Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten.

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 2017 (IPS)

As the 10-year anniversary for the Declaration on Indigenous Rights approaches, UN indigenous rights activists came together to assess the many challenges that still remain on the ground.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, is the first of its kind to recognise and highlight the importance of indigenous rights.

“The UN Declaration is a declaration that contains the collective nature of the rights of indigenous peoples. (It) is meant to bring about remedies to kinds of historical and current injustices that indigenous people suffer,” said UN Special Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz during a press briefing on 26 January.

Though it is not legally binding, the declaration guarantees indigenous groups rights to self-determination, land, and to live free from any kind of discrimination.

However, Tauli-Corpuz noted that there are “serious retreats” in the implementation of indigenous rights, including the threat of tribal land being taken away by extractive industries.

U.S. President Donald Trump has recently announced plans to green light the controversial Dakota Access (DAPL) and Keystone XL (KXL) pipelines, projects previously halted by President Barack Obama due to concerns for the environment and lack of consultations with Native American groups.

Issues around DAPL even reached the halls of the United Nations, prompting Tauli-Corpuz to call on the U.S. government, in accordance with its commitment to implement the Declaration, to consult with indigenous groups who were denied access to information and excluded from the planning processes.

She reiterated this call, stating: “It’s regrettable that now in spite of those demands that have not yet been met…that kind of decision has to be again consulted with the indigenous peoples themselves because at the end of the day, they are the ones who will be directly affected.”

Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council – they are not UN staff.

Though the Department of the Army announced that it has begun an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the $3.8 billion project, critics say that plans for DAPL were initially fast tracked as the U.S. Corps of Engineers did not adequately assess the potential for oil spills or its impact on the environment.

According to federal data, pipeline spills are fairly common, increasing the risk of water contamination. Between 2010 and 2013, there were almost 2000 incidents of leaks, amounting to an average of 1.6 incidents per day. Oil extraction, transport and combustion also accelerate emissions of methane and carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming and climate change.

In response to President Trump’s executive orders to continue the construction of DAPL, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe David Archambault II said: “We are not opposed to energy independence. We are opposed to reckless and politically motivated development projects, like DAPL, that ignore our treaty rights and risk our water.

“Creating a second Flint does not make America great again,” he added referring to the town in Michigan where drinking water is still contaminated with lead.

Friends of the Earth’s President Erich Pica said that the decisions reflect President Trump’s disregard for the “millions of Americans who fought to protect our land, water, sacred cultural sites and climate from dangerous pipelines.”

Tauli-Corpuz also criticised a proposed North Dakota bill that would legalise accidentally running over protestors standing on the road, introduced in response to DAPL protestors blocking roadways.

“This law…is really not consistent at all with international human rights law…how can you justify running over or violently treating a protestor when every person has the right to protest?” she said, adding that indigenous people are simply protecting the rights to their lands.

Tauli-Corpuz stressed the need for countries to incorporate the UN Declaration into national plans and legislation in order to ensure indigenous rights.

“My message is for indigenous peoples to continue to assert and claim their rights as enshrined in the UN Declaration, but also to call in the States to really fulfill their obligation to comply and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Tauli-Corpuz stated.

“What we need to do now is to really use this 10^th year of the celebration of the UN Declaration to further strengthen dialogue,” she said.

“Poor and rural communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It is them – who did the least to create this problem – who are suffering the most from it”. Photo credit: UN Photo/Tim McKulka

By Dipti Bhatnagar and Susann Scherbarth
BRUSSELS/MAPUTO, Apr 1 2015 (IPS)

World governments expect to agree to a new global treaty to combat climate change in Paris in December. As the catastrophic impacts of climate change become more evident, so too escalates the urgency to act.

Mar. 31 should have marked a major milestone on the road to Paris, yet only a handful of countries acted on it. Unfortunately, the few plans that were announced before that date show that our leaders lack the ambition to do what it takes to tackle the climate crisis.

National plans for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will most likely form the basis of the Paris agreement. These plans – known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) – are meant to indicate a government’s self-stated commitment to solve the global climate crisis through domestic emission reductions as well as through support for the poorest and most vulnerable countries.“People on the frontline of climate impacts are burning while governments fiddle. People are paying and will pay for the devastation of climate change with their lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, communities and culture”

This architecture will result in an agreement that is weaker than each country being legally mandated to reduce emissions based on their fair share, determined through science and equity.

Yet, even with this architecture, the idea was that national governments would declare these plans by the end of March so that they could then be scrutinised.

Only six pledges had been received by the United Nations by the deadline – from the European Union, the United States, Norway, Mexico, Russia and Switzerland. These nations, with the notable exception of Mexico, are among the worst historical carbon emitters, yet these pledges do not reflect that immense historical responsibility and do not show any real willingness to address the scale of the climate crisis.

The commitments are well below what science and climate justice principles tell us is urgently needed to avoid hitting climate tipping points. The European Union announced target to cut emissions by ”at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030” is merely re-hashed from last year’s announcement.

The United States has cobbled together a plan for a meagre reduction of 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, by 2025. If these insignificant pledges are an indication of what is to come, we are on track to a world which will be 4-6°C warmer on average. To put this into context, the climate impacts we are facing today are the consequence of a planet which is only 0.8°C warmer than it was.

So far, none of these countries’ announcements would contribute their ‘fair share’ according to science and equity. All parties are capable of much greater ambition, and it is high time to bring it to the table.

The deadlines that matter most are not set by governments, but by our planet and its natural boundaries, which have already been stretched considerably by the impacts of the climate crisis, for instance by the lethal and extreme weather events from Vanuatu to the Balkans to the Sahel.

Climate change is already happening now, bringing more floods, storms, droughts, rising seas and more devastating typhoons and hurricanes.

The mockery made of this latest Mar. 31 deadline is just another revelation of our governments’ inaction – under the influence of powerful polluting corporations – in the face of impending disaster.

People on the frontline of climate impacts are burning while governments fiddle. People are paying and will pay for the devastation of climate change with their lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, communities and culture.

Poor and rural communities are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. It is them – who did the least to create this problem – who are suffering the most from it.

We need a just and drastic transformation of our societies, our energy and food systems, and our economies. Proven and workable alternatives exist and are already being implemented.

Key decisions about our energy systems are made regularly, and will of course be made long after the Paris summit. Take for instance U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring planet-wrecking tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

A decision is expected soon and a rejection of the pipeline project would send a strong signal that our long-term future is not founded on the exploitation and burning of more and more fossil fuels.

European Union governments announced their INDCs back in February with their new ‘Energy Union’ vision for meeting the region’s energy needs. The bloc has recognised the need to reduce energy consumption and help citizens take control of clean, local renewable sources. But these moves towards the good must not be negated with new investments in the bad – new gas pipelines are also on the menu.

Throughout 2015, Friends of the Earth International and others will be bringing more and more people together to fight against the power of the polluters and make sure politicians hear the voices of the voiceless and take real action.

In the run-up to Paris, and along the road beyond, we, together with thousands of others, will be promoting the wealth of real solutions and proven ideas that are already delivering transformation around the world.

We will be on the streets throughout 2015, in 2016, and as long as it takes to realise community-owned renewable energy solutions that benefit ordinary people, not multinational corporations.

The Paris deadline will come and go, like others before. But the energy transformation is under way and, whatever our governments will pledge or not pledge at the climate summit in Paris, the transformation will not be stopped.

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* Dipti Bhatnagar is Climate Justice & Energy Co-coordinator for Friends of the Earth International, based in Maputo.

* Susann Scherbarth is Climate Justice & Energy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth Europe, based in Brussels.

Excerpt:

Representatives from a coalition of over 30 environmental and progressive groups delivered more than 800,000 messages to Democratic Senator Harry Reid and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell in 2012 urging them to block attempts to resurrect the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Credit: 350.org/cc by 2.0

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Feb 12 2015 (IPS)

With battle lines sharpening over the stalled Keystone XL pipeline, a new analysis details the intense industry lobbying of both houses of the U.S. Congress since 2013 – to the tune of 58.8 million dollars by five refinery companies alone.

According to MapLight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organisation that reveals money’s influence on politics, the oil and gas industry gave, on average, 13 times more money to members of the House of Representatives who voted “yes” (43,375 dollars) on the bill called H.R. 3 than those who voted against it (3,610 dollars)."Another climate denier-controlled House vote in favour of oil isn't a surprise, and the Democrats who voted with them of course are oil-funded politicians too." -- Kyle Ash of Greenpeace

The bill would allow TransCanada to build the highly controversial Keystone XL pipeline without a presidential permit or additional environmental review. It passed the House on Wednesday with a vote of 270-152.

The U.S. Senate approved a virtually identical measure last month.

“How can we truly trust legislators to vote in the public interest when they are dependent on industry campaign funding to get elected?” Pamela Behrsin of MapLight told IPS. “Our broken money and politics system forces lawmakers into a conflict of interest between lawmakers’ voters and their donors.”

She noted that Rep. Kevin Cramer, a Republican from North Dakota and the sponsor of the legislation, received 222,400 dollars from the oil and gas industry, the ninth most among members of the House voting on H.R. 3.

Figures for the Senate were comparable, with the oil and gas industry giving, on average, 10 times more money to senators who supported the measure (236,544 dollars). The Senate sponsor, John Hoeven – also a Republican from North Dakota – received 275,998 dollars.

“Big Oil thinks it can buy votes in DC, and unfortunately the Keystone vote shows that is still possible in the halls of Congress,” David Turnbull of Oil Change International, a nonprofit working to promote a shift away from fossil fuels, told IPS.

“But what’s more important is that Big Oil can’t buy the American people, who are standing up to the industry’s bullying in Washington and demanding the president reject the pipeline and take bold action to move us off fossil fuels and towards a safer climate future.”

President Barack Obama has 10 days to decide on a veto. Since the 1,179-mile pipeline crosses national borders, Obama needs to issue a permit declaring the pipeline serves the “national interest” in order for it to be approved. The new legislation would circumvent such approval.

The pipeline has united every prominent U.S. environmental group in opposition, and even prompted the venerable Sierra Club to suspend its 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The group’s executive director, Michael Brune, was arrested in front of the White House during a protest against Keystone in February 2013, and there have been massive rallies against it since then.

Studies have shown that burning the heavy oil the pipeline would carry would emit more than 181 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – equal to the emissions of nearly 38 million cars or 51 coal-fired power plants.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that two-thirds of proven fossil fuel reserves need to be kept in the ground in order to have a 50 percent chance of staying below the two-degree threshold of warming that could avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Kyle Ash of Greenpeace told IPS that since the House had already passed the companion of the Senate bill, normally each chamber would reconcile their respective bills in conference, especially since both chambers are now controlled by the Republicans.

