Climate Change and Melting Permafrost

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Ron

This bit of information really made me perk up my ears about where we are in the climate change process. Here’s what I’m talking about:

WASHINGTON: Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.

What the scientists are saying is that the heat-trapping gases under the frozen Arctic ground may be an even bigger factor in our climate change problem than cutting down forests. This is a scenario the scientists hadn’t been including in a lot of their forecasts. The release of these gases won’t be as polluting as the crap coming out of the power plants, cars, trucks and planes – but still polluting!

Melting Permafrost

I first heard about this in a little play about climate change that some friends of mine at the church I attend did this year. (We did a video of it – It was called, “Mother Earth vs. World’s People” – you can see it here: Mother Earth vs. World’s People ) One of the characters represented this melting of the permafrost.

What this all means is that over the next two or three decades a total of about 45 billion metric tons of carbon from methane and carbon dioxide will seep into the atmosphere when permafrost thaws during summers. That is about the same amount of global warming gas we spew out every five years by burning coal, gas and other fossil fuels.

This all comes down to the fact we will speed up the warming process by 20 to 30 percent than we would from fossil fuel emissions alone.

It’s not unusual for the first few inches of permafrost to thaw every summer. What’s different now is it’s a heck of a lot warmer so the scientists are now thinking it will be more like 10 feet of thawing permafrost. The gases come from all the decaying plants which have been frozen below ground for millennia. One of these leaking gases is methane which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. There was a professor at the University of Fairbanks Alaska, Katey Walter Anthony, who set leaking methane gas on fire and had flames shooting far above her head. She said, “Places like this are all around. We’re tapping into old carbon that has been locked up in the ground for 30,000 or 40,000 years.” This triggers what Anthony and other scientists call a feedback cycle. The world warms, mostly because of human-made greenhouse gases. That thaws permafrost, releasing more natural greenhouse has, augmenting the warming problem. The scientist s do all agree there is some guesswork here because of the limited data from this relatively new issue.

The World Meteorological Organization this week said the worst of the warming in 2011 was in the northern areas – where there is permafrost – and especially Russia. Since 1970, the Arctic has warmed at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

The thawing permafrost also causes trees to lean – scientists call them “drunken trees” – and roads to buckle. Scientist, F. Stuart Chapin III said when he first moved to Fairbanks the road from his house to the University of Alaska had to be resurfaced once a decade.

“Now it gets resurfaced every year due to thawing permafrost,” Chapin said.

Peace,

Ron Rink

When Will We Get It?

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Ron

Alberta Oil Sands Project

When Will We Get It?

How many times do we have to be warned before we get the message? For more than 25 years scientists have been warning us about the dangers we are creating for our climate. This is a distinct danger, not only to us as human beings, but to all forms of life on our planet.

We’re not “getting it” because we aren’t seeing enough evidence yet. Sure, we see all the severe weather that is happening around the globe, but that only affects a few thousand people. Most of us are unscathed by these storms. We feel for those who are affected – we send them money or other forms of aid, but then we go right back to our usual ways of living, hoping the next storm doesn’t affect us.

Some researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology looked at how Earth’s plant life is likely to react over the next 20 or 30 years in response to our ways of life which are producing greenhouse gases. These scientists are predicting that wherever Earth is not covered by ice or desert, the plants will undergo major changes as some species will overrun other species to the extent that better than 30% of our plant cover will change in some way. These changes will be so drastic that humans and animals will have to figure out ways to adapt to the changes or relocate — if they can find a place to go. One question we should be asking is how much adaptation can we manage? Are there limits?

On top of the changing plant communities, their studies predict that the ecological balance between interdependent and often endangered plants and animals will be so altered that it will affect our biodiversity and further create havoc with our water, energy, carbon and other vital elements. These elements won’t be able to follow the cycles they’ve always been on. Ever think about what it would be like to try to live without as much water as we have available right now? Or how about our energy sources?

I say, “Think about it?”

Our greed and disregard for the future has caused us to have activities in our agricultural practices and our urbanization so that we are destroying our natural habitats – not only for humans, but also for plants and animals. When we change the climate on Earth, the plants and animals have to migrate to other places in order to survive. However, with the changes happening so rapidly now, we’ve begun to effectively block the successful process of migration. The plants and animals are running low on their adaptability – at least they aren’t able to adapt fast enough to keep up with our rate of destruction.

