Mining tar sands oil at Ft. McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Oct 6 2014 (IPS)

Canada’s tar sands oil boom may be in jeopardy and it appears the ruling Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not have any plan B in its ambition to remake this resource-rich country into “an energy superpower.”

“This is one of the sectors that creates some of the most jobs, not just in the oil patch, but around the country in terms of manufacturing and support services, and this government will continue to do everything to promote the Canadian energy sector,” Harper told reporters in December 2011.“The game changer in all of this is that the world’s governments are supposed to negotiate a new agreement to constrain fossil fuel emissions for 2015. [And] Canada may be forced kicking and screaming to stay within reasonable limits." -- economist Marc Lee

But now, in the fall of 2014, Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hebert blames a hardnosed approach in Ottawa which she suggests jeopardised what might have garnered greater political support for its energy strategy from Canadians.

“It is playing out in the courts, in the provinces and in public opinion, with the Harper government almost always on the losing side of the argument,” she wrote in a Sep. 27 column.

Hebert was referring to efforts by the Harper government to loosen environment assessment rules, speeding up pipeline projects by gutting scientific research funding to investigate the climate change impact of fossil fuel emissions (including tar sands oil) on domestic regions like the Canadian Arctic, and to question the loyalty of environmental NGOs.

“While the majority of Canadian voters support the development of Canada’s energy potential, most continue to expect their governments to act as honest brokers in the search for a balance between the economy and the environment,” she added.

All the major pipeline projects designed to carry tar sands crude oil, which is extracted from the bitumen tar underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta, to markets in the U.S. and Asia (the later via British Columbia’s Pacific coast) are experiencing delays due to local and vocal opposition.

These projects are all slated to be built by either Enbridge or TransCanada Pipeline, both major Canadian pipeline construction companies.

“Right now there are 2.2 million barrels per day of capacity, production from the tar sands. And the federal and provincial governments have jointly handed out permits to take that to five million barrels per day. That is a huge increase, even if they never approve another project, which they will, and the limiting factor in all of this is pipelines,” says Keith Stewart, climate change and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada.

Despite occasional prodding from the Harper government, U.S. President Barack Obama appears loath to make a quick decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico because of stiff opposition from environmentalists, including some who are his supporters.

Keith Stewart notes that the Conservatives face the prospect of losing parliamentary seats in the vote-rich Pacific coast province of British Columbia in the national federal election in 2015 because of concerns about potential oil spills from either of the two planned pipelines in the pristine wilderness environment.

Northern Gateway, which has received formal regulatory approval coupled with 209 conditions, would travel across various First Nations indigenous territories in the BC interior to the coastal port of Kitimat. Supertankers would then load up the tar sands oil and navigate the narrow waters of the Douglas Channel for the open sea.

Many commentators, including Stewart, are doubtful that the project will ever get built because of the legal challenges from the First Nations, whose lands claims were given further reinforcement in recent Canadian court decisions.

The second project, by Kinder Morgan, is an extension of an existing pipeline in British Columbia that would slice through both wealthy suburban communities in the province’s lower mainland and First Nations territory.

Then there is Energy East, which is currently at an earlier stage of regulatory approval than the other two pipeline projects. It would transmit Alberta tar sands crude oil from the west to eastern Canada, which currently imports foreign oil, and is supported to various degrees by all the three major federal political parties.

But its route through Quebec has also ignited opposition because of climate change concerns. This is a province that prides itself on being green due to its reliance almost exclusively on hydroelectric power, “resulting in very low greenhouse emissions per capita,” adds Stewart.

“There is not a lot in [Energy East] for Quebec. It is all risk and low reward. You are taking the risk of spills into the St. Lawrence River and into the drinking water,” he notes.

Meanwhile, Jim Stanford, an economist with the UNIFOR union, warns of a boom-bust syndrome that is intrinsic to resource commodity investment. He says that tar sands oil is no exception to the trend.

Stanford points to the slide downward in the world price of oil from the 100-dollar a barrel level – the minimum required by energy producers to justify ploughing money into the expensive extraction process of applying chemicals, water and machinery to dig the bitumen out of the ground.