Instead, the full House went ahead and voted on the Senate version without making any changes, “apparently because GOP leaders fear that House Republican conferees will be too crazy”.

“As the Senate votes on climate amendments like Hoeven and Schatz also demonstrated, that the House voted on S.1 (the Senate version of the bill) ironically may be a sign that at least the crassest of congressional fossil fuel love is no longer in vogue,” he said.

“Another climate denier-controlled House vote in favour of oil isn’t a surprise, and the Democrats who voted with them of course are oil-funded politicians too.”

Indeed, MapLight found that the oil and gas industry gave, on average, 3.2 times more money to Democratic Senators voting for S.1 (73,279 dollars) compared to Democratic and Independent Senators voting against it (22,882 dollars).

The industry gave, on average, five times more money to Democratic Representatives voting “yes” (18,199 dollars) on H.R. 3 compared to Democratic and Independent Representatives voting “no” (3,610 dollars).

“We’ve done quite a bit of work on the massive amount of money members of Congress receive from the industry,” Turnbull said. “Indeed, it’s unfortunately not a surprise.”

The pipeline would carry petroleum from Canada’s oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and MapLight notes that some of Keystone XL’s strongest supporters are the Gulf Coast refinery companies that have expanded their facilities and would benefit from Canadian oil that will flow through the pipeline.

Valero, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66, and Motiva Enterprises (a company owned by Shell and the Saudi Arabian state oil company Saudi Aramco) constitute the five companies with the most refinery capacity along the Gulf Coast, the group says.

Together, the five companies control 45 percent of the refining capacity in the U.S., and all have been reported as possible customers of the pipeline.

“The vote in Congress on Keystone XL is a desperate distraction by an oil-soaked Congress. The president has said numerous times that he will veto the bill, and he’s right to do so,” Turnbull said.

“As the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] recently laid out, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline clearly fails the president’s own climate test, and should be rejected. The president has all the information he needs to reject the pipeline and we hope he does so as soon as possible, so we can all move on to building the clean energy economy rather than catering to the whims of Big Oil.”

A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month found 34 percent of respondents wanted the pipeline built now, while 61 percent said the environmental impact reviews – including by the State Department and the heads of eight other government agencies – should continue.

“The House is expediting this bill getting to the president so they can gloat about how Congress loves oil and he doesn’t – despite the Obama administration going out of its way to expand oil drilling on public lands,” Ash said.

“However, the KXL pipeline may have died when the president agreed with New York Times reporter Tom Friedman last June that growing fossil fuel supply is bad for the climate (‘we can’t burn it all’). I believe he will do as he said and veto this bill.”

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Young protesters at the U.N. climate talks in Lima, Peru highlight out-of-touch North American energy policies. Credit: Adopt a Negotiator.

By Leehi Yona
LIMA, Dec 13 2014 (IPS)

While U.S. and Canadian officials delivered speeches about how the world needs to step up to their responsibilities at the U.N. climate negotiations in Lima, Peru, activists from North America demanded clear answers back home on their governments’ relationships with fossil fuel corporations, as well as the future of several major oil projects across the continent.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke Thursday about the role each country should play on tackling climate change and referred to the U.S.-China agreement announced in November. The agreement, which pledged unforeseen emissions reductions for both countries, has been lauded by many countries as a progressive step forward at the U.N. negotiations.“Under Stephen Harper, Canada has no climate policy beyond public relations.” -- Canadian MP Elizabeth May

However, civil society delegates have expressed concern over the disconnect between the messaging the United States has been taking in Lima, and its domestic fossil fuel reliance.

This international discourse collides with Washington’s hesitance to repeal the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed project that would transport over 800,000 barrels of bitumen a day from the Alberta tar sands to Texas oil refineries.

“The best way the U.S. can support progress in the U.N. Climate Talks is to start at home by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline now,” said Dyanna Jaye, a U.S. youth delegate attending the conference with SustainUS.

TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline has been stalled in political procedures since 2011. Once considered to be a done deal, the project has grown to be a bone of contention among environmental groups, who have mobilised to put pressure on President Barack Obama to reject it.

Having been presented as a bill to Congress numerous times, it most recently passed a House of Representatives vote but failed in the Senate by only one vote on Nov. 5.

Youth have taken a leading role on been pushing for Kerry to reject Keystone XL, shining a spotlight on the influence of the fossil fuel industry in hindering progress.

Following Kerry’s speech to the U.N. on Thursday, Jaye and other U.S. and Canadian youth activists organised an action in protest of proposed pipelines through the two countries.

Calling for the industry to be kicked out of the negotiations, youth have highlighted that a successful deal in Lima would necessitate a phasing out of fossil fuel use to zero production by 2050, as stated in a World Wildlife Fund report.

“Dirty fossil fuel projects like Keystone XL clearly fail the climate test,” Evan Weber, executive director of US Climate Plan, told IPS. “We’ll be drawing the line on any new fossil fuel infrastructure and calling for investment in renewable energy solutions.”

Protesters emphasised the need for domestic action at home in order for there to be any progress at the United Nations

The United States, however, isn’t the only country whose domestic issues directly contradict their statements here at COP20. The Canadian government has been criticised for their lack of domestic ambition and their close relationship with fossil fuel companies at this conference.

At the talks, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq stated on Dec. 9 that Canada is “confident [they] can achieve a climate agreement” at these talks, “however it will require courage and common sense.”

While the government has attempted to portray itself as a climate leader in these negotiations, members of civil society have pointed out discrepancies between the emissions goals they are promising and the emissions trajectory the country is actually on track to produce.

“Under Stephen Harper, Canada has no climate policy beyond public relations,” said Elizabeth May, a Canadian Member of Parliament and leader of the Canadian Green Party attending COP 20.

“The zeal to exploit fossil fuels has led to the evisceration of ‎environmental laws. We have distorted our economy in the interests of exporting bitumen,” she told IPS.

Canada has once again entered into the non-governmental spotlight at U.N. climate negotiations. On Tuesday, uproar ensued when Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated that any regulation of the oil and gas industry would be “crazy” considering the industry’s current financial state.

On the conference’s last day, Canada was also awarded a Fossil of the Day, a daily non-prize awarded by civil society during the Climate Talks to the most regressive country, for its consistent meddling with and lack of participation in the U.N. process.

“As members of civil society, we’ve seen Canadian negotiators prioritise fossil fuel companies over public interest time and time again in Lima,” Catherine Gauthier of ENvironnement JEUnesse, a Québec youth environmental organisation, told IPS.

Both countries have come under scrutiny for their promotion of climate action on the international level while promoting tar sands expansion and shale gas fracking projects at home. Shale gas has particularly been promoted by both governments as a bridge fuel to help wean societies off fossil fuels with the goal of increasing renewable energy sources.

“The use of fracking as a bridge fuel is the biggest lie the American public has ever been fed,” Emily Williams of the California Student Sustainability Coalition told IPS. “It poisons our health and our communities, and destroys our environment. It cannot be part of the climate solution as it starves the renewable energy revolution of the investment it needs.”

Both Canada and the United States have been active in calling for swift action on the international level when it comes to climate change. The U.N. negotiations are currently running over time in Lima as countries work towards a compromise agreement.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Credit: Dru Oja Jay/ CC 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Feb 26 2014 (IPS)

The Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Nation, in the midwest of the United States, is one of the most abandoned places in the country and in the world.

Unemployment on the reservation hovers around 80 percent and only one in ten graduate from high school. Women live an average of 52 years, men 48. Half the population over 40 has diabetes and one in four children is born with some kind of foetal alcohol disorder.

So when the big companies behind the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline traced its proposed route around Pine Ridge, they probably thought little of this community of fewer than 30,000. If anything, they assumed, the Lakota would be happy to have jobs.“We are concerned about the preservation of our life and the earth for future generations. That’s not fear, that’s common sense.” -- Debbie White Plume, Lakota activist and resident of Pine Ridge

But what Pine Ridge lacks in material riches it makes up for in a unique attachment to the environment.

In 2012, when trucks belonging to a pipeline company attempted to drive through the tribal land in South Dakota, they were blocked by native authorities and locals who had sent out a call over the local radio station’s Facebook page.

Despite their poverty, locals knew that contrary to industry talking points, potential jobs in the area would be short-lived and outside experts flown in to maintain the pipeline.

Debbie White Plume, a Lakota activist and resident of Pine Ridge, says the pipeline runs against their conception of life and relationship with Mother Nature. They will never allow the pipeline to be built without putting up a fight, she told IPS by telephone.

Plume helps organise “Moccasins on the Ground”, a training programme that teaches native people the skills and tactics of non-violent direct action. Travelling from settlement to settlement, often hundreds of miles apart, Plume teaches local communities about their rights as sovereign citizens and how they can protest encroachment by corporations.

“We see what the tar sand oil mining is causing in Canada, we see what the oil drilling in the Dakotas is doing – as they gouge her (Mother Nature) and rape her and hurt her, we know it’s all the same ecosystem that we all need to live in,” Plume told IPS. “For us it’s a spiritual stand – it’s our relative, it hurts us.”

The Keystone XL is the final of four phases of the Keystone Pipeline system that brings highly corrosive oil called diluted bitumen (dilbit) from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada south to the Gulf of Mexico to be refined.

Oil sands, by far the most polluting of any fuel, require huge quantities of energy to be extracted and leave behind byproducts like “petcoke”, a high-sulphur coal-like substance that burns dirtier than coal.

The U.S. portion of the fourth phase would be built between the frontier town of Morgan, Montana and Steele City, Nebraska, where it would join existing pipelines headed south.

This final northern segment would cross several major rivers including the Red Rivers, the Missouri and the Yellowstone Rivers and pass over the Ogallala Aquifer, a shallow underground water table that supplies over a quarter of the United States’ irrigated land.

If it is completed, the pipeline would transport fuel equivalent to 181 million metric tonnes of CO2 per year, the equivalent of 51 coal plants.

Though technically skirting the reservation’s borders, the proposed pipeline would pass between Pine Ridge and the Rosebud Reservoir, where communities draw their water.

“In our mind, that’s our water,” Plume told an August gathering in Bridger, South Dakota. “We love our water and we have to protect our water.”

Plume says the Lakota have been joined by non-native ranchers and farmers in places like Nebraska who fear contamination could ruin their cropland.

Spills

With the Alberta oil sand boom pumping out record levels of Canadian crude, accidents are on the rise. In March 2013, between 5,000 and 7,000 barrels of Canadian heavy crude spilled from a gash in ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, leading to catastrophic environmental damage.

In October, 20,600 barrels of fracked oil spilled out of a pipeline in North Dakota.