Again, this is something which isn’t so obvious that it has received our undivided attention, so when we read about another species becoming endangered or no longer existing, we don’t get too bothered by it.

The latest scientific reports coming out of the United Nations indicate we will have a warmer and wetter Earth, with global temperatures increasing 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2100. This is the same warming that occurred almost 20,000 years ago,during the Last Glacial Maximum — except this time it’s happening about 100 times faster. These changes will cause some areas of Earth to become much wetter than usual, while others will become much drier. I feel we got a glimpse of that over this past year.

These reports predict that during this century the most affected areas for dramatic change will be in the Northern Hemisphere high altitudes particularly along the northern and southern boundaries of the boreal forests.

But then , those amazing boreal forests in Canada are being demolished to satisfy our greed and grasping for oil which is being developing out of the tar sands there. They have to destroy the boreal forest to get at the tar sands. (See the photo above — that used to be boreal forest!!)

Of course, our even greedier politicians are pulling every trick in the book to get those tar sands sent via pipe lines to Texas. Look at how they tacked the pipeline approval on top of the bill to renew the Payroll Tax Cut.

When will we ever get it?

Peace,

Ron Rink

The Birds — Early Warnings

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Ron

One of the reasons why I started this blog was to talk about Climate Change and to express some of my own concerns about why I feel it is such an important topic.

In my opinion, there is no other topic deserving more attention!

Oh, sure, there are many other things on the popular political agenda today — and there are many day-to-day frustrations we all have to deal with in our own lives — but Climate Change, if you believe it is actually happening, means so much more. Because, if Climate Change is real — and I believe it is — then all the other worries we have today won’t really matter in the long run.

Song Bird

What is happening with the latest meeting of world leaders about the Kyoto Protocol is just plain sad. There’s no other word to express how greed and politics are causing poor decisions to be made in this regard.

You have probably heard the old tale told about how people determined if a place was safe for humans, right? That’s the one where they send in a canary first. If the canary makes it out alive, then it was alright for the humans to enter. If the canary didn’t return, then it wasn’t safe.

Well, this morning, I was introduced to a video which talks about saving songbirds. It is a long video, but I do hope you will set aside the time to watch it. It’s beautiful to see so many of the songbirds up close and personal, but it also brings up an important point. If something is happening to the birds, then there is something we humans should be paying attention to!!

Here’s a link to the video — please take time to watch it.

Saving Songbirds

Have a great weekend.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink

Cry, The Beloved Climate by Amy Goodman

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Ron

I feel bad about posting another article I haven’t written, but time has been my enemy lately. I do hope to do a better job in the near future.

Peace,

Ron Rink

Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by TruthDig

Cry, the Beloved Climate
by Amy Goodman

The United Nations’ annual climate summit descended on Durban, South Africa, this week, but not in time to prevent the tragic death of Qodeni Ximba. The 17-year-old was one of 10 people killed in Durban on Sunday, the night before the U.N. conference opened. Torrential rains pummeled the seaside city of 3.5 million. Seven hundred homes were destroyed by the floods.

Ximba was sleeping when the concrete wall next to her collapsed. One woman tried to save a flailing 1-year-old baby whose parents had been crushed by their home. She failed, and the baby died along with both parents. All this, as more than 20,000 politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists and activists made their way to what may be the last chance for the Kyoto Protocol.

How might the conference have prevented the deaths? A better question is, how might the massive deluge, which fell on the heels of other deadly storms this month, be linked to human-induced climate change, and what is the gathering in Durban doing about it? Durban has received twice the normal amount of rain for November. The trends suggest that extreme weather is going to get worse.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a group with thousands of scientists who volunteer their time “to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change.” The group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Last week, the IPCC released a summary of its findings, clearly linking changing climate to extreme weather events such as drought, flash floods, hurricanes, heat waves and rising sea levels. The World Meteorological Organization released a summary of its latest findings, noting, to date, that 2011 is the 10th-warmest year on record, that the Arctic sea ice is at its all-time low volume this year, and that 13 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past 15 years.

Which brings us to Durban. This is the 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or, simply, COP17. One of the signal achievements of the U.N. process to date is the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty with enforceable provisions designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. In 1997, when Kyoto was adopted, China was considered a poor, developing country, and, as such, had far fewer obligations under Kyoto. Now, the U.S. and others say that China must join the wealthy, developed nations and comply with that set of rules. China refuses. That is one of the major, but by no means the only, stumbling blocks to renewing the Kyoto Protocol (another major problem is that the world’s historically largest polluter, the United States, signed Kyoto but did not ratify it in Congress).

