, some people are going to lose. And I guess what you are saying is that it’s hard for the environmental leadership to look some of their partners in the eye and say, “You’re going to lose.”

Exactly. To pick on power. Their so-called win-win strategy has lost. That was the idea behind cap-and-trade. And it was a disastrously losing strategy. The green groups are not nearly as clever as they believe themselves to be. They got played on a spectacular scale. Many of their partners had one foot in US CAP [Climate Action Partnership] and the other in the US Chamber of Commerce. They were hedging their bets. And when it looked like they could get away with no legislation, they dumped US CAP completely.

The phrase win-win is interesting, because there are a lot of losers in the win-win strategy. A lot of people are sacrificed in the name of win-win. And in the US, we just keep it to the cap-and-trade fight and I know everyone is tired of fighting that fight. I do think there is a lot of evidence that we have not learned the key lessons of that failure.

And what do you think the key lessons are?

Well one of them is willingness to sacrifice – in the name of getting a win-win with big polluters who are part of that coalition – the communities that were living on the fence line. Communities, in Richmond, Calif., for instance, who would have been like, “We fight climate change and our kids won’t get as much asthma.” That win-win was broken because you get a deal that says, “OK you guys can keep polluting but you’re going to have to buy some offsets on the other side of the planet.” And the local win is gone, is sacrificed.

I’m in favor of win-win, you know. The book I am writing is arguing that our responses to climate change can rebuild the public sphere, can strengthen our communities, can have work with dignity. We can address the financial crisis and the ecological crisis at the same. I believe that. But I think it’s by building coalitions with people, not with corporations, that you are going to get those wins. And what I see is really a willingness to sacrifice the basic principles of solidarity, whether it is to that fence-line community in Richmond, Calif., or whether it’s with that Indigenous community in Brazil that, you know, is forced off their territory because their forest has just become a carbon sink or an offset and they no longer have access to the forest that allowed them to live sustainably because it’s policed. Because a conservation group has decided to trade it. So these sacrifices are made – there are a lot of losers in this model and there aren’t any wins I can see.

You were talking about the Clean Development Mechanism as a sort of disaster capitalism. Isn’t geoengineering the ultimate disaster capitalism?

I certainly think it’s the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that’s the appeal of it. I think we will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn’t threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch. So all the stories that got us to this point, that flatter ourselves for our power, will just be scaled up.

[There is a] willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people in the way we respond to climate change – we are already showing a brutality in the face of climate change that I find really chilling. I don’t think we have the language to even describe [geoengineering], because we are with full knowledge deciding to allow cultures to die, to allow peoples to disappear. We have the ability to stop and we’re choosing not to. So I think the profound immorality and violence of that decision is not reflected in the language that we have. You see that we have these climate conventions where the African delegates are using words like “genocide,” and the European and North American delegates get very upset and defensive about this. The truth is that the UN definition of genocide is that it is the deliberate act to disappear and displace people. What the delegates representing the North are saying is that we are not doing this because we want you to disappear; we are doing this because we don’t care essentially. We don’t care if you disappear if we continue business-as-usual. That’s a side effect of collateral damage. Well, to the people that are actually facing the disappearance it doesn’t make a difference whether there is malice to it because it still could be prevented. And we’re choosing not to prevent it. I feel one of the crises that we’re facing is a crisis of language. We are not speaking about this with the language of urgency or mortality that the issue deserves.

You’ve said that progressives’ narratives are insufficient. What would be an alternative narrative to turn this situation around?

Well, I think the narrative that got us into this – that’s part of the reason why you have climate change denialism being such as powerful force in North America and in Australia – is really tied to the frontier mentality. It’s really tied to the idea of there always being more. We live on lands that were supposedly innocent, “discovered” lands where nature was so abundant. You could not imagine depletion ever. These are foundational myths.

And so I’ve taken a huge amount of hope from the emergence of the Idle No More movement, because of what I see as a tremendous generosity of spirit from Indigenous leadership right now to educate us in another narrative. I just did a panel with Idle No More and I was the only non-Native speaker at this event, and the other Native speakers were all saying we want to play this leadership role. It’s actually taken a long time to get to that point. There’s been so much abuse heaped upon these communities, and so much rightful anger at the people who stole their lands. This is the first time that I’ve seen this openness, open willingness that we have something to bring, we want to lead, we want to model another way which relates to the land. So that’s where I am getting a lot of hope right now.