According to the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), last year there were 364 pipelines spills in the U.S.. And in Alberta, accidents are just as common. One investigation found more than 25,000 spills there in the past 37 years.

It is virtually guaranteed that Keystone would have a spill at some point. Incredibly, when Texas activists locked themselves inside a newly installed segment of the pipeline, rays of sunshine poured through huge cracks in an exterior meant to be water tight. Later that day, the portion was buried.

Corruption

After years of opposition from activists, the U.S. State Department released its environmental impact statement on Jan. 31, finding that construction of the Keystone XL would not significantly worsen carbon emissions.

This was the test by which U.S. President Barack Obama said he would approve or veto the project. But the study assumed the oil sands would be extracted at the same rate and shipped via rail should the proposal be rejected, even though industry studies had shown the rail system was incapable of absorbing excess crude.

Democratic Party lawmakers had urged the State Department to postpone releasing the impact statement until its own Inspector General completed an investigation into whether Environmental Resource Management (ERM), the company contracted by the State Department to carry out the assessment, had hidden conflicts of interest.

Environmental groups publicised documents indicating the State Department made little effort to verify if what ERM told them was true.

In reality, the London-based company receives much of its profits from existing deals with companies like Conoco Phillips, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Canadian Natural Resources, all of which stand to benefit from the pipeline and further tapping of the Alberta oil sands.

Several ERM analysts who wrote the assessment appeared to have also been former employees of TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.

“We’ve submitted tons of evidence that the company lied on their disclosure forms,” Ross Hammond, senior campaigner at Friends of the Earth’s Climate and Energy Programme, told IPS.

“The investment community sees Keystone as critical and the State Department glossed over that issue,” Hammond told IPS.

“So basically they’re saying ‘since there’s no climate impact, you might as well build Keystone.’ There are definitely instances in the analysis where it’s really shoddy.”

Friends of the Earth alleges that TransCanada schemed to employ former Obama administration officials as State Department lobbyists.

Anita Dunn, former White House communications director and now chief lobbyist for a firm that represents TransCanada, visited the White House over 100 times after leaving office in 2009.

“The only way to approve Keystone XL is to ignore the multiple lies that TransCanada told the State Department in its application. I’m sorry to see the State Department is comfortable with that,” said Democratic congressman Raúl Grijalva, who serves on the House Committee on Natural Resources.

A 30 day public comment period following the report’s release ends Mar. 7, after which input from federal agencies, NGOs and citizens will be released for review by Secretary of State John Kerry. The last time they took public comments, the State Department was inundated with over 1.5 million letters, emails and faxes, the majority disapproving of the plan.

In Pine Ridge, Plume says the choice is clear.

“We are concerned about the preservation of our life and the earth for future generations. That’s not fear, that’s common sense.”

“Our creation story places us here at the beginning of time,” says Plume. “We are hoping president Obama will say no – if he says yes, then we’ll put our moccasins on the ground and engage in civil disobedience.”

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

A civil disobedience campaign against the pipeline in 2011 led to hundreds of arrests. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 1 2014 (IPS)

The U.S. government has taken a significant step towards approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a highly contentious project that has unified environmental groups here in opposition to what they say would be a climate catastrophe.

In a widely anticipated move, the State Department late Friday released a final environmental impact statement (EIS) that suggested that the Keystone project, which would bring a particularly dirty form of oil from “tar sands” fields in Canada to refineries in the southern United States, would have negligible effect on climate change.“It’s still uncertain if the White House has written off all of the political repercussions that would come with allowing this to move forward." -- Kyle Ash

The rationale for this finding was the fact that the Canadian government is particularly motivated to move forward with the project, and thus the tar sands would be developed regardless of whether the U.S. government green-lights the pipeline.

Over the past year, for instance, a debate has raged over the viability of moving tar sands oil by rail. But according to multiple analyses, including by the industry, the economic feasibility of the Canadian tar sands development rests on ensuring that the Keystone pipeline gets built.

Nonetheless, according to the new State Department analysis, “approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States based on expected oil prices, oil-sands supply costs, transport costs, and supply-demand scenarios.”

Critics say the emissions that would result from burning the heavy “bitumen” from the Canadian tar sands would be equivalent to adding an additional 37 million cars to the streets, and point out that such a result would be antithetical to broader policy goals voiced by President Obama himself. (The president has never taken a public stance on Keystone XL’s merits, though he has stated that he would have to be convinced that the pipeline wouldn’t significantly exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions.)

Others are concerned about the potential for leakages and other malfunctions that could occur along the pipeline, potentially impacting on local communities and environments, given the highly corrosive nature of bitumen. Such concerns have made the Keystone project into perhaps the single most defining issue for a U.S. environment community frustrated by national and international failure to act decisively in the fact of climate change.

“The environmental community has been asking the president to get serious on climate, and this is the first move he could make to show how serious he is,” Kyle Ash, a senior Washington legislative representative with Greenpeace, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“It’s still uncertain if the White House has written off all of the political repercussions that would come with allowing this to move forward. But he now seems to have what he needs to legally justify doing so.”

To a great degree, the State Department’s new conclusions adhere closely to a draft version of the report released last year and which set off a chorus of outrage from environmentalists. In the intervening months, however, President Obama and some of his top officials made public statements that strengthened the belief for some that the final report may offer different analysis.

Yet Greenpeace’s Ash says it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the report didn’t change significantly.

“You have to step back and see how this falls into the White House’s broader climate and energy strategy,” he says.

“What is the president doing on climate? He’s following an ‘all of the above’ approach, doing everything he can to increase the global supply of coal, oil and gas. There’s no reason to assume that we’d have a different EIS, but I still can’t understand how the White House can believe that facilitating the increase of fossil fuels doesn’t matter for the climate.”

National interest

The State Department is keen to emphasise that its final report, about which it received nearly two million comments since 2012, is not a “decisional document” on whether the Keystone XL pipeline should go forward.

Following a public-comment period and a 90-day interagency review, the issue will go to President Obama’s desk for a final decision on whether the project would be in the “national interest”. Of course, such vague phrasing offers plenty of fodder for both sides of the discussion over the Keystone pipeline’s merits, and the new State Department report will only feed this process.

On one side, opponents of the pipeline are seizing on the fact that the new report significantly expands on its analysis of the overall climate impacts of any development of the tar sands. Some suggest that this offers strong grounding for Obama to reject the project’s permit.

“In this report, for the very first time, the State Department acknowledges a scenario in which the Keystone XL tar sands export pipeline dramatically increases carbon pollution,” Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, said Friday.

“That’s a welcome and long overdue change, and it gives President Obama all the evidence he needs to reject Keystone XL.”

On the other side, a broad spectrum of business leaders, conservatives and unions has backed the Keystone project from the start, on grounds of energy security and jobs creation. Perhaps the most striking analysis of the implications of the new report is offered by the oil industry’s jubilant reaction.

“This final review puts to rest any credible concerns about the pipeline’s potential negative impact on the environment. This long awaited project should now be swiftly approved,” Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), a prominent industry lobby group, said following the report’s release.

“The only thing left is for President Obama to declare that this project is in our nation’s interest.”

Meanwhile, the State Department’s inspector-general is continuing to weigh evidence of alleged conflicts of interest behind the agency’s review process for the Keystone XL project. A contractor heavily involved in both State Department analyses and a London group called Environmental Resources Management, is accused of being part of multiple trade associations that have lobbied in favour of the Keystone project, including the API.

Two audit reports by the inspector-general are currently pending publication, expected to be released in coming weeks.

The Athabasca River from Icefields Parkway in Alberta, Canada. Credit: dicktay2000/CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
SPOKANE, Washington, Sep 1 2013 (IPS)

Native American tribes in the United States have taken the lead in opposing the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, engaging in civil disobedience to the point of arrest and attempting to physically block shipments of construction equipment from passing through their native lands.

Native opposition is based on concern over the environmental destruction associated with the expansion and with the related Keystone XL Pipeline. The pipeline would convey oil from the tar sands through Canada and the United States to southeastern Texas.

As previously reported by IPS, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation says the expansion of the world’s third largest crude oil deposit so far has caused significant damage to the ecosystem, including the disappearance of bugs, decline in the numbers of migratory birds, elevated rates of certain types of cancers, and the possible extinction of caribou herds. "They're trying to conquer Mother Nature, and they're not going to do it."
-- Silas Whitman

The Nez Perce tribe are also concerned about the Megaload shipments coming through their tribal lands, without their permission, and the ecological damage these shipments might cause. The most recent, a Megaload shipment, contains a 322-tonne, 225-foot-long evaporator to be used in the oil refining process in connection with the Tar Sands expansion.

“What it really amounts to is our association [with] our surroundings, our environment,” Tony Smith, a member of the Nez Perce tribe, told IPS in an interview at the recent Spokane Falls Northwest Indian Market, Encampment and Pow Wow.

“Outsiders believe they’re apart from the environment, that we’re above it, that we can control it,” Smith said. “But we believe we’re a part of the environment; it’s a symbiotic relationship. Whatever we do to our environment we do to ourselves.”

“The issue is really hot,” he added. “A lot of emotions are flowing over, with the protests that happened.”

Protests and arrests

Nineteen members of the Nez Perce tribe, including eight members of the tribal council, were arrested for disorderly conduct on Aug. 6, 2013, near downtown Lewiston, Idaho. They were released shortly thereafter. About 200 protesters had gathered beginning the night before, according to the Spokesman Review newspaper. They chanted and banged drums until the Megaload shipment approached in the early morning hours on Aug. 6.

The protest delayed the Megaload shipment by about four hours. About three quarters of the protesters were estimated to be Native Americans. Others included activists with an environmental group, Wild Idaho Rising Tide. A video of the protest has been posted to Youtube.

The protesters continued to block the shipment at four different points over four different days as the Megaload shipment attempted to move through tribal lands.

Other tribes, however, have received advance payments from TransCanada for allowing the Keystone Pipeline to come through their tribal lands, according to Silas Whitman, chairman of the executive committee of the Nez Perce Tribal Government.

Whitman also said he was concerned about how companies were shipping equipment “without any consultation with the tribe or without any impact study”.

“Corporate Canada has been used to rolling over indigenous populations for quite some time. We thought the only way to get their attention is to conduct civil disobedience. We tried diplomacy, we tried outreach,” Whitman said.

“They’re using our wilderness corridor, where our treaty rights are still intact. They’re using us to further more misery and exploitation of Native resources in Canada. We’re taking a stand for those who can’t speak for themselves – the fish, the wildlife, the cultural resources, including our brothers in Canada who are having a tough time,” Whitman said.

Going to court

The Nez Perce tribe has joined with other Native tribes in opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline, noting that such efforts begin with the Megaload protests.