“Commodity prices go up and they always come down. And getting excited in a period of relatively high prices usually ends in tears [among the investors] when the prices come back down the other way,” Stanford says.

Another economist, the Vancouver-based Marc Lee, observes that the Harper government is keen to extract as much tar sands oil as possible over a short period of time before renewable energies like solar and wind, with fewer consequences for the warming of the planet, come on stream at more affordable pricing.

“The game changer in all of this is that the world’s governments are supposed to negotiate a new agreement to constrain fossil fuel emissions for 2015. [And] Canada may be forced kicking and screaming to stay within reasonable limits,” says Lee.

Looming over all of this is Canada’s historical dependence on the development and export of raw resource staples, starting with trade in fur and fish from the New World to Europe under French and British colonisation in the 1500 and 1600s, says Mel Watkins, a retired University of Toronto political economist and the author of various books and articles on what he and others call the “staples theory,” to explain this country’s evolution.

Other important resources for Canada have been lumber, minerals and petroleum. Watkins speaks favourably of the wheat boom which began in the 1890s and provided, he recounts, positive spinoffs for the Canadian prairies, including the spread of family farms, expansion of agricultural, railway construction and settling of new communities and towns.

But often, says Watkins, resource-dependent countries – including Canada, Australia and nations in Latin America – get “addicted” to resource exports to the point where other parts of their economies fail to receive the full benefits of the commodity. He calls it “the staple trap.”

Watkins explains how the energy companies in Canada rely on foreign-made machinery to extract the tar sands oil and that once dug up the crude is invariably refined outside Canada.

Furthermore, continues Watkins, the tar sands boom has helped to raise the value of the Canadian dollar and thus upped the price of domestically manufactured products in a competitive world market.

Finally, resource-dependent countries like Canada “are too deferential” when it comes to the multinational energy companies paying sufficient royalties and taxes back to the government, adds Watkins, “which [could] can then be used to seed diversified, greener, development.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Canada has been leading the world in forest loss since 2000, accounting for 21 percent of global forest loss. Credit: Crustmania/ CC by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

The world’s last remaining forest wilderness is rapidly being lost – and much of this is taking place in Canada, not in Brazil or Indonesia where deforestation has so far made the headlines.

A new satellite study reveals that since 2000 more than 104 million hectares of forests – an area three times the size of Germany – have been destroyed or degraded.Since 2000 more than 104 million hectares of forests – an area three times the size of Germany – have been destroyed or degraded

“Every four seconds, an area of the size of a football (soccer) field is lost,” said Christoph Thies of Greenpeace International.

The extent of this forest loss, which is clearly visible in satellite images taken in 2000 and 2013, is “absolutely appalling” and has a global impact, Thies told IPS, because forests play a crucial in regulating the climate.

The current level of deforestation is putting more CO₂ into the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes together, he said, adding that “governments must take urgent action” to protect intact forests by creating more protected areas, strengthening the rights of forest communities and other measures, including convincing lumber, furniture manufacturers and others to refuse to use products from virgin forests.

Greenpeace is one of several partners in the Intact Forest Landscapes initiative, along with the University of Maryland, World Resources Institute and WWF-Russia among others, that uses satellite imagery technology to determine the location and extent of the world’s last large undisturbed forests.

The new study found that half of forest loss from deforestation and degradation occurred in just three countries: Canada, Russia and Brazil. These countries are also home to about 65 percent of world’s remaining forest wilderness.

However, despite all the media attention on deforestation in the Amazon forest and the forests of Indonesia, it is Canada that has been leading the world in forest loss since 2000, accounting for 21 percent of global forest loss. By contrast, the much-better known deforestation in Indonesia has accounted for only four percent.

Brazil’s Amazon forest – 2000. Credit: Courtesy of Global Forest Watch

Brazil’s Amazon forest – 2013. Credit: Courtesy of Global Forest Watch

Massive increases in oil sands and shale gas developments, as well as logging and road building, are the major cause of Canada’s forest loss, said Peter Lee of Global Forest Watch Canada, an independent Canadian NGO.

A big increase in forest fires is another cause of forest loss. Climate change has rapidly warmed northern Canada, drying out the boreal forests and bogs and making them more vulnerable to fires.