The impacts of Idle No More are really not understood. My husband is making a documentary that goes with this book, and he’s directing it right now in Montana, and we’ve been doing a lot of filming on the northern Cheyenne reservation because there’s a huge, huge coal deposit that they’ve been debating for a lot of years – whether or not to dig out this coal. And it was really looking like they were going to dig it up. It goes against their prophecies, and it’s just very painful. Now there’s just this new generation of young people on that reserve who are determined to leave that coal in the ground, and are training themselves to do solar and wind, and they all talk about Idle No More. I think there’s something very powerful going on. In Canada it’s a very big deal. It’s very big deal in all of North America, because of the huge amount of untapped energy, fossil fuel energy, that is on Indigenous land. That goes for Arctic oil. It certainly goes for the tar sands. It goes for where they want to lay those pipelines. It goes for where the natural gas is. It goes for where the major coal deposits are in the US. I think in Canada we take Indigenous rights more seriously than in the US. I hope that will change.

It’s interesting because even as some of the Big Green groups have gotten enamored of the ideas of ecosystem services and natural capital, there’s this counter-narrative coming from the Global South and Indigenous communities. It’s almost like a dialectic.

That’s the counternarrative, and those are the alternative worldviews that are emerging at this moment. The other thing that is happening … I don’t know what to call it. It’s maybe a reformation movement, a grassroots rebellion. There’s something going on in the [environmental] movement in the US and Canada, and I think certainly in the UK. What I call the “astronaut’s eye worldview” – which has governed the Big Green environmental movement for so long – and by that I mean just looking down at Earth from above. I think it’s sort of time to let go of the icon of the globe, because it places us above it and I think it has allowed us to see nature in this really abstracted way and sort of move pieces, like pieces on a chessboard, and really loose touch with the Earth. You know, it’s like the planet instead of the Earth.

And I think where that really came to a head was over fracking. The head offices of the Sierra Club and the NRDC and the EDF all decided this was a “bridge fuel.” We’ve done the math and we’re going to come out in favor of this thing. And then they faced big pushbacks from their membership, most of all at the Sierra Club. And they all had to modify their position somewhat. It was the grassroots going, “Wait a minute, what kind of environmentalism is it that isn’t concerned about water, that isn’t concerned about industrialization of rural landscapes – what has environmentalism become?” And so we see this grassroots, place-based resistance in the movements against the Keystone XL pipeline and the Northern Gateway pipeline, the huge anti-fracking movement. And they are the ones winning victories, right?

I think the Big Green groups are becoming deeply irrelevant. Some get a lot of money from corporations and rich donors and foundations, but their whole model is in crisis.

I hate to end a downer like that.

I’m not sure that is a downer.

It might not be.

I should say I’m representing my own views. I see some big changes as well. I think the Sierra Club has gone through its own reformation. They are on the front line of these struggles now. I think a lot of these groups are having to listen to their members. And some of them will just refuse to change because they’re just too entrenched in the partnership model, they’ve got too many conflicts of interest at this stage. Those are the groups that are really going to suffer. And I think it’s OK. I think at this point, there’s a big push in Europe where 100 civil society groups are calling on the EU not to try to fix their failed carbon-trading system, but to actually drop it and start really talking about cutting emissions at home instead of doing this shell game. I think that’s the moment we’re in right now. We don’t have any more time to waste with these very clever, not working shell games.

 
Jason Mark is a writer-farmer with a deep background in environmental politics.  In addition to his work in the Earth Island Journal, his writings have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The Progressive,Utne Reader, Orion, Gastronomica, Grist.org, Alternet.org, E magazine,and Yes!  He is a co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots and also co-author with Kevin Danaher ofInsurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. When not writing and editing, he co-manages Alemany Farm, San Francisco’s largest food production site. More Jason Mark. 