“It starts with us. They’re trying to ship…through our corridor, to Canada. That’s where the Native first nations have their lands destroyed for tar sands,” Whitman said.

In February, a federal court mandated approval from the tribe and the U.S. Forest Service before the Megaload shipments could come through the Nez Perce tribal lands. The state of Idaho, however, approved the shipment, despite the court order, and without tribal approval.

“The judge told them the first time they [the Forest Service] had the authority to do [block the shipment]. Now we’re taking them back to court to enforce that authority,” Whitman said.

“They have staff here conducting interviews. We’re saying the Forest Service has to uphold its duties and obligations. The Forest Service said they are afraid of losing a court battle because there’s no federal regulation that allows them to stop it,” Whitman said.

“General Electric has now decided to intervene. They think they can beat us in court,” Whitman said. Delays of the shipments could cost General Electric millions of dollars.

“Sep. 9 we’re going back to court [to see] if we can get a cease and desist on [the basis of] the order,” Whitman said.

With the ongoing litigation pending, Omega Morgan, the company responsible for the shipments, has said it will not move forward on any more shipments until at least Sep. 18.

“We’re gaining more support every day. The newspaper poll was two-thirds against [the protests]. Now, it’s 50/50. We’re standing up to the corporate giants and we’re doing it on a shoestring,” Whitman said.

Potential problems with the shipment include the truck or shipment falling into the wilderness river, which could block fish passage during the critical migration season, breaking roads and river banks, and causing soil to accumulate on the campgrounds.

Whitman says the trucks are going about 50 miles per hour on a “two lane road next wilderness river through high mountains in Idaho. They’re trying to conquer Mother Nature, and they’re not going to do it.”

Regional temperature increases predicted by 2100. Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report 2004

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Two reports released Wednesday reveal the dangerous gap between science and politics. New climate research shows that extreme events such as the severe heat wave in the U.S. last year will double in 2020, increase 400 percent by 2040, and then get far worse without significant carbon reductions.

Meanwhile, an analysis shows Canada cannot meet its weak 2020 carbon emissions reduction target even as it plans to triple the size of its massive tar sands operations in coming decades.

Canada’s has no credible carbon reduction plan and has done virtually nothing on climate since Stephen Harper’s government came to power in 2006, said activists.

“It will be very difficult for the Canadian government to achieve its own emissions reduction target for 2020 even without tar sands expansion,” Danny Harvey, a climate scientist at the University of Toronto, said at a press conference Wednesday.

Canada, the United States and other countries pledged to reduce their total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 17 percent compared to 2005 levels by the year 2020 under what is known as the Copenhagen Accord. Scientists say that target is too weak and will result in global temperatures rising by at least 3.5C, a very dangerous level of climate change.

Those high temperatures will likely produce heat extremes that kill people, animals and crops, and blanket 85 percent of the planet’s land area in summer by 2100, German and Spanish scientists reported late Wednesday.

“That’s what our calculations show for a scenario of unabated climate change,” said co-author Dim Coumou of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Shockingly, it is already too late to prevent a doubling of heat waves by 2020 and four-fold increase by 2040, concludes the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The reason for this is that burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the past 50 years has added 40 percent more heat-trapping CO2 gas to the atmosphere. Even if all human sources of CO2 emissions ended today, temperatures will continue to rise from the present 0.8C of additional warming to as much as 1.1. to 1.5C due to a time lag in the climate system, scientists say.

And those temperatures would not decline for a very long time.

That is why all countries agreed to cut CO2 emissions at the 2009 U.N. climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

Canada matched the U.S. pledge to reduce emissions 17 percent but then did little to reduce its emissions and instead dramatically expanded the world’s biggest energy project, the Alberta tar sands.

Each year, the tar sands burn nearly 40 billion cubic metres of natural gas, roughly two-thirds of what India uses annually. This gas is mainly used to heat water so the tarry bitumen can be boiled out of the ground and converted into heavy crude oil.

In 2011, 370 million cubic metres of freshwater was used. This is more than the city of Toronto’s 2.8 million people use. Oil companies pay nothing for the water even though the water becomes too toxic to be returned to rivers or to aquifers.

Most analyses show that oil from the tar sands is the most polluting and has the highest CO2 footprint compared to other sources of oil. Those CO2 emissions are increasing as bitumen becomes harder to extract and are expected to double by 2020.

“Canadian politicians are simply not telling the truth. You can’t keep expanding the tar sands and meet the reduction target,” said Mark Jaccard, an energy economist at Simon Frasier University and a Harper government appointee to the now-shuttered National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy.

There are no federal regulations on oil and gas emissions in Canada. Instead of acting, the Harper government launched a 16-million-dollar public relations campaign in the U.S. and Canada promoting the economic benefits of “responsible resource development” of the tar sands – a move mocked by activists as “greenwashing”.

Deep cuts in emissions after 2020 will be needed to avoid most of the world suffering under devastating heat waves before the end of the century, the Potsdam Institute’s research shows. Those reductions “will be impossible to achieve if we lock in 40 years of increased tar sands emissions by building more pipelines” like the Keystone XL, said the University of Toronto’s Danny Harvey in a press conference here in Toronto Wednesday.

The U.S. is on target to make its meet its Copenhagen reduction pledge. However, Canada’s abysmal environmental record has come to the attention of the Barack Obama administration. President Obama recently said that he would only approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline if it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution”. The long-delayed Keystone XL would bring 800,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen (heavy oil) to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL will increase Canada’s emissions by allowing the tar sands to expand in size, said Gillian McEachern of Environmental Defence Canada. And there is no technology nor any policies that will allow Canada to reduce those emissions before 2020, McEachern said.

Other proposed pipelines that are needed to support tar sands expansion have met strong opposition in Canada and it is far from certain if they will be completed, said Jaccard.

“We are now at a point where the only acceptable alternative is for the U.S. government to reject Keystone XL,” he said.

Activists taking part in the annual 'Healing Walk' through the tar sands site in Fort McMurray, Canada, call for the expansion of the energy project to end. Credit: Keepers of the Athabasca

By Flossie Baker
NEW YORK, Aug 5 2013 (IPS)

“First the bugs began to disappear,” says Eriel Deranger, spokesperson for Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation.

By Deranger’s account, her small community of Fort Chipewyan is increasingly affected by the expansion of the world’s third largest crude oil deposit, the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta, Canada."Our people are being held as economic hostages in the race to develop our homeland." -- Eriel Deranger of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation

In the last decade, the town of Fort Chipewyan in northeastern Alberta has witnessed its local caribou herds threatened with extinction, a decline in the numbers of migratory birds, and elevated rates of certain types of cancer.

An independent study conducted from 2006 to 2009 was inconclusive about the cause of the rise in cancer.

“The most recent statistics indicate that overall rates of cancer are not higher in Fort Chipewyan compared to the Alberta average,” John Muir, spokesperson for Alberta Health Services, told IPS.

“However, the rate is higher for specific cancers such as lung cancer. Independent medical studies have found no causal links between oil sands development and the community health downstream.”

Many locals do not believe it is a coincidence that cancer rates and tar sands production have both increased. Nevertheless, the community is pleased with its new health facilities, which were largely paid for by the oil company Suncor.

Oil companies continue to heavily fund projects for Native people in northeastern Alberta. In 2009, they donated more than 23 million dollars to organisations in the region, including youth and community programmes. Yet for a lot of local indigenous people, this support is bittersweet.

Like many northern indigenous communities, Fort Chipewyan has struggled economically since the fur trade, on which it heavily depended, was outlawed in the early 1970s. Now, with fears of contamination compounding the hardships of living off the land, many residents have turned to the tar sands for employment.

This is a move encouraged by oil companies, one of which provides a fly in/fly out service every two weeks for its workers from the isolated town.

“[The oil] industry is proud of the solid relationship it has with Aboriginal people…[and] has created mutually beneficial employment and business opportunities,” Geraldine Anderson of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers told IPS.

The town’s elders, however, have mixed feelings about younger generations leaving to work in the tar sands.

“The elders who lived through the end of the fur trade, and then the [economic] depression…are now seeing this resurgence,” Deranger says. “This economy on the one hand is ensuring that their families are fed …and are allowing new and better health facilities…people are able to live well.

“However it’s also going hand in hand with the loss of land, the loss of culture, the loss of identity.”

Deranger explained that a deep understanding and connection with the land is central to the culture of indigenous people.

“The blades of grass, the leaves on the trees, the medicine, the water, the animals: they are our brothers and sisters and cousins…the land is where we learnt to be human and self-sufficient,” she said.

Deranger says that there has been a surge in the numbers of Fort Chipewyan tar sands workers taking drugs and alcohol. She attributes this to the racism they face in the workplace as well as the psychological trauma of leaving their land.

“We are seeing increases in the cases of post-traumatic stress disorder because they are watching the destruction of their ancestors. And this is why we are seeing an epidemic of substance abuse…they are trying to numb that pain,” Deranger told IPS.

Covering 142,200 square kilometres, the tar sands span an area the size of New York State. Only 20 percent of the deposit has thus far been mined and it is estimated that the Athabasca tar sands have the potential to produce three million barrels of oil per day for the next 150 years.

Environmentalists say that mining tar sands oil produces three to five times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional crude. Large amounts of water and natural gas are required to heat and separate oily tar – or bitumen – from the sand.

Extracting one barrel of oil from the tar sands requires 650 cubic feet of natural gas, according to Shell Canada figures.

Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, estimates that by 2050, only 30 percent of the world’s energy sources will be will be renewable, with the remaining 70 percent coming from fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

There is a huge incentive for oil companies to expand. If U.S. President Barack Obama gives the go-ahead for the expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline, oil would be transported all the way from Alberta to Houston, Texas.
This is a worrying prospect for Deranger who believes that expansion has already committed a “cultural genocide” against her community. Being both an economic catalyst and environmental hazard, the tar sands pose a difficult dilemma for many Fort Chipewyan residents.

“We need these jobs …because there are members that can’t pay their bills and [whose] children are starving. Our people are being held as economic hostages in the race to develop our homeland,” Deranger says.

Despite a pledge by the oil companies to reduce environmental contamination, it still occurs. For the last six weeks, oil has been continuously leaking from the ground into the forests of Cold Lake, Eastern Alberta. Attempts to stop it have so far failed.

The continuing expansion of the tar sands is viewed by some as a practical solution to the world’s increasing demand for energy, and by scientists and climate activists on both sides of the border as a catastrophe. For local indigenous people who live at ground zero, their traditional culture is in jeopardy.

“When there is no Athabasca left, there will be no Athabasca Dene Suline [the Native language]…You will have completely annihilated an entire people,” says Deranger.

