No Pipelines, No Tankers, No Tar Sands!

Rally Sat. Aug. 27 2-5pm
Inlet Dr. and Hastings St. Burnaby

From FB:
A mass civil disobedience action has been called for the end of August in Washington DC to pressure the US government to stop approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline proposed to carry tar sands crude oil from northern Alberta to refineries in Illinois, Oklahoma and the U.S. Gulf Coast.
At the same time, here in the Lower Mainland, we will spotlight and protest the tar sands pipeline in our own backyard -- in North Burnaby.

Organized by the Council of Canadians, Tanker Free BC, Streams of Justice, StopThePave.org and the Wilderness Committee.

Turn off the taps on the tar sands - No pipelines, no tankers

For further info FB event:
https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201195663267755

Hope to see you there!

REPUBLICANS

Why are all of the Republicans now running to become the contender for the presidency of the United States, taking pot shots at the Environmental Protection Agency. Could it be that they are all backed by the Great American Oil Cartel? Lots of luck to those who would save the environment.

The new eco-warriors

What is "Climate Justice" today?

It's come a long way from the days when people like Stewart Brand (probably unknown to many of today's warriors) and others used their writings and influence to bring about ecological awareness, the EPA and the word 'ecology' itself. Their work was of one purpose but now it's been hijacked and has morphed into a corporate-like multi-faceted conglomerate of ideas that simply want to change the world and the western democracies are going to pay. Forget health, education, jobs for workers and social programmes, first up will be financial reparations to the "south".

quote
"Our Networks Goals are:

To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and affected peoples (including workers) in confronting the climate crisis. To support reparations and the repayment of ecological debt to the Global South by industrialized rich countries
To build a global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to avoid catastrophic climate change.
To highlight the critical role of biodiversity in weathering the climate crisis, and to defend the existence of all species.
To expose the roles of false and market-based climate “solutions” as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations in worsening the climate crisis.
To advance alternatives that can provide real and just solutions to the climate crisis.
To both sharpen our understanding of, and to address, the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward a total systemic transformation of our society."

http://www.climate-justice-action.org/about/about-cja/

With many countries experiencing rising unemployment, what are the realistic chances that these costly schemes will become accepted by the population in general?

The purebred ecologist is being swallowed and drowned by a disenchanted aggressive mongrel cabal.

Climate-based housing and transportation policies

Thank you for highlighting climate justice activism and the critical link between social issues and environmental issues. There is another aspect of climate change policy that is inspired by civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks: climate-based housing and transportation policies. In California, for example, regional housing and transportation planning policies have been reformed to generate less driving and carbon emissions. These policies have serious implications not only for CO2 but for the daily lives of low-income communities of color. Underserved communities should have the same opportunities to benefit from these laws, ensuring that they have the public transit and housing they need to access jobs and services, and to decrease our region’s carbon footprint. If we neglect to take this step now, we will exacerbate inequality in our communities and make them less sustainable in the long run. To learn more about the work we are doing on these issues in the Bay Area, check out our website: http://www.publicadvocates.org/climate-justice.

Evacuate Cities

Urban tripe, this whole story

City dwellers are the root of the problem...commuters, merchants, crowds and pestilence. So-called progressives that live in cities are worst of all with their smug electronics and "organic" food trucked in.

Unless you're off the grid, grow your own and you know where things come from...you're the
enemy.

southdeltawalker

If oil isn't shipped out of Vancouver, providing jobs for people there, Kinder Morgan will just divert it down the pipeline to Seattle and it will be shipped out of there. Thus Vancouver will lose jobs and the ships will still sail through the Georgia Straits. So you are accomplishing what?

Why are you against people having jobs? Especially those working in the ports?

Are you going to shut down the ships carrying some of the 21 million tonnes of coal out of Vancouver each year to be burned or added to steel in South Korea and China? After all, coal is mostly carbon.

Sabotaging oil and gas pipelines is not the answer to AGW

I don't think there IS an answer, quite frankly. My own force of habit as a case in point. I carry two reusable shopping bags in my vehicle, but I can never remember to actually take them into the store. If I can't get that right at 62, I don't have much confidence the human race can quit the gasoline habit.