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/naomi_klein_big_green_groups_are_crippling_the_environmental_movement_partner/ 

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Yukon, Canada, First Nation votes against fracking

by Eye on the Arctic, CBC News, August 8, 2013

The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in the community of Old Crow in Canada’s northwestern Yukon territory is giving its leaders a clear and unequivocal message on hydraulic fracturing, a method used in oil and gas exploration and extraction.

Vuntut Gwitchin citizens have voted on a resolution at their annual general assembly, saying hydraulic fracturing — or ‘fracking’ — will not be welcome within their traditional territory.

“That essentially gave us the direction to oppose fracking within our traditional territory until it can be proven to be 100 per cent safe as relates to drinking water and other issues,” said Chief Joe Linklater.

Earlier this month, the Council of Yukon First Nations said it opposes hydraulic fracturing. This year’s general assembly passed a resolution which declares traditional territories to be ‘frack free’.

The resolution was brought forward by the Na-cho Nyak Dun First Nation, and passed unanimously. It calls on the Yukon government to prohibit fracking.

 This story is posted on Alaska Dispatch as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.

http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130808/yukon-canada-first-nation-votes-against-fracking

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New TransCanada Pipeline Plan Dwarfs Keystone XL

by Derek Leahy, DeSmog Canada, August 2, 2013

TransCanada Corp. announced yesterday they will proceed with plans to create a pipeline capable of shipping 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil and tar sands bitumen from western Canada to refineries and ports in Quebec and New Brunswick. 

Called "Energy East," this west-to-east pipeline would dwarf the oil delivery capacity of TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline in the US (830,000 bpd).

The premiers of Alberta and New Brunswick declared Energy East a "nation building" pipeline. The pipeline will pass through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

"This is an historic opportunity to connect the oil resources of western Canada to the consumers of eastern Canada, creating jobs, tax revenue and energy security for all Canadians for decades to come," said Russ Girling, TransCanada's president and chief executive officer, in a statement.

It remains unclear how much of Energy East's oil will be exported outside of Canada and how much tar sands bitumen will be shipped through the pipeline.

Eastern Canadian refineries are not outfitted to refine large quantities of bitumen. TransCanada has stated the Energy East project will involve shipping oil to "existing North American markets" but there is speculation Europe or Asia could be possible destinations for the pipeline's oil. 


Energy East will be 4,400 kilometres of pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to Saint John, New Brunswick. 3,000 kilometres of this pipeline already exists as a 55-year-old TransCanada natural gas line that will be converted to carry oil. Another 1,400 kilometres (the equivalent of building a Northern Gateway) of new pipeline will be constructed from the Quebec-Ontario border to Saint John.

The Assembly of First Nations' Chiefs in New Brunswick announced today they "will avail themselves of any means necessary, legal or otherwise" if Energy East threatens their treaty rights or the environment. Yesterday the Council of Canadians unveiled a nation-wide campaign to stop the Energy East pipeline. 

“While using an existing pipeline may reduce TransCanada’s costs, it increases spill risks for the many rivers, lakes and communities along the route,” said Andrea Harden-Donahue, Energy Campaigner with the Council of Canadians, in a press release. 

“The disastrous pipeline spills in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Mayflower, Arkansas, highlight the dangers of shipping tar sands crude and using an older pipeline not originally built for carrying oil," concluded Harden-Donahue. 

More details on "Energy East: The Tar Sands Nation Building Pipeline" to come on DeSmog Canada.
Image Credit: TransCanada

http://desmog.ca/2013/08/01/new-transcanada-pipeline-plan-dwarfs-keystone-xl

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Great Plains tribal chairmen walk out on State Dept Keystone XL consultation

by Climate Science Watch, May 17, 2013

Indian Country Today Media Network reports: Elders and chiefs of at least 10 sovereign nations walked out of a Keystone XL pipeline tribal consultation meeting with U.S. State Department officials in Rapid City, South Dakota, on May 16, calling the meeting ‘invalid.’ The Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association Statement Against the Keystone XL Pipeline concludes: “If the Keystone XL pipeline is allowed to be built, TransCanada, a Canadian corporation, would be occupying sacred treaty lands as reserved in the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties. It will be stopped by unified resistance.” Full text of the statement below.