Forward On Climate Rally. Washington DC, Feb. 17, 2013. Credit: Stephen D. Melkisethian/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

Advocacy groups here are applauding the publication of new government concerns, formally expressed Monday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over a recent assessment of the environmental impact of a major oil pipeline that would run between Canada and the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Because the EPA will eventually have to sign off on any decision to approve the pipeline proposal, made by a Canadian company called TransCanada, this indication of the agency’s strong reservations over the government’s assessment could now further gum up the consent process for the seven-billion-dollar project."Anyone who doesn’t work for an oil company or the Canadian government has said this is a boondoggle." -- 350.org's Daniel Kessler

While a draft State Department environmental impact assessment (known as an SEIS), released in March, found that the Keystone XL proposal would have no major environmental or climate impact, the EPA has now officially given that appraisal a rating of medium severity. In a letter to State Department officials Monday, the EPA expressed “environmental objections” to the SEIS due to “insufficient information”.

“The EPA has basically told the State Department that it needs to go back and do its homework – they looked at the major parts of the analysis and found it insufficient,” Daniel Kessler, a media campaigner with 350.org, an environment group, told IPS.

“That’s not really a surprise: anyone who doesn’t work for an oil company or the Canadian government has said this is a boondoggle. Still, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is what President [Barack] Obama thinks, and the EPA just gave him ample fodder to reject this proposal.”

In previous assessments, the EPA has expressed such strong concern only very rarely, giving out “environmental objections” or worse in just five percent of cases, according to Kate Colarulli, a campaigner with the Sierra Club, an advocacy group.

“We’re very pleased to see this come out of EPA, as it not only highlights a lot of the issues that we’ve point out, but also adds significant credibility to these concerns,” Colarulli told IPS.

“For a federal agency, this is really tough language. EPA’s job is to make sure that such assessments are both factually accurate and thorough, so that decision-makers have the best set of information, and here they’re saying the work needs to be better.”

Colarulli says this concern is underscored by the fact that the agency is in the midst of contentious Congressional confirmation hearings for a new administrator.

“This is a politically sensitive moment for EPA, so for them to come forward now shows they’re willing to put some skin in the game,” she says. “Their concerns about the negative consequences of the Keystone proposal are serious enough that they’re willing to take a public stand.”

Monday’s letter coincided with the end of a public response period on the State Department’s draft assessment. During that time, the agency reportedly received more than a million responses, although these have not yet been made public.

The State Department, meanwhile, has stated that the EPA’s concerns are just another part of this public response. “The State Department has always anticipated that in preparing a Final Supplemental EIS it would conduct additional analysis and incorporate public comments received on the Draft SEIS,” agency spokesperson Patrick Ventrell said in response to the EPA’s letter.

No updated modelling

The key concerns for the EPA have to do with the State Department’s determination that the direct environmental or climate implications of the Keystone XL proposal would be negligible.

The EPA suggests that the pipeline’s 50-year lifetime would result in 935 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions, a fact that the State Department appraisal does not counter. Nor does it contradict that the particularly dirty “tar sands” oil (or bitumen) that would flow through the pipeline releases far more greenhouse gas-related emissions than does conventional oil.

Rather, the State Department’s reasoning is that the Canadian tar sands would be developed regardless of whether the pipeline gets built – perhaps transporting the oil by train to the Pacific Ocean, instead. In fact, however, this conclusion has been repeatedly questioned, including by oil industry insiders and business analysts – and now by the EPA, the government’s lead regulator on such issues.

“We note that the discussion in the [draft] SEIS, while informative, is not based on an updated energy-economic modelling effort,” the EPA letter states.

“[W]e recommend that the Final EIS provide a more careful review of the market analysis and rail transport options … recognizing the potential for much higher per barrel rail shipment costs than presented in the DSEIS.”

Such suggestions will almost certainly need to be followed in some form. The pipeline’s cross-border nature has left the State Department as the lead agency in deciding on the Keystone XL proposal, with a decision ultimately needed from President Obama.

If none of more than a half-dozen federal agencies has any objection to the final assessment, the State Department would be able to unilaterally make a recommendation on the proposal. Yet the EPA’s letter makes clear that some bedrock objections already exist, and if they’re not dealt with the EPA would have another opportunity to make comments or to require that the approvals process be diverted directly to the White House.

“Both the State Department and President Obama’s administration have made clear that they intend to run a rigorous process using the best scientific evidence,” Anthony Swift, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defence Council, a watchdog group, told reporters Tuesday.

“And it’s impossible to do that while ignoring the findings of the EPA, which has the most expertise in environmental review. It would be very difficult to imagine the State Department ignoring the EPA comments.”

Conflicts of interest

Beyond some of the conclusions in the State Department’s assessment, the way the SEIS itself was undertaken has also come under fire. This follows on a 2011 investigation by the agency’s inspector-general that found that a previous version of the evaluation was carried out by a consultant with close and undisclosed (though not unlawful) links to TransCanada.

While that incident led to reforms of contractor-selection criteria, several groups are now alleging that the State Department has already violated those regulations by hiring a group called Environmental Resources Management (ERM) to complete the draft SEIS. ERM reportedly also has undisclosed ties to TransCanada.

On Monday, 11 environmental and public interest groups requested another investigation from the State Department inspector-general. A letter detailing the request, which IPS has seen, alleges “misleading disclosures on ERM’s conflict of interest questionnaire … [and] the Department’s apparent attempt to conceal ERM employees’ experience on TransCanada projects.”

Students from Santa Monica High School join hundreds of protestors on Feb. 17 at Los Angeles City Hall demanding President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Credit: Charlie Kajio/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

Two new reports, put out by a cross-section of U.S. environmental and public interest groups, are attacking central rationales for the construction of a major new Canada-U.S. oil pipeline proposal, which has emerged as an emblematic cause for green groups who have angrily denounced a U.S. government approvals process.

A new study released Tuesday by eight of the country’s most established environmental advocacy groups suggests that U.S. regulators have massively underestimated the proposal’s environmental impact. Burning the heavy oil the pipeline would carry, the report warns, would emit more than 181 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – equal to the emissions of nearly 38 million cars or 51 coal-fired power plants."When you look at the Keystone XL development, it’s clearly all about moving that oil to a global not a U.S. market." -- Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum

Over the course of three and a half decades, the report says, this would result in more than 6.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than the United States’ total emissions for 2011.

The proposed pipeline, known as the Keystone XL, would carry a particularly dirty and corrosive form of “tar sands” oil from Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Because it would cross international borders, the pipeline requires approval by the U.S. State Department and a decision by President Barack Obama that the project would be in the “national interest”.

In early March, the State Department released a draft environmental impact review (known as an SEIS) offering cautious endorsement of the project. It suggested the project would “not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects” and that the tar sands would be mined regardless of whether the Keystone project is approved.

Since then, and with the SEIS currently in a public comment period, analysts opposed to the Keystone project have been able to deepen their scrutiny of both the SEIS and the public arguments currently in favour of building the pipeline. At the heart of this criticism is an observation of conflicting national policies: that approval of the Keystone XL would contradict stated U.S. climate policy.

“At the top of a long list of problems with [the SEIS] is the simple assertion that the Keystone XL pipeline would have no impact on climate change … in the belief that these emissions will be released regardless of whether the pipeline gets built. This is simply incorrect,” Steve Kretzmann, lead author of the new report and a researcher with Oil Change International, an advocacy group, told reporters Tuesday.

“Further, whether or not that oil would be burned anyway is a separate question … The State Department needs to assess this project’s climate impact by looking at whether Keystone XL would survive national policies to limit climate change to two degrees Celsius, which is this country’s stated goal – and we believe it would not.”

Since the Keystone XL proposal was first put forward by TransCanada, a Canadian company, in 2008, scientists have come to a clearer understanding of what’s today called the world’s “carbon budget”. This refers to the percentage of remaining fossil fuel resources that can be burned without bringing about the catastrophic forecasts of what could happen if the Earth’s average temperature rises more than two degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

According to a major report put out in November by the International Energy Agency (IEA), two-thirds of proven fossil fuel reserves need to be kept in the ground in order to have a 50 percent chance of staying below that two-degree threshold. Climate scientists, meanwhile, put the figure far higher, saying around four-fifths need to remain untapped.

“The State Department is using ‘business as usual’ projections for oil demand in the U.S., moving forward,” Kretzmann says.

“Those projections, we now know from the IEA and others, lead to a four to six-degree change – and that’s climate disaster. What we should be measuring instead are projections that take into account attempts to keep demand below two degrees – but that’s not what the State Department has done.”

Satisfying Chinese markets?

The State Department has been tight-lipped as it moves through the public comment phase of the SEIS, with a spokesperson stating Monday simply that the department is continuing a “rigorous and thorough review”. (A previous public comment period on the project brought in some 1.4 million responses.)

On Thursday, department officials are slated to meet with pipeline opponents in the state of Nebraska, where opposition to the project has been particularly vociferous.

Yet in addition to the local and global concerns, new analysis suggests that the Keystone project could have a far larger-than-expected impact on a national issue that has long been highly sensitive for U.S. politicians: energy and gas prices. This data could undermine a key argument made by Keystone proponents, who suggest the project would strengthen U.S. energy security and bring down domestic prices.

“When you look at the Keystone XL development, it’s clearly all about moving that oil to a global not a U.S. market,” Tyson Slocum, director of the energy programme at Public Citizen, an advocacy group, told IPS, noting that TransCanada’s own forecasts admit that current pipeline capacity is already adequate to provide oil for the U.S. market.

“We’ve seen that western Canadian [oil] prices have been depressed because of the landlocked nature of Canada, and there is no question that any investment that gets that oil or any refined product to a more global market will have an upward pressure on prices. Clearly, that doesn’t result in a lower cost for consumers.”

On Monday, Slocum released a new investigation on the subject. That study also points to significant but under-reported investments in the Canadian tar sands by entities tied directly to the Chinese state.

“China is the largest foreign investor in Canada’s tar sands, representing 52 percent of all foreign investment since 2003,” the report states. “[R]ecent investments by six different entities controlled by China’s national government will have power over nearly 1.1 million barrels of daily tar sands production by 2020.”

Slocum says such findings reinforce the sense that Canadian tar sands oil is meant largely for the global market.

“China has every right to undertake such investments, of course,” the report states. “But satisfying Chinese energy security interests is a far cry from the U.S. benefits touted for the pipeline project.”

Following the end of the current 45-day public comment period for the SEIS, the State Department will release a final report before passing on the final decision to President Obama. While no timetable is yet available, some have suggested the president may make a decision on the proposal’s “national interest determination” by August.