In Canada’s northern Alberta’s oil sands region, more than 12.5 million hectares of forest have been crisscrossed by roads, pipelines, power transmission lines and other infrastructure, Lee told IPS.

Canada’s oil sands and shale gas developments are expected to double and possibly triple in the next decade and “there’s little interest at the federal or provincial political level in conserving intact forest landscapes,” Lee added.

The world’s last remaining large undisturbed forests are where most of the planet’s remaining wild animals, birds, plants and other species live, Nigel Sizer, Global Director of the Forest Programme at the World Resources Institute, told a press conference.

Animals like Siberian tigers, orangutans and woodland caribou require large areas of forest wilderness, Sizer noted, and “losing these top species leads to a decline of entire forest ecosystems in subtle ways that are hard to measure.”

While forests can re-grow, this takes many decades, and in northern forests more than 100 years. However, if species go extinct or there are too few individuals left, it will take longer for a full forest ecosystem to recover – if ever.

Trees, plants and all the creatures that make up a healthy forest ecosystem provide humanity with a range of vital services including storing and cleaning water, cleaning air, soaking up CO₂ and producing oxygen, as well as being sources of food and wood. These ‘free’ services are often irreplaceable and generally worth far more than the value of lumber or when converted to cattle pasture, said Sizer.

In just 13 years, South America’s Paraguay converted an incredible 78 percent of its remaining forest wilderness mainly into large-scale soybean farms and rough pasture, the study found. Satellite images and maps on the new Global Forest Watch website offer see-it-with-your-own eyes images of Paraguay’s forests vanishing over time.

The images and data collected for the study are accessible via various tools on the website. They reveal that 25 percent of Europe’s largest remaining forest, located 900 km north of Moscow, has been chopped down to feed industrial logging operations. In the Congo, home of the world’s second largest tropical forest, 17 percent has been lost to logging, mining and road building. The Global Forest Watch website also shows details of huge areas of Congo forest licensed for future logging.

Deforestation starts with road building, often linked to logging and extractive industries, said Thies. In some countries, like Brazil and Paraguay, the prime reason is conversion to large-scale agriculture, usually for crops that will be exported.

The new data could help companies with sustainability commitments in determining which areas to avoid when sourcing commodities like timber, palm oil, beef and soy. Market-led efforts need to gain further support given the lax governance and enforcement in many of these forest regions, Thies said.

He called on the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – a voluntary certification programme that sets standards for forest management – to “also play a stronger role” and to improve those standards in order to better protect wilderness forests.

Without urgent action to curb deforestation, it is doubtful that any large-scale wild forest will remain by the end of this century, concluded Sizer.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Mining tar sands oil at Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada. Credit: Chris Arsenault/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 17 2014 (IPS)

Newly publicised internal documents suggest that U.S. negotiators are working to permanently block a landmark regulatory proposal in the European Union aimed at addressing climate change, and instead to force European countries to import particularly dirty forms of oil.

Environmentalists, working off of documents released through open government requests, say U.S. trade representatives are responding to frustrations voiced by the oil and gas industry here. This week, U.S. and E.U. officials are in Brussels for the sixth round of talks towards what would be the world’s largest free-trade area, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).“These documents show that the U.S. is simply not interested in an open, transparent [negotiation] process.” -- Bill Waren

“These documents show that the U.S. is simply not interested in an open, transparent [negotiation] process,” Bill Waren, a senior trade analyst with Friends of the Earth U.S., a watchdog group, told IPS. “Rather, U.S. representatives have been lobbying on the [E.U. regulatory proposal] in a way that reflects the interests of Chevron, ExxonMobil and others.”

The oil industry has repeatedly expressed concern over the European Union’s potential tightening of regulations around transport fuel emissions, first proposed in 2009 for what’s known as the Fuel Quality Directive (FQD). Yet according to a report released Thursday by Friends of the Earth Europe, the sector now appears to have convinced the U.S. government to work to permanently block the implementation of this standard.

Current negotiating texts for the TTIP talks are unavailable. But critics say the negotiations are forcing open the massive E.U market for a particularly heavy form of petroleum known as tar sands oil, significant deposits of which are in the Canadian province of Alberta.