In Copenhagen in late 2009 (at COP15), President Barack Obama swept in, organized back-door, invite-only meetings and crafted a voluntary—i.e., unenforceable—alternative to Kyoto, angering many. COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, in 2010 heightened the distance from the Kyoto Protocol. The prevailing wisdom in Durban is that this is make-or-break time for the U.N climate process.

Exacerbating Obama’s failures is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that largely holds human-made climate change as being either a hoax or simply nonexistent, as do eight of nine Republican presidential candidates. Oil and gas corporations spend tens of millions of dollars annually to promote junk science and climate-change deniers. Their investment has paid off, with an increasing percentage of Americans believing that climate change is not a problem.

Coincident with the disappointing U.N. proceedings has been a growing movement for climate justice in the streets. Protests against fossil-fuel dependence, which accelerates global warming, range from the nonviolent direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia to the arrest of more than 1,200 people at the White House opposing the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

Which is why Durban, South Africa, is such a fitting place for civil society to challenge the United Nations process. The continent of Africa is projected to experience the impact of climate change more severely than many other locales, and most populations here are less well-equipped to deal with climate disasters, without proper infrastructure or a reserve of wealth to deploy. Yet these are the people who threw off the oppressive yoke of apartheid.

South African novelist Alan Paton wrote of apartheid in 1948, the system’s first year, anticipating a long fight to overturn it, “Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end.” The same determination is growing in the streets of Durban, providing the leadership so lacking in the guarded, air-conditioned enclave of COP17.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2011 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

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The Story of Broke

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Ron

There has been so much going on in the world of Climate Change, the economy, the political circus, Occupy Wall Street and many other Occupy events, the 350.org circling of the White House on Sunday, the fact that another portion of the Jobs Bill was turned away by the Senate Republicans, and so much more.

One of those things is the new Annie Leonard movie, “The Story of Broke” was released.

(You may remember the other movie she produced called, “The Story of Stuff”.)

The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.

“The Story of Broke” couldn’t come at a more relevant time. Before Thanksgiving, the Congressional Supercommittee will propose a plan on how to bridge a $1.2 trillion budget gap – and if they don’t, the country will face a series of draconian, across-the-board budget cuts.

With sky-high unemployment and our social safety net in tatters, it’s no wonder many of us feel a collective sense of desperation. But as Annie points out, we aren’t broke: “Spending billions on fighter planes we don’t need or wars with no end, and then saying we’re broke, just isn’t honest.”

So, at no cost to you, here is the movie. You will love it.

The Story of Broke/

Today is also election day, and here in Ohio it is a vitally important one. We have some serious “Issues” to deal with on our ballot. Issue 2 is the one getting the most attention. It’s a chance for voters here to repeal a law (SB 5) enacted by our mostly Republican Legislature which would put all our families’ safety at risk. It makes it harder for emergency responders, police and firefighters to negotiate for critical safety equipment and training that protects us all.

Issue 2 will make our nursing shortage worse. It makes it illegal for nurses, hospital and clinic workers to demand reasonable and safe staffing levels — so nurses will juggle more patients while their salaries and benefits are cut.

Instead of creating jobs to fix our economy, politicians like Gov. Kasich gave away hundreds of millions in corporate tax breaks — draining our state budget without creating jobs — and passed flawed laws like SB 5 to pay back their campaign donors.

Teachers, nurses, firefighters are not the reason Ohio’s budget is in trouble. Big corporations, their high-paid lobbyists and the politicians they fund are blaming middle class Ohioans for a problem they caused.

This one needs a strong NO vote.

There are also a couple more issues on our ballot which are designed to make changes to our Constitution. Ohio tea partiers will finally get their big moment at the ballot box today, November 8. That’s when Ohioans vote on Issue 3, a referendum spearheaded by tea party groups that would amend the state constitution to ban any law or rule requiring that citizens buy health insurance. The intent is obvious: to rebuke President Obama by blocking the individual mandate — the part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires Americans to buy health insurance or pay a fine.

This Issue is bad news any way you look at it. Not only won’t it block the ACA’s individual mandate, but it’s so vague, legal experts say, that it could have the damaging, unintended effect of undermining key public services and regulations in Ohio, including blocking the state’s ability to collect crucial data on infectious diseases. If passed, it could also spark a wave of costly lawsuits, with taxpayers likely footing the bill.