After another winter of erratic and disappointing snowfall, 75 of the U.S.’s top professional winter athletes are calling on President Barack Obama to take stronger measures to curb climate change.

In a letter released Tuesday, the athletes, who included five Olympic medallists, as well as a half a dozen world champions in skiing and other winter sports, noted that the 12-billion-dollar-a-year U.S. winter tourism industry has already been hard hit by the decline in snowfall and the steady rise in average winter temperatures that most climate scientists attribute to global warming.

Among other actions, the group, organised by a six-year-old, 50,000-member non-profit organisation called “Protect Our Winters” (POW), is calling on Obama to issue tough new regulations on U.S. power plants, the largest source of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.

It also urged Obama to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline -the biggest current focus of activist efforts to fight climate change – that, if approved, would pump oil produced from Canadian tar sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

“Mr. President, it’s time to force our transition to clean energy, (and) these are the first big steps and we need your leadership,” according to the letter, which will be delivered personally to Obama Thursday when POW founder and snow-boarder Jeremy Jones will be honoured at a White House ceremony along with other non-governmental community activists.

“For real change to happen, it needs to happen at the White House and on Capitol Hill,” Jones said in a teleconference that featured four other winter sports champions, including Olympic silver medallist and four-time X games gold medallist snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler, and world free-skiing champions Kit Deslauriers and Ingrid Backstrom.

Jones added that the mobilisation of all of the athletes in support of climate change activism was also aimed at younger sports enthusiasts who, as consumers, could exert pressure on sporting-goods companies to conduct their business in a more environmentally responsible fashion.

“One message we give to (youth), is, ‘hey, when you do make a purchase, really do research on what the company stands for,’” he said.

With The North Face apparel company, POW has created the Alliance for Climate Education which since 2011 has sent its star athletes to 36 high schools to spread the word to some 15,000 students.

The athletes’ action comes amidst an apparent resurgence in public concern about climate change after a decade in which the issue received relatively little attention.

While the 9/11 attacks and the wars that followed dominated the public agenda in the early part of the decade, the 2008 financial crisis and its impact on the economy effectively put environmental issues on the back burner.

Meanwhile, the effective takeover of the Republican Party by so-called “climate sceptics”, as well as continued heavy lobbying by the powerful coal, oil and gas industries, effectively put paid to any prospects that Obama could get major reform legislation through Congress.

In his latest State of the Union address, Obama, who had been relatively quiet about climate change during his first term, said he would take stronger action in his second term.

He warned that “if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations (from climate change), I will.” Acting through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), his administration subsequently set tougher-than-expected energy-efficiency standards for automobiles and future power plants.

The weather itself, especially extreme events, such as Hurricane Sandy that inundated lower Manhattan and much of the New Jersey coastline last fall, appears to have both helped reverse the decline in public concern about the effects of climate change and encouraged Obama to take a more aggressive stance.

Indeed, in his second Inaugural Address, Obama referred to the “devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms” – all of which have gained significant attention over the past couple of years in the news media which, unlike the president, however, generally refrained from attributing them to climate change.

While those extreme events have gained the headlines, the impact of warming on the more remote and sparsely populated mountain regions and communities of the country – and specifically the generally lighter or more inconsistent snowfall — has received much less attention.

POW last year teamed up with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to produce a 33-page study on this question, entitled “Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States”.

Increasingly, it noted, “there have been all-or-nothing winters – blizzards in some places, only a dusting all season-long in others.”

“For those whose livelihood depends upon a predictable winter season, such unpredictability and lack of snow can translate into a precipitous fall in revenue, an early economic indicator of what climate change looks like,” according to the report, which found that 212,000 jobs were either directly or indirectly supported by the winter tourism industry nationwide.

Among other conclusions, it found winter resort communities, such as Aspen, Colorado, and Squaw Valley, California, increasingly threatened by the changing climate patterns, especially the increasingly later onset of substantial snowfall and the earlier melt-off of the snowpack.

In the 2011-12 winter, about half of all ski areas opened late and closed early, resulting in serious losses in revenue and employment.

Deslauriers, who is famous for climbing the world’s highest mountains in order to ski down them, noted major changes around her community in the Grand Teton Mountains, a sub-range of the Rocky Mountains, in Wyoming.

“We just have a few small pieces of glaciers left, and the rain is lasting longer at lower elevations, so our snowpack is melting faster,” she said.

On a recent trip to the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, she added, Native American elders had told her about the shortening of their winters, too.

Indeed, these trends – the shortening of winter seasons and the retreat of glaciers at high elevations – are not confined to North America. In the Andes of South America and Tanzania’s Mt. Kilamanjaro, where snowpack and glaciers are a vital source of freshwater, much larger populations are threatened by global warming.

“There’s still time for the winter sports world to stand together,” said Deslauriers.

Workers mop up tar sands oil from Exxon Mobil Pegasus pipeline spill from creek in Mayflower, Arkansas. Credit: NWFblogs/cc by 2.0

By Katelyn Fossett
Apr 3 2013 (IPS)

Environmental groups are sounding alarms about conflicting reports on the size and seriousness of an oil spill that took place late last week in the southern U.S. state of Arkansas.

The spill has generated particular interest because it emanates from a pipeline carrying “tar sands” oil, a particularly heavy and environmentally destructive oil composed of bitumen and diluted with lighter elements.A lot of the people we talked to said, ‘We didn’t even know there was a pipeline under our homes.'

It also comes just as politicians and environmentalists here are engaged in a debate over whether to approve the construction of a major pipeline – known as Keystone XL – that would carry the same tar sands oil from Canada to the southern U.S.

“[Pipeline owner] ExxonMobil is sort of dancing around how they’re describing it,” Jane Kleeb, executive director of BOLD Nebraska, an advocacy group fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, told IPS.

“Every time they talk about the oil spill, they describe it in different terms – sometimes as crude oil, sometimes Canadian oil – but we’re fairly certain it is tar sands oil.”

On Tuesday, 22 homes in the town of Mayflower were evacuated and at least 12,000 barrels of what the Sierra Club, an environment group, calls the “dirtiest oil on Earth” had been released, reportedly darkening yards and driveways across the suburban town.
Critics of the Keystone project, including BOLD Nebraska, are particularly concerned about the spill’s release of benzene, a carcinogenic chemical found in tar sands oil, and bitumen, which climate scientists say releases 17 percent more greenhouse gases than standard oil.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is surveying the environmental and health evidence in order to determine whether the construction of Keystone XL would serve the “nation’s interest”. He is expected to give a final ruling on Canadian company Transcanada’s application to build the pipeline by late summer.

Despite environmental concerns, recently released polls from the Pew Research Center suggest broad support has been gathering for the project’s approval, likely bolstered by Congressional Republicans’ trumpeting the project’s potential for job creation.

The spill also comes a month after a draft environmental impact assessment from the U.S. State Department concluded that the Keystone XL project would “not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects”. That conclusion is likely to be subject to greater scrutiny as Mayflower residents continue to reel from the spill’s damage.

“To see the devastation in that town is pretty sobering,” Glenn Hooks, a spokesman for the Arkansas chapter of the Sierra Club, told reporters Tuesday. “I spoke with people whose lives have been upended – they want to know when they can go home, and they want to know if there will be a home to come back to.”

Anthony Swift, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a watchdog group, said the spill brings the risks of the Keystone XL pipeline into “sharp relief for the American people”.

Swift noted that bitumen oil pipelines require higher operating temperatures that make ruptures more likely, citing a study that found that states that carried bitumen oil for the longest periods had experienced 3.6 times as many spills as the national average.

He called the Mayflower oil spill “a tragic warning”, but alluded to previous warnings that had gone unheeded.

“TransCanada’s Bison and Keystone I pipelines had special conditions that were supposed to make them safer. The Keystone I pipeline had to be shut down in its first year after having 14 spills,” he said.

Little clarity

In the days following the Mayflower spill, the opaqueness surrounding the leak and the pipeline in general has been of particular concern for environmental groups.

“A lot of the people we talked to said, ‘We didn’t even know there was a pipeline under our homes,’” said Hooks of the Arkansas Sierra Club. “And I’m sure the ones who did know were surprised to learn it was a tar sands oil pipeline.”

Kleeb, of BOLD Nebraska, pointed to ExxonMobil’s failure to disclose potential health hazards by specifying sooner exactly what kind of oil had been spilled.

“ExxonMobil is not giving folks a clear sense of what was spilled … It’s obvious why they’re not saying it’s tar sands,” she said, referring to the growing concerns over tar sands oil pipelines in the midst of the Keystone debate.

Exxon spokesperson Charles Engelmann said the leaking pipeline was built in the 1940s, but did not have any information on when it last underwent maintenance. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Transportation fined the company for going more than five years without maintenance on a section of the same pipeline beneath the Mississippi River.

With environmental groups already sceptical of an incomplete picture of the environmental and public health impact of Keystone XL, many are now suggesting that these growing signals of oil companies’ poor commitment to maintenance and regulation standards should carry serious implications for the president’s ultimate decision to approve the project.

“Looking at the differences between the reality and rhetoric, TransCanada’s claims that this pipeline will be different don’t add up,” warned Swift of the National Resources Defense Council.

Three trends underlie falling U.S. gasoline use: a shrinking car fleet, an overall reduction in driving, and improved fuel efficiency. Credit: Scott63us/cc by 2.0

By Janet Larsen
WASHINGTON, Mar 29 2013 (IPS)

Freeing America from its dependence on oil from unstable parts of the world is an admirable goal, but many of the proposed solutions – including the push for more home-grown biofuels and for the construction of the new Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian tar sands oil to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast – are harmful and simply unnecessary.

Gasoline use in the United States is falling, and the trends already driving it down are likely to continue into the future, making both the mirage of beneficial biofuels and the construction of a new pipeline to import incredibly dirty oil seem ever more out of touch with reality.

U.S. motor gasoline consumption peaked at 142 billion gallons in 2007. In each year since, American drivers have used less gasoline. In 2012, gas use came in at 134 billion gallons, down six percent off the high mark.

Three trends underlie falling U.S. gasoline use: a shrinking car fleet, an overall reduction in driving, and improved fuel efficiency. The number of registered vehicles in the United States rose rather steadily from 1945 to 2008, when it topped out at close to 250 million and then abruptly changed course.

As the economic recession hit, new car sales in the United States fell from more than 16 million in 2007 to below 11 million in 2009. For two years, scrappage exceeded new purchases, causing a contraction in the overall size of the fleet. Even with a rebound in sales to nearly 15 million vehicles in 2012, the days of annual sales exceeding 17 million – as seen through the early 2000s – are likely over.