See Chiefs Declare Keystone XL Consultation Meeting Invalid, Walk Out on State Department Officials

Full text of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association Statement Against the Keystone XL Pipeline:

On this historic day of May 16, 2013, ten sovereign Indigenous nations maintain that the proposed TransCanada/Keystone XL pipeline does not serve the national interest and in fact would be detrimental not only to the collected sovereigns but all future generations on planet earth. This morning the following sovereigns informed the Department of State Tribal Consultation effort at the Hilton Garden Inn in Rapid City, SD, that the gathering was not recognized as a valid consultation on a "nation to nation" level:

Southern Ponca, Pawnee Nation, Nez Perce Nation. And the following Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires People): Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, Ihanktonwan Dakota (Yankton Sioux), Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Oglala Sioux Tribe, Standing Rock Tribe, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. 

The Great Plains Tribal Chairmans Association supports this position, which is in solidarity with elected leaders, Treaty Councils and the grassroots community, and is guided by spiritual leaders. On Saturday, May 18, the Sacred Pipe Bundle of the Oceti Sakowin will be brought out to pray with the people to stop the KXL pipeline, and other tribal nation prayer circles will gather to do the same.

Pursuant to Executive Order 13175, the above sovereigns directed the DOS to invite President Obama to engage in "true Nation to Nation" consultation with them at the nearest date, at a designated location to be communicated by each of the above sovereigns. After delivering that message, the large contingent of tribal people walked out of the DOS meeting and asked the other tribal people present to support this effort and to leave the meeting. Eventually all remaining tribal representatives and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers left the meeting at the direct urging of the grassroots organization Owe Aku. Owe Aku, Moccasins on the Ground, and Protect the Sacred are preparing communities to resist the Keystone XL pipeline through Keystone Blockade Training.

This unprecedented unity of tribes against the desecration of Ina Maka (Mother Earth) was motivated by the signing on January 25, 2013, of the historic International Treaty to Protect the Sacred Against the Tar Sands. Signatories were the Pawnee Nation, the Ponca Nation, the Ihanktonwan Dakota and the Oglala Lakota. Since then ten First Nations Chiefs in Canada have signed the Treaty to protect themselves against tar sands development in Canada.

The above sovereigns notify President Obama to consult with each of them because of the following:

• The nations have had no direct role in identifying and evaluating cultural resources.

• The nations question the status of the programmatic agreement and how it may or may not be amended.

• The nations are deeply concerned about potential pipeline impacts on natural resources, especially our water: potential spills and leaks, groundwater and surface water contamination.

• The nations have no desire to contribute to climate change, to which the pipeline will directly contribute.

• The nations recognize that the pipeline will increase environmental injustice, disproportionately impacting native communities.

• The nations deplore the environmental impacts of tar sands mining being endured by tribes in Canada. The pipeline would service the tar sands extractive industry.

• The nations insist that their treaty rights be respected ⎯ the pipeline would violate them.

• The nations support an energy policy that promotes renewables and efficiency instead of one that features fossil fuels.

• The nations regard the consultation process as flawed in favor of corporate interests.

The sovereigns of these nations contend that it is not in America's interest to facilitate and contribute to environmental devastation on the scale caused by the extraction of tar sands in Canada. America would be better served by a comprehensive program to reduce its reliance on oil, and to invest in the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, such as electric vehicles that are charged using solar and wind power.

If the Keystone XL pipeline is allowed to be built, TransCanada, a Canadian corporation, would be occupying sacred treaty lands as reserved in the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties. It will be stopped by unified resistance.

*    *    *

Also see Jacob Devaney at Huffington Post: Sovereign Nations Walk Out of Meeting With U.S. State Department Unanimously Rejecting Keystone XL Pipeline

The State Department, still with "egg on its face" from its statement that Keystone XL would have little impact on climate change, sunk a little lower today as the most respected elders, and chiefs of 10 sovereign nations turned their backs on State Department representatives and walked out during a meeting. The meeting, which was a failed attempt at a "nation to nation" tribal consultation concerning the Keystone XL Pipeline neglected to address any legitimate concerns being raised by First Nations Leaders (or leading scientific experts for that matter).

Climate Science Watch, The EPA and most people with common sense rebuked the State Department's initial report and today First Nations sent a very clear message to President Obama and the world concerning the future fate of their land regarding Keystone XL. ...

