Category: climate emergency

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Greenwashing set Canada on fire

A forest swept by a wildfire; a river runs through it. Standing in the river is a caricature of a bloated, top-hatted capitalist lugging a huge sack of money. He is shouting over his shoulder.ALT

On September 22, I’m (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I’ll be at Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they’d come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they’d made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn’t merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.

At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they’d fed into their mills.

I was wrong. Last summer’s Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren’t just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/wildfires-treeplanting-timebomb.html

Cameron’s summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned “penalty” for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).

Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they’re heated. They’re so flammable that firefighters call them “gas on a stick.”

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The #TMX Pipeline Approval and Canada’s #ClimateEmergency

Pipeline approval will likely lead to more legal challenges and protests that will continue to delay and block the controversial project

[guest post by Stand.Earth]

The Canadian federal government’s announcement reapproving the Trans Mountain Pipeline is inconsistent with the government’s declaration of a climate emergency the day before.  This will likely lead to more legal challenges and protests that will continue to delay and block the controversial project, said international environmental organization Stand.earth.

“Approving the Trans Mountain Pipeline is inconsistent with our government’s declaration of a climate emergency. Oil and gas emissions are the largest and fastest growing component of Canada’s emissions. If we are going to fight climate change in Canada, we need to face the fact that we can no longer expand fossil fuel production and infrastructure. Canada’s oil is high cost and high carbon, and it is struggling to compete in a global market. Investing pipeline profits into clean energy? How about you just put the $10 billion directly into clean energy, instead of wasting taxpayer money on this risky investment?” said Tzeporah Berman, International Program Director at Stand.earth. “We stand by city leaders, the B.C. government, and First Nations who oppose this project, and we call on organizations and individuals around the world to stand with us.”

“No matter who forms the next government in Ottawa, the Trans Mountain Pipeline will never be built,” said said Sven Biggs, Climate and Energy Campaigner at Stand.earth. “People care deeply about protecting the BC coast, and British Columbians remain opposed to this pipeline and the risks of a devastating oil spill that come with it. Whenever construction resumes, another wave of protests is guaranteed in British Columbia.”

Pipeline opposition

Opposition to the pipeline remains strong, with tens of thousands of people pledging to stop the pipeline and multiple cities, municipalities, and the province of B.C. also stating opposition.

Project risks

Construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and the likelihood of a spill associated with the project poses significant risks to the climate, the public safety of the communities it passes through, the economy, and the critically endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales.

  • Climate change: If built, the Trans Mountain Pipeline would expand the production of Canada’s oil sands, and the increase in emissions would be the equivalent of putting 2.2 million cars on the road. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report in late 2018 showing that Canada has just 12 years to reduce its climate emissions by 40%. Meeting those climate objectives is simply not possible if Canada continues to build new fossil fuel infrastructure like the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
  • Spill risk: If the Trans Mountain Pipeline is built, it will lead to a 700% increase in oil tanker traffic in the Salish Sea, with the likelihood of an oil spill in the 50-year lifespan of the project as high as 79-87%. A major oil spill would expose the entire Vancouver population to human health risks due to inhalation of toxic chemicals.
  • Public safety: A potential tank fire at the Burnaby Mountain Terminal poses a significant risk to nearby high-density neighborhoods, elementary schools, and Simon Fraser University. Proposed increased storage capacity could cause multiple tanks to ignite during a fire.
  • Economy: An oil spill would put at risk the 98,000 coast-dependent jobs in British Columbia. By comparison, the Trans Mountain Pipeline would create an average of 2,500 jobs a year for two years during construction, with 90 full-time jobs after construction.
  • Tar sands markets: Economists have questioned Trudeau’s claims that the pipeline would help Canada reach new markets in Asia, instead of simply expanding into existing U.S. markets in California and Washington, where opposition to the pipeline is heating up. Last week in California, the Protect the Bay coalition launched to oppose an increase in tar sands tankers in the Bay Area. In May, the California Assembly threw its support behind AB 936, a proactive measure to protect California’s critical marine and freshwater resources from harms caused by a spill of non-floating oils like tar sands, which if passed, would join similar legislation in Washington state on non-floating oils. In Washington, the King County Safe Energy Leadership Alliance sent a letter to the Department of Ecology to strengthen oil spill response requirements for dilbit, specifically calling out the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The letter includes signatories from multiple city mayors, city and county councilmembers, and state senators.Save Orcas
  • Endangered orcas: Even without a spill, the increased tanker traffic and the resulting underwater noise disturbance will have a huge impact on the endangered Southern Resident Orca population, and could push the struggling population toward extinction.

Republished from Tzeporah Berman: Approving the Trans Mountain Pipeline is inconsistent with Canada’s declaration of a climate emergency

Image Credits

White Rock, BC – Coast Salish housepost and Haida totem pole © by Joe Mabel is licensed to share under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Oil Flag of Canada © by Laurel Russwurm photographed at Jobs.Justice.Climate 2015 Toronto is licensed to share under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

#FridaysForFuture Save Orcas © by Laurel Russwurm, photographed at #FridaysForFuture Waterloo (2019) is licensed to share under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.