“Since the adoption of the revised Fuel Quality Directive in 2009, the international oil companies … petroleum refiners, the Cana­dian government and the Albertan provincial government have spent enormous resources and used aggressive lobbying tactics to delay and weaken the implementation proposal,” the new report, which is being supported by a half-dozen environmental groups, states.

“The oil industry and the Canadian government … are afraid that the FQD could set a precedent by recognising and labelling tar sands as highly polluting and inspire similar legislation elsewhere.”

Safeguarding investments

At issue is the mechanism by which the European Union would determine the greenhouse gas emissions of various types of oil and gas. As part of Europe’s broader climate pledges, the FQD was revised to reduce the emissions of transport fuels by six percent by the end of the decade.

In 2011, the E.U. proposed that tar sands and other unconventional oils be formally characterised as having higher greenhouse gas “intensity” than conventional oil, given that they require more energy to produce – 23 percent higher, according to a study for the European Commission.

Yet tar sands have received massive interest from oil majors in recent years. Some 150 billion dollars were invested in Canadian tar sands between 2001 and 2012, according to Friends of the Earth, a figure expected to grow to nearly 200 billion dollars through 2022.

“Major oil investors want to immediately move as much tar sands oil as possible to Europe,” Waren says. “Over the longer term, they want to get the investments that will allow them to develop the infrastructure necessary to ship that exceptionally dirty fossil fuel to Europe.”

Many investors likely assumed the Canadian tar sands oil would have a ready market in the United States. But not only is the U.S. economy reducing its dependence on oil – particularly imports – but the trans-national transport of Canadian tar sands oils has become a major political flashpoint here, and remains uncertain.

So, last year, oil lobbyists here began to push U.S. trade representatives to use the nascent TTIP talks to safeguard the E.U. market for unconventional oils.

“[I]f the EU approves the proposed amendment to the FQD … it would adversely affect the U.S.-EU relationship, potentially eliminating a $32 billion-a-year flow of trade,” David Friedman, a vice-president with American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a major trade association, wrote in a May 2013 letter to the top U.S. trade official.

Now, according to an internal European Commission e-mail uncovered by Friends of the Earth Europe and outlined in the new report, U.S. trade representatives appear to be echoing this analysis.

“[T]he US Mission informed us formally that the US authorities have concerns about the transparency and process, as well as substantive concerns about the existing proposal (the singling out of two crudes – Canada and Venezuela,” the letter, said to be from October 2013, reportedly states.

Canada and Venezuela have the world’s largest deposits of tar sands oil.

The letter also notes that the U.S. negotiators would prefer a “system of averaging out the crudes”, meaning that all forms of oil would simply receive one median score regarding their emissions intensity. This would effectively lift any E.U. bar on unconventional oils – and, according to the Friends of the Earth analysis, add an additional 19 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

‘Threatening’ climate policies

The new revelations come just a week after the leaking of a TTIP paper on E.U. energy policy, which would push the United States to abolish restrictions and automatically approve crude oil exports to the European Union. The document offered a rare glimpse into notoriously secret talks.

“We strongly oppose attempts by the E.U. to use this trade agreement, negotiated behind closed doors, to secure automatic access to U.S. oil and gas,” Ilana Solomon, director of the Responsible Trade Program at the Sierra Club, a conservation and watchdog group, told IPS. “I think there’s strong support for continued restrictions on this issue among both the public and policymakers, due to the implications for both energy security and the climate.”

The new disclosures have indeed caught the attention of the U.S. Congress. Last week, 11 lawmakers renewed a line of questioning from last year about Washington’s influence on E.U. tar sands policy.

“We reiterate that actions pressuring the EU to alter its FQD would be inconsistent with the goals expressed in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan,” the lawmakers wrote to the U.S. trade representative, Michael Froman, “and we remain concerned that trade and investment rules may be being used to undermine or threaten important climate policies of other nations.”

Yet such concerns may already be too late.

Last month, media reports suggested that the European Commission is now considering a proposal to go with the U.S.-pushed “averaging” approach to its fuel-emissions calculation. The same week, Europe’s first shipment of tar sands oil – 570,000 barrels from Canada – reportedly arrived on Spanish shores.

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.

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.

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