Some earlier posts:

EPA on State Department’s Keystone XL draft impact statement: "Environmental Objections - Insufficient Information"

Comments to the State Department on the Keystone XL pipeline Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement

Where are the Keystone XL pipeline whistleblowers?

Photos from the climate demonstration in Washington DC February 17

48 arrested in civil disobedience at White House to stop Keystone XL pipeline and push Obama on climate action

On acting to block the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

Scientists call on President to reject the Keystone XL pipeline

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2013/05/17/tribal-chairmen-walk-out-on-state-dept-kxl-consultation/

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Right-wing Canadian "think" tank attempts smear of First Nations indigenous activists

Report: Canada could see indigenous uprisingFormer military official says poverty and anger in indigenous communities mean conditions for an "insurgency" are ripe.

by Chris Arsenault, Al Jazeera, May 14, 2013 
Canada has recently seen a wave of indigenous protest through the Idle No More Movement [Reuters] 

Living standards for indigenous people on par with "third world" countries, buttressed by a large population of unemployed young men in a "warrior cohort," and easy-to-target economic infrastructure, all mean Canada has conditions for a potential indigenous "insurgency." That's according to a new report penned by a former Canadian military officer for the MacDonald Laurier Institute, a think-tank supported by corporate executives.

"For many Aboriginal people in Canada, but especially for First Nations women and children, life on-reserve is dreary, dark and dangerous," wrote Douglas Bland in the report, Canada and the first Nations: Cooperation or Conflict? "Social fractionalisation significantly increases the risk of social conflict. The phenomenon provides motives for an insurgency," read the report, issued in May.

Bland refused interview requests from Al Jazeera, but conclusions from the Queen's University professor emeritus and 30-year military veteran have worried the Canadian establishment, especially in light of indigenous-led protests associated with the Idle No More movement, and Canada's increasing dependence on natural resource extraction.

'Ongoing injustice'

"The Canadian right-wing establishment is seizing on this to justify its own agenda of stricter controls and the continued criminalisation of native people who defend their rights," Taiaiake Alfred, chair of the centre for indigenous governance at the University of Victoria, and one of Canada's most influential aboriginal intellectuals, told Al Jazeera. "The positive elements of Canadian society -- progressive values and social justice -- are founded on the ongoing injustice of land theft and murder of indigenous people."

In November, Paul Martin, Canada's former prime minister and a business tycoon, echoed Alfred's comments, albeit in a softer tone. "We have never admitted to ourselves that we were, and still are, a colonial power," he said.

We have never admitted to ourselves that we were, and still are, a colonial power Paul Martin, former prime minister

One of the world's most developed countries, Canada is home to about 1.2 million indigenous people out of a population of 34.5 million. The indigenous population is rising faster than other demographic groups, despite drastically higher rates of poverty, incarceration and substance abuse.

If indigenous Canadians were ranked as a country according to the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures living standards and life expectancy, they would have social outcomes comparable to residents of Kazakhstan and Albania.

Across Canada's prairies, the heartland of the country's agricultural industry and a centre for mining, about 42% of the indigenous population will be under the age of 30 by 2016, more than twice the youth rate in the non-indigenous community.

"The fact that Canada's natural wealth flows unfairly from Aboriginal lands and peoples to non-Aboriginal Canadians is a long-standing and justifiable grievance," the report said.

A large number of poorly educated, unemployed young men -- a "warrior cohort," as Bland put it -- provide fertile recruits for militant groups, the report says.

Using a formula first developed by researchers at Oxford University, Bland argued that the "feasibility" of unrest, rather than just root causes, could determine outcomes. Most of Canada's resource industries, including mines, dams and oil facilities, are located on land claimed by indigenous people -- and attacking such facilities is easily feasible, the report said.

Comprising about four percent of the population, indigenous people make up 23% of Canada's prisoners, a 43% increase during the 5 years prior to 2013, according to a government report released in March.

There is near universal acceptance that the status quo is unacceptable, but across Canada's coffee shops, factories -- and even within the MacDonald Laurier Institute -- there is no consensus on the causes.