Why the auto industry is so afraid of e.g. electric cars is beyond me. They would replace about 10% of gasoline vehicles at most in North America. Batteries lose their electrical potential at low temperature. They would be useless at subzero temperatures which limits them to summer use on the prairies.

They are only useful as long as electricity is dirt cheap, and if too many cars were electrically powered, the price per kwh would skyrocket.

Also, the batteries last less than ten years and they cost a small fortune. There is nothing worse than a rechargeable battery that has half its original charge capacity and all batteries lose their charge capacity over time.

So why are North American auto manufacturers so dead set against electric vehicles? They are no threat to them at all. An electric car is a good second family car, but no good for long trips. Hybrids may be a threat, but only if the batteries last for ten years. I don't think they will.

This is the kind of overt strategic thinking that the electric car fans should be voicing to miminise the potential threat to Detroit. Bragging about the low maintenance and excellent mileage is a mistake.

Urban tradeoffs

Squinter, there is a kernel of truth in what you say, as this has been raised for millennia. But urban centres also provide the ideas, cultures and technologies that we all use. De-urbanization of 3 billion world city dwellers would be a disaster.

Sask Residents, rather than many thousands of septic systems, or worse, we have effective tertiary sewage systems, such as in Whistler & Calgary, rather than that outdated Victoria cesspool. Where is that infrastructure maintenance & improvement funding that we all rely on, including the rich kids and corporations who keep pushing for lower taxes and often questionable P3s here?

It's not about losing jobs in the sunset fossil fuel & pipeline industries, but shifting them to sustainable energy production technologies & infrastructure.

Export of energy can be a money maker, but such energy projects must be primarily geared to the needs and resources of the region, especially given how much energy is wasted in transportation, be it by transmission line or tanker & pipeline.

Fish-counter, you are correct for now but technology changes rapidly, especially when backed by government incentives to catalyse these, (rather than giving them away as big corporate subsidies).

As photovoltaics decrease in cost, what's wrong with charging batteries during the day and recharging a plug-in hybrid overnight? It may not be effective every day, but that's what the small gas tank is for.

Most people's travel is the daily city commute. Gas guzzlers are still needed for some jobs and could still be rented for holidays and moves. As to batteries, removable designs are under development, and the majority of users don't keep their autos for more than 10 years.

real ODB, not stupid, maybe ignorant, but surely fearful

Even as late as the 90s, environment & working class issues were on opposite sides of the fence and the shift has been slow, note the Open Pen Fish Farm issue. Industry flaks try to keep it that way by constantly playing, & often exaggerating, the "jobs" card.

But the common links between those positions are being more generally recognized over the past decade. For a while now, Winnipeg's Canadian Dimension collective have called this union "Ecosocialism".

Unfortunately big media & tea baggers have villainized the word socialism, while both left (Soviet) & right (Nazi) regimes seriously misused the term.

But whatever else to call it, it is the idea that the common source of so many of these problems is the unfettered capitalist rush to profit above all else.

As Jerry put it "many streams are converging here with "objectively" anti-capitalist conclusions; around the issues of war and peace, the environment, the economy, and the ongoing decline of even limited "bourgeois democracy" in the West."

Awareness is growing, something age and research seem to enhance, but many haven't put the pieces together yet (or even tried to), and still more fear giving up the status quo for a world of uncertain change.

But change is coming, sometimes unpredictably, regardless of our wishes.

Some of it can be directed to all our advantage, rather than the chaos of the so called free market and the elite who questionably control it.

This is what these protesters are railing about, and the Keystone XL pipeline is the straw man symbol of the struggle.

Owlrol is correct...

"But change is coming, sometimes unpredictably, regardless of our wishes." owlrol

Even wingnutters are showing small signs of suddenly realizing that what they have been about and inflicting on society since the late 70s, is about to produce a revolutionary "push-back". They have been part of us on the "serious" Left suddenly arriving at a new "opportunity period." Too bad it has to be this way, but what do ya do? We couldn't do it without these dipshits.