The car promised mobility, but in urbanising communities it instead brought traffic congestion and air pollution. With four out of five Americans now living in urban areas, private vehicle ownership is starting to lose its allure. This is particularly true among younger people, who are readily embracing mass transit and the car-sharing and bike-sharing programmes that are popping up in cities around the country.

Fewer than half of American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have a driver’s license, a share that has been falling over recent decades as states have tightened restrictions and as socialisation patterns have shifted from cruising the streets to cruising the Internet. Retirees also tend to drive less; as the baby boomers retire, more people will be putting away their car keys.

As gasoline prices have risen, private vehicles have traveled fewer miles and public transit ridership has increased. Not only are there fewer vehicles traveling fewer miles on U.S. roads than there were just five years ago, but new cars today can drive farther on a gallon of gasoline.

This will soon accelerate: after more than two decades of near-total stagnation, in 2011 the Obama administration increased fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks from an average of 27.5 miles per gallon in 2008 to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. In addition to the technological changes that can improve the fuel economy of conventional vehicles, new plug-in hybrid electric cars and fully electric vehicles use far less gasoline or even do away with it entirely.

Somewhat counterintuitively, falling gasoline use is at odds with the federal mandate to use more renewable fuel. Under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) requires blending increasing volumes of ethanol into the U.S. gasoline supply, regardless of how much gasoline is needed.

In 2012, U.S. distilleries produced 13 billion gallons of fuel ethanol, almost entirely from corn. Ethanol accounted for nearly 10 percent of the U.S. gasoline supply. The 2013 requirement for 13.8 billion gallons is likely to go beyond the 10-percent threshold of what can be blended into gasoline and still be used in older vehicles without risking engine damage and voiding warranties.

Furthermore, the RFS requires a growing share of the renewable fuel to come from cellulosic non-food biofuels, yet these have not become economical to produce on a meaningful scale. The increasing production of corn-based ethanol has pitted food use against fuel use, with the unfortunate result of higher food prices.

As drought in the U.S. Corn Belt shrank harvests in 2012, corn prices spiked to an all-time high. U.S. corn carryover stocks fell to six percent of use in 2012, a historic low. Still, more than 40 percent of the 2012 corn harvest will likely go to fuel cars.

While corn exports from the United States were down in 2012, gasoline exports were up. Higher domestic production and reduced demand allowed the United States to export more oil products than it imported for the second year in a row – after more than six decades of being a net importer.

The United States is still a net importer of crude oil, though. Instead of necessarily allowing more gasoline to reach U.S. markets, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would bring the carbon-intensive Canadian tar sands oil closer to Gulf Coast export terminals for easier access to international markets.

A March 2013 report by the National Research Council describes policies and technologies that would allow the United States to cut its gasoline use 80 percent by 2050. Yet the data they used on the distances being driven only went through 2005, missing the recent drop, and many of the social trends that are starting to drive down car use were not incorporated.

These trends are important to consider when envisioning energy and transportation policies for the future. This means rethinking mobility beyond private automobiles. And putting a price on carbon to encourage powering the cars still on the roads with carbon-free wind-sourced electricity can help move the United States beyond ecologically disruptive false solutions that raise food prices and further destabilise the climate.

*Janet Larsen is Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute. Data and additional resources available at www.earth-policy.org.

Since the project was first proposed in 2008, it has been beset by local and national opposition in both Canada and the U.S. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. State Department late Friday released a draft environmental impact assessment of a contentious pipeline project that simultaneously acknowledged the dangers posed by climate change while also noting the project would “not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects”.

Scientists and advocates have reacted with significant alarm, warning that the new report, officially a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS), is merely recycling deeply flawed conclusions offered in previous such assessments. Since the project was first proposed by a Canadian company, TransCanada, in 2008, it has been beset by local and national opposition in both countries, including drawing some 40,000 protesters to Washington last month.More people have gone to jail for [protesting] Keystone than for any issue in this country in the last 30 years.

“Here we are again, with the State Department producing basically the same report they produced before, saying there will be no big impact from this pipeline – a conclusion that is at odds with every scientist, diplomat and every other observer that has looked at this project,” Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, an environment advocacy group, told reporters immediately following the SEIS release.

“The 1.4 million public comments that poured into the State Department on this project seem not to have made much of an impact, nor has the testimony of leading scientists in this country and around the world.”

Known as the Keystone XL project, the pipeline would stretch from “tar sands” in south-central Canada to refineries in the southern United States, on the Gulf of Mexico. It would carry a noxiously dirty form of oil, known as bitumen, that releases around 17 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.

Scientists say the tar sands would be able to be mined for around 50 years.

According to a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Congress’s research wing, bitumen from the tar sands would release the same amount of carbon dioxide as adding four million more cars to the roads. Others have put this figure even higher, the equivalent of six million additional cars.

Climate scientists, meanwhile, say that by itself the tar sands bitumen would release around half of the carbon dioxide left before the planet reaches a global temperature increase of two degrees Celsius, currently seen as a critical cut-off point by the United Nations, among others.

“This is the most important issue for the environmental movement here in a very long time,” McKibben said. “More people have gone to jail for [protesting] Keystone than for any issue in this country in the last 30 years. To have their concerns, and those of our leading scientists, blithely dismissed for a reiteration of the same tired boilerplate is very sad.”

He continued: “However, we’re hopeful that [Secretary of State John] Kerry and President Barack Obama will figure out that the bureaucrats have done a poor job here.”

Lynchpin

While the southern section of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline is already under construction, the northern part – that covered by the new assessment – requires a far more extensive permitting process. That’s not only because it crosses several environmentally protected areas, including a massive aquifer critical for farming and drinking water, but also because it crosses an international border.

For this reason, the project will ultimately require President Obama to issue formal authorisation, a key bit of leverage that activists are now hoping to use in the weeks ahead. The president has yet to weigh in publicly on the issue, though he has made notable mention of the need for action on climate change in recent months.

The publication of the SEIS will now kick off a 45-day public comment period, following which the final environment report will be published. (Information on how to contact the State Department is available here.)

Particularly troubling in the new assessment is the State Department’s conclusion that the pipeline would be “unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development” in the tar sands. This important contention appears to be undercut by widespread analysis, particularly from Canada’s oil and gas industry itself.

“That conclusion is not shared by any industry observers, economists or academics – those both pro- and anti-development of the tar sands,” Kenny Bruno, campaign director at Corporate Ethics International, a watchdog, told reporters Friday. “It’s perplexing that the State Department has come to that conclusion, given that it’s one that virtually no one in Canada shares.”

Others are reacting even more vehemently.

“Overall, the State Department says that the impact would be limited because oil will be mined, drilled and used no matter what happens – this is not only inaccurate but is devastatingly cynical,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, a conservation group, said Friday.

He notes that while the tar sands are currently producing around 1.8 million barrels of oil per day, new permits would allow for up to five million barrels per day. And yet, the industry is clear that, currently, all crude oil pipelines are operating near or at capacity.

“The tar sands are fundamental to the industry’s plan to triple development, and there is overwhelming evidence this pipeline is seen as the lynchpin,” Danielle Droitsch, Canada project director for the National Resources Defence Council, a watchdog, said Friday. “The entire industry is very open about this.”

National interest

The SEIS carries with it no formal recommendations. Even once the final assessment is finished, the State Department, in conjunction with more than a half-dozen other federal agencies, will still need to engage in a complicated process of establishing whether the Keystone XL pipeline is in the “national interest”.

Some are now suggesting that, regardless of how the State Department finally views the environmental impact, this National Interest Determination Report, potentially expected in August, could offer the clearest indication of how exactly President Obama sees the project.

For instance, while proponents of the Keystone XL discuss its impact in terms of job creation and U.S. energy security, critics say the reality is that the pipeline would create only a few thousand jobs and that the United States could well simply export the refined oil.

“For the National Interest Determination Report, we’ll be pushing to ensure that that there isn’t any more recycling of bad information,” Jane Kleeb, executive director of BOLD Nebraska, an advocacy group in one of the states through which the pipeline would pass, told IPS.

“There is very good evidence this is an export pipeline, not for American energy security. Likewise, jobs numbers continue to be overinflated. So, when it comes to the National Interest Determination Report, that might be where we finally see the writing on the wall.”

The tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Credit: howlmonteal/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 16 2013 (IPS)

The largest climate rally in U.S. history is expected Sunday in Washington DC with the aim of pressuring President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Activists are calling Keystone “the line in the sand” regarding dangerous climate change, prompting the Sierra Club to suspend its 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The group’s executive director, Michael Brune, was arrested in front of the White House during a small protest against Keystone on Wednesday.

“The Keystone XL pipeline is part of the carbon infrastructure that will take us to dangerous levels of climate change,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia.To permit the pipeline would represent a heartbreaking acquiescence to climate change on the part of President Obama and our national leaders.

“By itself, Keystone won’t have much of an impact on the climate, but it is not happening on its own,” Donner told IPS.

Carbon emissions are increasing elsewhere, and the International Energy Agency recently warned humanity is on a dangerous path to four degrees C of warming before the end of this century. Children born today will experience this. Preventing that dire future is inconsistent with expanding tar sands production, Donner said.

A new study released this week revealed that the volume of Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly. Ice volume has fallen 80 percent since 1980, according to the latest data from European Space Agency satellite, CryoSat-2. Summers with a sea ice-free Arctic are only a few years away, scientists now agree. This will have significant and permanent impacts on weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere.

“Keystone XL is the key to opening up the expansion of the tar sands industry,” said Jim Murphy, senior counsel with the National Wildlife Federation.

“By rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, we can keep this toxic oil in the ground,” Murphy said in a statement.

Keystone XL is intended to bring 700,000 to 800,000 barrels of a heavy, tar-like oil from the northern Alberta tar sands 2,400 kilometres south to the refineries on the Gulf Coast. Nearly all the resulting fuels are destined for export.

Since the seven-billion-dollar Keystone XL crosses national borders, it is up to President Obama to issue a permit declaring the pipeline serves the “national interest” in order for it to be approved.

“The only way Keystone XL could be considered in the national interest is if you equate that with profits for the oil industry,” Steve Kretzman of Oil Change International previously told IPS. Oil Change is an NGO that researches the links between oil, gas, coal corporations and governments.

“It couldn’t be simpler: Either we leave at least two-thirds of the known fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or we destroy our planet as we know it,” wrote Sierra Club’s Michael Brune in explaining the decision to engage in civil disobedience.

“That means rejecting the dangerous tar sands pipeline that would transport some of the dirtiest oil on the planet,” said Brune.