Other solutions
In a separate report for the institute, former government senior economic adviser Brian Lee Crowley and professor Kevin Coates paint an optimistic picture, far removed from fears over blockades, sabotage or a full-blown uprising.

"Blockades may be news," they wrote, "but the new joint ventures, long-term training programmes and successful indigenous businesses are what will reshape our common future."

They argue that indigenous communities are ready to hit a "sweet spot" as a series of Supreme Court decisions on long-standing treaties will give them a larger stake -- environmental and financial -- in natural resource development.

Other intellectuals, however, say support for mines, dams and other megaprojects with large environmental costs won't help get people out of poverty, and are contrary to indigenous support for sustainability.

"Crowley's argument is what the government has been saying for the last 150 years; historical experience has shown that it doesn't work," Peter Kulchyski, professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba, told Al Jazeera. "The communities that are worst off tend to be close to these resource developments … These partnerships between natural resource exploitation companies and First Nations generate some cash for the reserve elite, but not much in terms of employment opportunities for average people."

Especially in northern Canada, many indigenous people still depend on hunting and trapping for their food, and Kulchyski says this way of life should be preserved through land management deals, the sale of meat and eco-tourism projects rather than large-scale developments -- which often imperil the land.

Financial confusion
On reserves, the territory of indigenous Canadians, property rights function differently than in other parts of the country, making it difficult for residents to buy and sell their homes or land because the territories are often administered through a form of communal property law.

Outside large-scale resource extraction, a lack of property rights make business development difficult, conservatives argue, contending that free markets are needed to end poverty.

Many Canadians blame indigenous leaders for the poverty of their communities, arguing corruption is rampant on reserves. Conservative Canadians often say indigenous people should leave their traditional territories on remote lands where employment opportunities are scarce and move to cities where jobs, training and education are more easily accessible.

After going on a hunger strike and making international headlines in an attempt to draw attention to the dire poverty faced by residents of Attawapiskat, a northern indigenous community, Chief Teresa Spence faced insinuations of mismanagement in January, after the government leaked an audit showing accounting gaps in more than $100 million of federal transfers to the community.

Many Canadians say indigenous people receive too much money from the federal government, but Kulchyski says that isn't true. "The money comes to them from a separate envelope, so that's where the confusion comes from," he said. "They are actually getting less money than the rest of us [on a per capita basis] and that is reflected in the horrifying living conditions people are dealing with."

Bland's Laurier Institute Report comes on the heels of renewed interest in indigenous issues from Canadian society, following Chief Spence's hunger strike and the Idle No More movement, a campaign driven by social media and popular protest to draw attention to poverty and marginalisation.

Professor Alfred, who fought as a US marine before joining academia, believes Idle No More is a positive step for education, but its ability to change fundamental social structures is limited. He said he thinks recent reports about a possible "insurgency" are vastly overblown and based on poor research; part of a political ploy by another ex-military man to gain more funding for a broader crackdown against dissenters.

"As an activist, I am hoping and praying for more militant action," Alfred said. "But as a political analyst, there is no objective evidence that will happen. As it stands, all the evidence points to continued colonialism."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/05/201358113923656697.html

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Bill McKibben: The Fossil Fuel Resistance. As the world burns, a new movement to reverse climate change is emerging: fiercely, loudly and right next door

by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone Magazine, April 11, 2013

It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80% of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.

After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's growing fast.

Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country's history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run down from Canada's tar sands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, a fight that Time magazine recently referred to as the Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement. But there were thousands in the crowd also working to block fracking wells across the Appalachians and proposed Pacific-coast deep-water ports that would send coal to China. Students from most of the 323 campuses where the fight for fossil-fuel divestment is under way mingled with veterans of the battles to shut down mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and with earnest members of the Citizens Climate Lobby there to demand that Congress enact a serious price on carbon. A few days earlier, 48 leaders had been arrested outside the White House – they included ranchers from Nebraska who didn't want a giant pipeline across their land and leaders from Texas refinery towns who didn't want more crude spilling into their communities. Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham was on hand, urging scientists to accompany their research with civil disobedience, as were solar entrepreneurs quickly figuring out how to deploy panels on rooftops across the country. The original Americans were well-represented; indigenous groups are core leaders of the fight, since their communities have been devastated by mines and cheated by oil companies. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., of the Hip Hop Caucus was handcuffed next to Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP, who recounted stories of being arrested for integrating Atlanta lunch counters in the Sixties.