This one also needs a strong No vote.

And we also have Issue 1. This is a Constitutional Amendment to raise the age of judges. We need a lot of things here in Ohio, but more and older judges isn’t one of them. Because judicial terms in Ohio are for 6 years, the current law allows a judge to run for a new term as long as he will be one day younger than 76 on the day that term would end. Under the amendment, a judge could run for a new term that wouldn’t end until he or she was 82 years old.

I have to ask why? We have enough judges. Since this has to do with our Constitution, I feel caution is the better rule and
I’m voting No on this one too.

So, that’s it for this time.

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Ron

I know — it’s too long between posts here. I agree — and I hope to improve on it soon. In the meantime, here’s another guest article I would like to share with you.

Be well, be in peace,

Ron Rink
=======================================================
Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick

by Chip Ward

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems — its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere — goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future — that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

Copyright 2011 Chip Ward

Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. He described his political adventures in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. Today he works to protect the spectacular redrock wildlands of Utah. His essays can be found by clicking here. http://www.chipwardessays.blogspot.com/

Ottawa Sit-In to Protest Federal Support of Oilsands

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Ron

Here’s an article about the Tar Sands Protest in Ottawa.

Published on Monday, September 26, 2011 by Postmedia News

Ottawa Sit-In to Protest Federal Support of Oilsands
by Trish Audette

Alberta Oil Sands Project

Environmental groups are hoping to trigger what they call the “largest civil disobedience action in the history of Canada’s climate movement” Monday in Ottawa — a sit-in on Parliament Hill to protest federal government support of Alberta’s oilsands.

“This isn’t about condemning anybody that works in the tarsands or oilsands industry. This is about presenting choices,” said Greenpeace campaigner Mike Hudema.

The Edmonton-based activist said he hopes people do not see the protest as an attack on Alberta, but as a bid for a “clean-energy economy.”

Monday’s action takes aim at Alberta’s oilsands as a whole, but the effort piggybacks on growing American and Canadian attention to the proposed $12-billion Keystone XL pipeline extension.

As U.S. lawmakers draw closer to deciding whether to approve the massive project, expected to eventually pump 900,000 barrels of raw bitumen daily from Hardisty, Alta., across nine states to refineries in Texas, the pipeline proposal has become a magnet for wider environmental and economic debate on Alberta’s oilsands production. Where environmental activists weigh in against bolstering fossil fuel development, Canadian unions and even former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed have raised questions about exporting jobs. Across the U.S., meanwhile, local organizations worry about backyard environmental issues — including worst-case scenarios for the pipeline’s impact on the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska.

“It’s been an interesting year, and yeah, it’s been challenging,” said Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada, the Calgary-based company building the pipeline.

In the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the 2010 Enbridge pipeline rupture that affected the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, however, Howard said it was no surprise to find the Keystone XL project in the cross-hairs.

“That changes how people look at an entire industry, not just a single project,” Howard said. “All we can do is point to our industry-leading safety and operating record as something we’re proud of.”

Despite industry assurances — and efforts by members of the Alberta government to intercede by meeting with their American counterparts — opposition to the project drew a range of activists to Washington, D.C. last month for a two-week protest during which about 1,250 people were arrested, including actresses Daryl Hannah, Margot Kidder and Tantoo Cardinal.

Hudema called the Washington action an inspiration for his and other organizations — including the Sierra Club, the Council of Canadians, the Polaris Institute and the Indigenous Environmental Network — which hope more than 100 people will meet in front of the House of Commons on Monday and then move in groups into the building, where they anticipate arrest. Hudema said he expects protesters will arrive from across Canada, including from Alberta.

“It’s more about the tarsands in general, but of course the pipelines are a big part” of the fight, Hudema said. “The pipelines are what are going to allow or prevent the tarsands from expanding (or) the damage from getting significantly bigger.”

Business observers aren’t so sure the protests will capture public imagination to the point where approval for the Keystone XL project stumbles, however — even in light of mass arrests.

“When they put their mind to it they can really put on a good show of force and make a strong statement,” said David MacLean, vice-president of the Alberta Enterprise Group. Since 2008, MacLean’s Edmonton-based umbrella group has taken a cross-section of business leaders and politicians to Washington to talk about and defend the oilsands.

“The debate is so many levels,” MacLean said, including the need for oilsands companies to improve their environmental records.

But also, he said, there is a public-relations battleground.