Tar sands carbon emissions on a “well-to-tank” basis (i.e., production) result in emissions that are on average 72 to 111 percent higher than other U.S. transportation fuels, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Canada’s tar sands aren’t really a “carbon bomb” from a scientific perspective, says Donner. The world’s coal deposits contain many times more carbon. However, the tar sands and Keystone have symbolic importance.

“Climate change is a complicated problem. Lots of things need to be done to address it. We’re at a point where changes need to happen soon,” he says.

Writing in the Daily Kos Saturday, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of the environmental justice group Green For All, says, “Hurricane Katrina taught us a lesson – and Superstorm Sandy reinforced it. People living in neighborhoods with the fewest resources have a harder time escaping, surviving, and recovering from disasters.

“And they’re more vulnerable to the extreme weather climate change will bring. For example, African-Americans living in Los Angeles are more than twice as likely to die during a heat wave than other residents of the city,” she says in a piece titled “Why People of Color Should Care about the Keystone Pipeline”.

“To permit the pipeline would represent a heartbreaking acquiescence to climate change on the part of President Obama and our national leaders. It would be throwing our hands up helplessly in the face of one of the biggest threats our country has ever faced. That’s not the kind of leadership we voted for.

“There are certain points in history, like the Civil Rights Movement, when the consequences of inaction are so great that we have to make bold choices,” Ellis-Lamkins says. “This is one of those times.”

Michael Brune. Courtesy of Sierra Club.

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 15 2013 (IPS)

The term “civil disobedience” takes its roots from an 1849 essay by U.S. poet, philosopher and environmentalist, Henry David Thoreau, originally entitled “Resistance to Civil Government”.

Civil disobedience is often used as a non-violent tool of protest against widespread injustices, such as in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

On the morning of Feb. 13, prominent activists gathered in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and participated in an act of civil disobedience, to protest the idea behind the Keystone XL Pipeline.

This pipeline would run from Alberta, Canada all the way across the United States, to its coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. It would carry about a million barrels of crude oil each day, and according to protestors and scientists, contribute dangerously to climate change.There are at least three times more jobs that come from solar and wind than for an equivalent amount of gas or coal or oil.

The protestors – who include NASA climate scientist James Hansen, poet Bob Haas and lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among others – were arrested after blocking a main thoroughfare in front of the White House and refusing to move.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, was among the participants in this event. It was his organisation’s first act of civil disobedience in its 120-year old history, and the first time its executive director was arrested.

Brune spoke with IPS correspondent George Gao about his experience at the protest, as well as the environmental significance of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Can you describe what unfolded on the morning of Feb. 13 outside of the White House?

A: We organised about 50 community leaders from across the country who have been resisting various aspects of both the tar sands and other destructive projects in civil disobedience outside of the White House.

The point of this was to call on President (Barack) Obama to make sure that he’s doing everything within his power to turn away from extreme energy sources, and to embrace clean energy as much as he can.

Q: What specifically makes the tar sands’ oil deposits in Alberta, Canada – and the Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport these deposits – unique and deserved of such attention, as compared to other pipelines?

A: The tar sands is the most carbon intensive fuel source on the planet. It’s hard to access and takes a lot of energy to extract this thick gooey oil out of the ground. So we are deeply concerned that by expanding production of the tar sands, it will make it almost impossible to stop runaway climate change.

We have been advocating that instead of building a massive pipeline that would take almost a million barrels of oil per day, from Canada down into the U.S., that we should investing that same money, seven billion dollars worth, in clean energy instead – solar, and wind and energy efficiency and advanced energy technologies.

So we were fighting this both because the pipeline itself was highly destructive, but also because it’s a symbol of the kind of investments that we need to turn away from as a society.

Q: Proponents of the pipeline argue that this will create easy jobs for a slumping economy – ready jobs that the U.S. know how to allocate. Is this a misperception?

A: We have to be honest in this debate: there are jobs in installing a pipeline, and for many people those are important jobs. Any energy investments create jobs. If you create a coal plant, that will put people to work, if you create a pipeline, that will put other people to work.

But if we’re going to be honest about that, we should also be honest about the big picture, which is that we can produce more jobs – we have produced more jobs in clean energy than with dirty fuels.

There are at least three times more jobs that come from solar and wind than for an equivalent amount of gas or coal or oil. So if we care about climate change, of course you want to move to clean energy. If you care about the economy and producing jobs, you should probably move to clean energy as well.

The folks who are the most defensive and resistant towards a clean energy transition are the ones who are profiting from our dependence on fossil fuels.

Q: Does the pipeline run through any environmentally sensitive areas or protected lands in the United States?

A: It runs through Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska, which is one of the most important drinking water supplies in the country. It also runs through people’s farms and ranches, many of whom have been farming and ranching in those areas for generations.

I was next to a couple of ranchers yesterday from Nebraska. They don’t want any part of a dirty oil pipeline running through their farm. They don’t feel as though companies like TransCanada and others have any right to take their property, risk their water supply – all for a substance that will pollute our air and pollute our atmosphere.

Q: What executive powers does U.S. President Barack Obama wield over this situation?

A: An enormous amount. The president can reject this pipeline outright. The State Department is currently reviewing the proposal, will issue a recommendation – or what’s known as a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement – and then it is the president’s decision about whether the pipeline should be built or not.

One person gets to decide. That’s why we were out in front of the White House.

Q: Do you see this decision as a significant moment that sets the tone for future climate change policies in the U.S.?

A: Absolutely. We’re having the largest rally in U.S. history on climate change in the National Mall this Sunday, and it’s coming at a time where there are several important decisions that the president will make: about mountain top removal, about fracking across the country, about drilling in the arctic, whether or not to build a deadly and destructive pipeline.

What we’re seeing is a resurgence of committed, passionate Americans who are willing to advocate and fight for clean energy, and it’s really inspiring to be a part of.

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Feb. 12, 2013. Credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 13 2013 (IPS)

In a major annual address Tuesday night, President Barack Obama offered further details on a broad and ambitious range of policy priorities, taking advantage of perhaps his single most significant opportunity to guide the public conversation on his second-term agenda.

Discussing some of the most potent debates currently taking place in Washington – including gun control, immigration, climate change, voting rights and U.S. counterterrorism efforts – the president continued a recent trend of speaking around the partisan immobility that has characterised the U.S. Congress.

Instead, he engaged in a campaign-style attempt to explain his stance on these issues to the estimated 38 million people who tuned in to primetime coverage.While the message was mixed, there will be clarity soon. We’ll see whether or not President Obama is indeed serious about addressing the climate crisis by his choice on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Following a surprisingly progressive – and forceful – second inaugural speech, in late-January, the first State of the Union speech of President Obama’s last term in office was overwhelmingly devoted to issues of fixing the United States’ stuttering economy and still high unemployment rate. Focus on these issues was relatively absent from the inaugural address, in favour of broader themes.

On Tuesday, however, the president sought to tie the two more closely together. He offered not only a reiteration of his current policy stance on ongoing debt and austerity negotiations, but also attempted to explain how legislative action on issues related to climate change, immigration, manufacturing and infrastructure updating – and even setting a higher minimum wage – were key to safeguarding the U.S. economy.

Energy independence was particularly key in this regard.

“Today, no area holds more promise than our investments in American energy,” the president said, speaking before both houses of Congress and other dignitaries. “After years of talking about it, we are finally poised to control our own energy future … But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.”

The president announced his intent to push for the creation of a new Energy Security Trust that would use revenues from domestic oil and gas production to fund research into renewable energy sources, and called for more spending on wind and solar energy. He also urged Congress to look again at market-based “emissions trading” solutions.

The president proposed a new focus on energy efficiency, with a goal of halving wasted energy by 2020. Importantly, unlike other initiatives, such a process could be done without the participation of Congress. Indeed, in line with a growing chorus of calls from environment groups, the president warned Congress that he would increasingly turn to executive actions – circumventing legislators if they did not move on climate-related issues.

Still, many environmentalists were frustrated by a Obama’s pledge to expand oil and gas drilling, and by his failure to clarify his stance on a contentious pipeline, currently pending authorisation, that would bring dirty “tar sands” oil from Canada through the U.S. Midwest.

“The priority President Obama placed on climate change was welcome, but his emphasis on fossil fuels like oil and gas was not at all compatible with such prioritisation,” Karen Orenstein, a researcher with Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“While the message was mixed, there will be clarity soon. We’ll see whether or not President Obama is indeed serious about addressing the climate crisis by his choice on the Keystone XL Pipeline. He must reject the pipeline if his words in tonight’s address are to be worth more than the paper on which they’re written.”

Eradicating extreme poverty

Orenstein also noted that the president’s stance on climate change will have significant ramifications for his hopes for global development.

“Decades of development gains will be undermined,” she warned. “It is impossible to eradicate extreme poverty without forcefully confronting the U.S. role in causing climate change.”

While domestic issues were the inevitable focus of President Obama’s address, he did range farther afield, including referencing the United States’ ongoing responsibility towards poor and developing countries. In this he offered few specifics, however, and tied such rhetoric directly to the national and global economy.

“We also know that progress in the most impoverished parts of our world enriches us all,” the president stated.

He pledged that the United States would “join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades”, promising to work to connect more communities to the global economy and to empower women and poor communities. The president also promised to focus on saving children from preventable deaths and to bring about “an AIDS-free generation”, Washington’s stated policy goal on the issue.

On more standard foreign policy issues, President Obama made a major announcement on U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, reportedly decided upon only earlier in the day, stating that half of U.S. troops – 34,000 – would be back home by this time next year.

That number is far higher than called for by some military top brass, but is in line with the preferred recommendation made by the former top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen.

And while final details are still being negotiated on whether and how U.S. troops will stay in Afghanistan thereafter, the president was clear on his own vision.

“After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home,” he stated within the first minute of his address, noting later, “And by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.”

Many had also hoped for a specific discussion of the president’s hopes to significantly reduce the United States’ massive stockpile of nuclear weapons.

This issue has recently been a source of regular discussion here in Washington, as the president’s nominee for secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, is aligned with a group that prominently endorses an eventual goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. (Earlier on Tuesday, Hagel cleared a key but highly contentious Senate committee hearing on a party-line vote.)

Yet perhaps in part due to complications brought about by Tuesday’s test by the North Korean government of a nuclear weapon, Obama declined to include specifics on the issue. Instead, he noted only that “we will engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals.”

Nuclear experts were nonetheless heartened.

“The president is making it clear that the United States will continue to reduce the size and role of outdated Cold War nuclear arsenals,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington watchdog, told IPS.

“Further reciprocal reductions of these bloated arsenals would increase our leverage on other nuclear-armed states to exercise restraint and join in serious multilateral disarmament discussions.”

The third and most important part of President Obama’s new agenda will come when he unveils his visions for the 2014 national budget, slated for mid-March.