That said, owlrol above has produced, in my opinion, a brilliant piece of "working class" intellectual work. I would really like to take off on some of the point he has made and raised, but five hours in the saddle has left me burnt... and only really able to raise a glass of "water of life".

I would only say, barring the most extreme socio-economic disaster, and I'm a person who prefers "country", owlrol is right... we are not, in my estimation, as a species, going to suddenly abandon "urbanization" and many of the elements of urbanization. It is one of the winning elements in human history, that has raised us to our dominant position amongst all other species. Good or bad.

But what we humans ARE going to have to do, becoming more and more clear, is get a handle on our population numbers, and bring them into line with our environmental realities. Which is going to have to effect, the insane mega growth of mega-cities. This is part of "their" unsustainability.

On the other hand, small towns, farms, and generally rural areas, are needing some re-population to provide labour and vital "servicing" centres here. Much of which has been sucked up into the artificial boom and bust cycles or relatively recent mega urbanization.

A more equal and "democratic" co-operative socio-economic system is needed to stabilize and smooth out the inequities and socio-economic imbalances between urban and more rural.

But before all this has a chance greater than a snowball in Hell, a serious "revolutionary" push-back must begin. It is the pre-requisite to it all.

Today my dad mentioned on

Today my dad mentioned on the phone that he read that today's babies could live to be over 100, close to 110. There was a pause on the phone and then at the same time we said "Oh god, imagine what the world will be like? Poor kids.." hahaha

A boy named Aidan who looked at trees and......

Yup, we definitely could have done so much better for the kids about to inherit this world.... I hope they come through all this.

My son sent me this amazing link about a thirteen year old boy who looked at trees and made a major breakthrough in solar power.

It is truly revolutionary thinking - his writing is both scientific and poetic and full of wonder...and his discovery proves nature really is the best textbook as to what works and what doesn't - we just have to start paying attention:

http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html

Copy nature, not the financial markets

Jeneane Benyas, (spelling?), a superb science writer, in her book "Biomimicry", pointed out the natural wisdom of ecosystems and their inhabitants, to accomplish amongst many other things, systems of sustainable life and mature development without the need for constant growth, something we humans have not yet come to grips with.

Spider webs, stronger than equal amounts of tensile steel, produced from fly bits without toxic and corrosive chemicals, at room temperature, rather than the energy intensive, high temp. ovens.

Barnacle adhesives on rough surfaces and in water, so strong that the rock will break before it does.

Rhino horn that can heal cracks even though it is non living tissue, much like our hair and nails.

And much more.

How about the development of perennial crops, something much needed in today's hungry world? Fruit trees produce with minimal inputs. Then again no money in it for the seed, biotech and chemical corporations.

How about direct energy from photosynthesis? Then again nuclear and fossil fuel corporations lose.

Not mimicking nature for competitive and profit purposes but rather for sustainable survival, we have much to learn.

She suggests that we think like an ancient forest rather than a field of weeds that multiply until the nutrients are fully depleted.

But the so called invisible hand of the financial market is accelerating weed fields (or worse) over everything else. Just think boreal tar sands, coal blown former mountains, plastic ocean gyres.

Biomimicry means that we are part of nature, not some separate controlling entity, and these protesters are pointing it out to us even as nature begins to show us the same through escalating blowback. Ignore it at your children's peril.

Jerry

By the way. Where are the super-greenies like Al Gore, Liz May et. al.?

I see that Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow are going to get on board - after the arrestings been done with.

Those Park Police look very efficient. These are the guys you generally call when people are throwing a Frisbee around a group of toddlers or when grandpa just has to find the little boys room now!.

Working with youth reaffirms my own faith in humanity

Last week, a crew of four people, including myself, moved 20 tons of gravel into a stream to provide spawning habitat for salmon. We did it with shovels and wheelbarrows. No heavy equipment was used, just muscle power. It was great fun. It took four days instead of four hours, but at $10.00 per hour, the cost was the same as hiring a backhoe for half a day.