“Sometimes it means getting your hands dirty because this is a fight.”

And the province’s role in the fight has not gone unnoticed by members of industry or the protesters taking on bitumen extraction, its carbon footprint, tailings ponds and pipelines. Where business people applaud the efforts of ministers and provincial politicians to tell Alberta’s oil story in the United States and abroad, activists like Hudema accuse the government of having become a “mouthpiece” for the oilsands.

“I think industry has asked the government to make sure that we represent what’s true in Alberta and what we represent when we go to America is the Alberta story, which isn’t so much in defence of industry,” International and Intergovernmental Relations Minister Iris Evans said.

Since January, her department and the premier’s office have spent about $92,500 on missions to the U.S. to discuss Alberta-produced energy and build relationships.

Evans is hoping the next premier — to be selected by Progressive Conservatives on Oct. 1 — will visit Washington later this fall as Keystone XL hearings continue, to gauge impacts on residents along the proposed pipeline route.

“I guess you could characterize (protests) as certainly distractions on that front, but I don’t want to belittle their intent,” Evans said.

“I think we have to do our due diligence so that we understand what elements of truth exist in any kind of protest, and make sure that we’re well prepared to defend what we do in the most positive way.”

Armageddon or Not?

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Ron

Tar Sands Extraction

Are we approaching another Armageddon? A well-recognized naturalist Professor at Harvard, E.O. Wilson, say we are. He says, “it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.”

The last one was around 65 million years ago — that was the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. If the dinosaurs could have named that one they’d have called it a Global Cooling event.

Some articles and other papers I’ve read over the past several years point out that there are 50,000 species disappearing off the face of the Earth every year. It’s never happened before, but there is now one species on this planet which is slowly trying to kill the very planet they live on. Yes, it’s us — the species who started walking upright on our hind legs about 200,000 years ago.

There have been records kept over the past 10,000 years or so, but the era which bears a careful good look is the modern industrial era. If you look even deeper in this history, you’ll see that the 20th century is the most amazing. During the 20th century alone our global population quadrupled, the world economy grew 14-fold, and industrial output went up 40-fold. How did we manage to do all this in such a short time? We fed it with a 13-fold increase in energy use compared to the already industrialized 19th century.

Let’s see — what else did we do during that time? We destroyed about a quarter of the world’s forests — we wiped out thousands upon thousands of species so we could convert our nature into goods we could sell — and to make more room for the increasing numbers of people. We also needed to have more room to grow products and animals to feed ourselves. Our human explosion has upped our air pollution five-times which in turn upped our emissions of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide by about 17-fold.

All this expansion has taken an enormous amount of energy. Here’s an interesting statistic: “Since 1970, the rate of energy building up within the biosphere is on a par with exploding 2.5 of the bombs that levelled Hiroshima every second, or 216,000 atomic bombs a day, every day, for the last four decades. Minus the radiation, of course.”

Since I’m talking about reengineering the planet — here’s one factor which, if you’ve been reading this blog for the past few posts, really has me disturbed. Yes, it’s the Syncrude mine in Canada’s Athabasca tar sands. (See photo above) This one project alone involves displacing some 30 billion tons of earth — more than twice the total tonnage of sediment carried down all the world’s rivers in a year.

Whether we like to admit or not, we, the human beings on this planet, are not the dominant force of nature on the planet. The world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity, comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five times in the Earth’s history. We are pushing the envelope of our planetary boundaries – the boundaries which have kept us safe for the past 10,000 years. We humans are overwhelming the Earth we live on. Even though we don’t want to face the reality of the changes we have to make in order to continue to survive, we can’t continue to procrastinate. We can no longer afford the luxury of denial.

“Now wait a minute,” I can hear you saying! We have an economy in crisis mode — we have huge unemployment problems — we have this phenomenal debt we need to take care of — we don’t have the time to be worrying about climate change right now. I mean, so what if in the time you’ve been reading this article another species has been driven into extinction.

Nearly all of the physical sciences have documented how serious this threat to our survival truly is — yet the wider global community has just not responded with anything approaching a solution — we either don’t want to face it — or we are just not able to do so. We know there is a way to move toward fixing this problem, yet we seem to have dropped even a pretense of trying. Why is that?

I know my first reaction to this question is to find a lot of things other than myself to blame. Things like, the energy industry propaganda which we’re hearing and seeing on our television ads every day — or the cynical corporate control of the media — or the way the energy lobbyists are buying off our politicians.