It's a sprawling, diverse and remarkably united movement, marked by its active opposition to the richest and most powerful industry on Earth. The Fossil Fuel Resistance has already won some serious victories, blocking dozens of new coal plants and closing down existing ones – ask the folks at Little Village Environmental Justice Organization who helped shutter a pair of coal plants in Chicago, or the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which fought to stop Chevron from expanding its refinery in Richmond, California. 

"Up to this point, grassroots organizing has kept more industrial carbon out of the atmosphere than state or federal policy," says Gopal Dayaneni of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. 

It's an economic resistance movement, too, one that's well aware renewable energy creates three times as many jobs as coal and gas and oil. Good jobs that can't be outsourced because the sun and the wind are close to home. It creates a future, in other words.

These are serious people: You're not a member of the Resistance just because you drive a Prius. You don't need to go to jail, but you do need to do more than change your light bulbs. You need to try to change the system that is raising the temperature, the sea level, the extinction rate – even raising the question of how well civilization will survive this century.

Soon after the big D.C. rally, the State Department issued a report downplaying Keystone XL's environmental impact, thus advancing the pipeline proposal another step. Since then, at the urging of the remarkable cellphone-company-cum-activist-group Credo, nearly 60,000 people have signed a pledge promising to resist, peacefully but firmly, if the pipeline is ever approved. By early March, even establishment commentators like Thomas Friedman had noticed – he used his New York Times column to ask activists to "go crazy" with civil disobedience; 48 hours later, 25 students and clergy were locked down inside a pipeline-company office outside Boston. It's not a one-sided fight anymore.

No movement this diverse is going to agree on a manifesto, but any reckoning begins with the idea that fossil fuel is dirty at every stage, and we need to put it behind us as fast as we can. For those of us in affluent countries, small shifts in lifestyle won't be enough; we'll also need to alter the policies that keep this industry fat and happy. For the poor world, the much harder goal is to leapfrog the fossil-fuel age and go straight to renewables – a task that those of us who prospered by filling the atmosphere with carbon must help with, for reasons both moral and practical. And for all of us, it means standing with communities from the coal fields of Appalachia to the oil-soaked Niger Delta as they fight for their homes. They've fought longest and hardest and too often by themselves. Now that global warming is starting to pour seawater into subways, the front lines are expanding and the reinforcements are finally beginning to arrive.

Right now, the fossil-fuel industry is mostly winning. In the past few years, they've proved "peak-oil" theorists wrong – as the price rose for hydrocarbons, companies found lots of new sources, though mostly by scraping the bottom of the barrel, spending even more money to get even-cruddier energy. They've learned to frack (in essence, explode a pipe bomb a few thousand feet beneath the surface, fracturing the surrounding rock). They've figured out how to take the sludgy tar sands and heat them with natural gas till the oil flows. They've managed to drill miles beneath the ocean's surface. And the hyperbolic enthusiasm has gushed even higher than the oil. The Wall Street Journal has declared North Dakota a new Saudi Arabia. The New York Times described a new shale-oil find in California as more than four times as large as North Dakota's. "We could make OPEC 'NOPEC' if we really put our minds to it," said Charles Drevna of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. "We're talking decades, if not into the hundreds of years, of supply in North America."

But all that fossil fuel will only get pumped and mined and burned if we decide to ignore the climate issue; were we to ever take it seriously, the math would quickly change. As I pointed out in these pages last summer, the world's fossil-fuel companies, even before these new finds, had five times more carbon in their reserves than we could burn if we hope to stay below a two-degree­ Celsius rise in global temperatures. That's the red line almost every government in the world has agreed on, but the coal, oil and natural-gas companies, propelled by record profits, just keep looking for more – and ignore reality. A new report shows that an anonymous group of industry billionaires has secretly poured more than $100 million into anti-environmental ­front groups. Weeks before Election Day, Chevron gave the largest corporate Super PAC contribution of the post­-Citizens United era, making sure that Congress stayed in the hands of climate deniers.