The three students who worked with me enjoyed the hard work. It gave them a sense of accomplishment and ownership and we left a very small carbon footprint.

If only our provincial school districts could reinstate the Work Experience Program (or something similar) and work with local government, we could have many of our problems licked in no time. There are thousands of young people who are prepared to pick up a shovel and actually work at improving wildlife habitat. The problem is that us older folk put barriers up to stop them.

We worry about liability insurance (even though there is very little risk involved), displacing union jobs (even though there is no money to pay anyone for this work) and almost anything to frustrate the effort. As a result, we have frustrated and angry youth with little or no sense of ownership and social responsibility, writing graffiti on walls instead of planting native shrubs in a park, or pulling English ivy from Canadian trees.

My generation seems to disdain anything that smacks of hard work, unless it makes them a profit. It is truly disgusting. we may not get Earth Day and Rivers Day, but our kids do. If you don't want to fix the environment, please get out of the way of those who do, especially if you work for a government agency.

What we think, say and feel is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what we actually DO. The rest is just hot air.

Were are? Realisticman.

"By the way. Where are the super-greenies like Al Gore, Liz May et. al.?" Realisticman.

I don't give a rat's ass where the luminaries of the Green or any movement of people stands. They can all stay home, for all I really care about them. For me, it will always be where and what the mass of the citizenry is doing or not.

Leaders can help or hinder, as in the case of much of the trade union movement right now, but in the end they all come and go, and often have their own agendas... right and left. Where are the masses? What are they doing? This is really critical to all the great questions of any time... be they asleep, content with the status quo of any time, or in a state of agitation, movement and rebellion.

Al Gore? Maude Barlow? Minor issues.

An Absurd Comparison

Any thought that Tim DeChristopher is in the same league as those who fought and even died for civil rights in the United States several decades ago is ludicrous.

While people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and those who died trying to register voters in the deep South are true heroes, people like DeChristopher are simply environmental fanatics trying to cram their worldview down the rest of our throats. Like those who blocked logging roads and put loggers out of work in Clayoquot Sound, DeChristopher is so self absorbed in the rightness of his own cause that he cannot recognize that there are other valid points of view out there and that those people have a right to have those views recognized and acted upon in a democracy.

Shame on those who consider DeChristopher a hero. He is anything but.

Wake up people.

Climate change is much less of a problem than overpopulation, much, much less, almost to the point of being insignificant.

some thoughts on thoughts

going back up the trhread....

snert:
"Climate change is much less of a problem than overpopulation..."
Climate change is the result of overpopulation. Don't separate the two. But unless you're advocating eugenics, the only other method seems to be equalizing opportunity between rich and poor, and I don't see many advocates for that.
_____________

fishcounter:
"My generation seems to disdain anything that smacks of hard work, unless it makes them a profit."

Didn't used to be that way. But every generation has its price. Only it's the planet and the poor that pays, and the price these years looks as high as it as in the 1890s under the great robber barons...

_______________

realisticman
"Can we seriously expect that Canada's ethical oil will be out-voted for depot oil?"

Calling tar sands oil "ethical" is like calling Qadafi reasonable. So is it OK to buy oil from Libya now? Did England, France and Italy pay a high enough price supporting the rebellion in Benghazi to atone for how they fucked up Libya and Tunisia all those decades ago by putting their own strongmen into power over the rest of the populace to make it safe for business?

There's no simple answers in any situation - greasing the skids with the Vaseline of "ethical oil" don't make that myth run any smoother on a gravel road.

___________

Owlrol
"It's not about losing jobs in the sunset fossil fuel & pipeline industries, but shifting them to sustainable energy production technologies & infrastructure."

Keep repeating it. It hasn't sunk in yet. It's been said so many times in the past few years here and elsewhere, and still the naysayers claim that if one protestor somehow gets his message out, that all of civilization will grind to a clanking crashing halt like a Star Wars battle 'droid.

No imagination, no courage, no inventiveness, no intelligence. That's the new Conservative face of Canada. Tragically.