It could be those things do add to the problem — but when we really put our minds to it we can see it’s in our own psychology where the problem lies. Our brains don’t function well in responding to slow-moving disasters. We’re hard-wired to to respond to immediate threats — the kinds of things which will evoke a ‘fight or flight’ response. We’re not so interested in what the costs might be in the future — we’re more tuned into the present gains. We, or our media, or our political structure, don’t stay focused for long on abstract threats or things which might be happening sometime down the road. This is especially true when it involves changing the way we live. I believe that is what is involved here.

But, as I said when I first started this blog — if we don’t deal with this climate change problem now, these other problems which are at the top of our priority lists really won’t matter.

24 Hours of Reality

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Ron

Dear friends,

Have you been noticing the weather getting wilder where you live, and in the news around the world?

350.org - Climate Change

Well, we wanted to share with you an exciting global event from our partners that will help connect the dots between the wild weather we’re seeing, climate change, and why it’s so important we push the planet beyond fossil fuels.

The event is called 24 Hours of Reality at http://climaterealityproject.org/– it’s happening THIS WEDNESDAY, Sep 14th, and it will be a 24-hour worldwide marathon all about the reality of the climate crisis. Around the world, from New York City to South Africa to the Solomon Islands, people will use the power of the Internet to present their stories of living with climate change, and make clear the connection between extreme weather and the corporate carbon pollution that’s changing our climate.

All the presentations, which will be in multiple languages, and in every single time zone, will be streamed live at http://ClimateRealityProject.org.

Be sure to scroll down at the above site and watch the video too.

Many of us within the 350 movement already get the basic science and reality of climate change — yet we sometimes struggle with getting our friends to really grasp the urgency. This event is a great opportunity to help your friends see why you care so much (plus, you can always pick up a new communication tip or two).

The timing of 24 Hours of Reality couldn’t be more perfect — it’s just 10 days before Moving Planet (http://www.moving-planet.org/), the global day of bike rallies and on-the-ground events to call for climate action. It’s that one-two kick of awareness and activism that’s got me really excited.

At the end of many of the Climate Reality Presentations there will be a plug for joining Moving Planet actions — so we can all move together from knowledge to action.

We hope you’ll be watching Wednesday too!

Onwards,

Ron Rink

Climate Change and Food

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Ron

With all the weather events happening here and around the world, it set me to thinking more about what effect these events might have on another aspect of our Climate Change discussion – our ability to provide food.

Corn in the field

In the United States we are often considered to be the supplier of last resort for places in the world where hunger is a reality. It’s one of those things we seem to take for granted – we’ve always been able to come up with plenty of grain, meat, vegetables, fruits and other crops, haven’t we?

What about now – should we be thinking more seriously about what the Climate Change problem might be doing to our ability to continue to provide? Just considering corn, soybeans and wheat, we are the world’s leading exporter of these items.

But, just how vulnerable are we now?

In the Midwest, many farmers are growing more and more skeptical about the future. They are now making subtle changes to the way they farm to adapt to the changing climate. The extreme events – drought, floods, heat, cold – are causing farmers to make adjustments to deal with the risk of fires and pest and pathogen outbreaks which could have a direct effect on food production.

Even though framers will pooh-pooh discussions about Global Warming, they are using larger machines to allow for faster and denser seeding when the excessive rains get started earlier in the spring. Since frosts seem to be coming a little later each year, they are leaving the crops in the fields longer for better drying.

Farmers in the Corn Belt are seeing higher humidity levels which lead to higher night-time summer temperatures which have cut down on their yields. Corn likes the days to be hot, but it wants night temps to be cooler. Farmers in parts of Texas are seeing huge reservoirs dry up and crops wither in the fields because of the drought. There just aren’t any work-around’s for this problem.

The government is getting in the picture lately – which is good in some ways. There are grants coming from the U.S. Agriculture Department to study crops and climate change, and their relationship to each other. There are grants to look at greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane from livestock and carbon dioxide from growing crops.

The primary point of this is to stress the importance of realizing just how serious the changing climate can be on things like our survival.

Ron Rink

What in the World is Going On?

Tag Archives: Global Warming

Climate Change and Melting Permafrost

When Will We Get It?

The Birds — Early Warnings

Cry, The Beloved Climate by Amy Goodman

The Story of Broke

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Ottawa Sit-In to Protest Federal Support of Oilsands

Armageddon or Not?

24 Hours of Reality

Climate Change and Food