But every flood erodes their position, and every heat wave fuels the Resistance. When the Keystone pipeline first became controversial, in 2011, a poll of D.C. "energy insiders" showed that more than 70% of them thought they'd have permits to build it by the end of the year. Big Oil, of course, may end up getting its way, but so far its money hasn't overwhelmed the passion, spirit and creativity its foes have brought to the battle. And we're not just playing defense anymore: The rapidly spreading divestment movement may be the single biggest face of the Resistance. It's no longer confined to campuses; city governments and religious denominations have begun to unload their stakes in oil companies, and the movement is even spreading to self-interested investors­ now that HSBC has calculated that taking climate change seriously could cut share prices of oil companies by up to 60%.

With each passing month, something else weakens the industry's hand: the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that's gone from pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order. In the few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables, the results are staggering: There were days last spring when Germany (pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar panels. Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last year came from renewables. A December study from the University of Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9% of the time on renewable energy. In other words, logic, physics and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry. For the moment, it has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps more easily than physics.

Which is where the resistance comes in. Forty-three years ago, the first anarchic Earth Day drew 20 million Americans into the streets. That surge helped push through all kinds of legislation – the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act – and spurred the growth of organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. As these "green groups" became the face of the environmental movement, they grew adept at playing an inside-the-Beltway lobbying game. But that strategy got harder as the power of the right wing grew; for 25 years, they've been unable to win significant progress on climate change.

Now, energized by the Keystone protests, some strides have been made. The NRDC has done yeoman's work against the pipeline. The Sierra Club, which just a few years ago was taking millions from the fracking industry to shill for natural gas, has been reinvented. In January, the club dropped a 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The following month, its executive director, Michael Brune, was led away from the White House in handcuffs.

But the center of gravity has also shifted from big, established groups to local, distributed efforts. In the Internet age, you don't need direct mail and big headquarters; you need Twitter. In Texas and Oklahoma, hundreds have joined actions led by the Tar Sands Blockade, which has used daredevil tactics and lots of courage to get between the industry and the pipeline it needs to move oil overseas. In Montana, author Rick Bass and others sat-in to stop the export of millions of tons of coal from ports on the West Coast. And all across the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Northeast, people have been standing up for their communities, often by sitting down in front of the fracking industry. The Fossil Fuel Resistance looks more and more like Occupy – in fact, they've overlapped from the beginning, since oil companies are the 1% of the 1%. The movements share a political analysis, too: A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the Internet than ConEd; it's a farmers' market in electrons, with the local control that it implies.

Like Occupy, this new Resistance is not obsessed with winning over Democratic Party leaders. The Keystone arrests in 2011 marked the most militant protests outside the White House during Obama's first term; now Van Jones, who once worked for the president, has taken to calling Keystone the "Obama pipeline." Used to dealing with the established green groups, the administration thinks in terms of deals – "We'll approve the pipeline but give you something else you want" – the kind of logic that gains the approval of op-ed columnists and talking heads. But given that the Arctic has already melted, we don't have room for easy compromises. The president's insistence that he favors an "all of the above" energy system, where oil and gas are as welcome as solar and wind, seems increasingly like a classic political hedge. In fact, if the GOP wasn't in the tank for the oil industry, you couldn't do much worse than Obama's campaign­ trail rhetoric. Last year, the president went to Oklahoma, posed in front of a stack of oil pipes and bragged of adding enough new pipelines to encircle Earth. Since the election, the president has started talking green, promising that now climate change would be a priority – but this growing Resistance is, I think, unconvinced. As climate leader Naomi Klein said, "This time, no honeymoon and no hero worship."

Only grit and hard work. We've watched great cultural shifts and organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada's tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon's $100,000-a-day CEO, said that environmentalists were "obtuse" for opposing new pipelines. He announced the company planned to more than double the acreage on which it was exploring for new hydrocarbons and said he expected that renewables would account for just 1% of our energy in 2040, essentially declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started. He added, "My philosophy is to make money."

That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record at Mauna Loa's measuring station. Right now, we're losing. But as the planet runs its spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.

This story is from the April 25th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411

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