Is the G7 commitment to an energy transition that aims to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change just hot air? Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5

By Lucy Cadena
LONDON, Jun 11 2015 (IPS)

One of the promises made by the leaders of the world’s seven richest nations when they met at Schloss Elmau in Germany earlier this week was an energy transition over the next decades, aiming to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change.

Let us be clear: a target of zero fossil fuels by 2100 puts us on track for warming on an unmanageable scale. The only commitment made by the G7 this week was a commitment to climate chaos.

Putting our faith in as-yet-underdeveloped technology fixes such as ‘carbon capture and storage’ and ‘geo-engineering’ to save us in the next 85 years, while the solutions to the climate crisis – renewable technology and community energy systems – exist here and now, is senseless.“The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy”

The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy.

While the G7 gathered on Jun. 7 and 8, this was the message from people from around the world, who are calling for a ban on all new dirty energy projects and an end to the financing of dirty energy.

The G7’s role in upholding the current dirty energy system is not limited to the subsidies they pour into fossil fuels daily.

G7 countries also directly finance – and profit from – dirty energy projects, particularly in the global South, and in regions where poverty and limited energy access devastate families.

These include projects affecting communities deeply reliant on clean air, water, and land that is polluted and stolen from them, projects among populations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and projects where people face harassment and human rights violations for speaking out.

France

Last week, France, host of the 30 November-11 December 2015 Paris climate summit – the U.N. gathering to set the agenda for global climate commitments in the next decades – announced that two of the summit’s key sponsors will be EDF and ENGIE (formerly GDF-Suez).

The French state holds 84 percent and 33.3 percent of shares in these companies respectively. Both are involved in the construction of several very controversial, polluting projects across the world.

EDF is currently planning the destructive Mphanda Nkuwa mega-dam on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, in the face of fierce opposition from local communities and environmental organisations.

A letter from civil society reminds French President François Hollande that these and other projects place EDF and ENGIE among the top 50 companies that contribute the most to global climate change.

With 46 coal-fired power plants between them, EDF and ENGIE are responsible for emitting 151 million tonnes of CO₂ a year – which amounts to about half the total of France’s overall emissions.

Italy

The Italian state owns a considerable number of shares – almost one-third – in oil and gas company ENI. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, last year alone ENI reported 349 oil spills in the Niger Delta from its own operations.

The figure is remarkable – almost unbelievable. Each spill triggers a human and ecological crisis. The scale of the devastation and ENI’s failure to safeguard communities and ecosystems begs the question: is this sheer incompetence, recklessness, or simply utter indifference to the welfare of local communities?

Japan

Japan, the next offender on the G7 list, is the number one public financier of coal plants globally among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Japan has 24 coal-powered projects either under construction or planned, many of them in Indonesia, Vietnam and India, where the more vulnerable local populations live under the cloud of plants’ toxic emissions.

Emissions of deadly sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from coal plants are currently highest in Indonesia, where the planned Batang coal power plant is set to become the largest ever Japanese-financed plant in Southeast Asia.

United States

A report by Oil Change International indicates that the United States government alone provides 5.1 billion dollars in national subsidies to fossil fuel exploration each year – that’s 5.1 billion dollars into seeking out new sources of civilisation-destroying energy sources.

Canada

Likewise, Canada’s expanding oil sector (caused by the growth in dirty tar sands production, known as ‘the biggest industrial project on Earth’) continues to reap the benefits of massive national subsidies.

United Kingdom

The U.K. government spent 300 times more supporting dirty energy overseas than it contributed towards renewable energy projects during its last term.

The 2012-2013 annual report of UK Export Finance, the country’s export credit agency, announced spending on projects such as a 147 million pounds (228 million dollars) guarantee to support oil and gas exploration by Petrobras in Brazil and 15 million pounds (23 million dollars) in guarantees to a loan for a gas power project in the Philippines.

Domestically, the government is prioritising drilling for new oil and gas, which will require huge subsidies. Hailing carbon-emitting gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ towards a cleaner energy system, the government is delaying investment in renewables to push fracking onto a population that vehemently opposes the dash for gas.

Germany

Meanwhile, Germany – the host of the G7 meeting – has been much lauded for its ‘Energiewende’ (‘Energy Revolution’), with a rapidly increasing use of renewable energy compensating for its nuclear phase-out in recent years.

However, German euros still make their way into the dirty energy machine – through sizeable tax exemptions afforded to fossil fuel producers’ exploration activities – allowing such companies to go further and dig deeper to uncover more carbon that needs to stay in the ground.

G7 Must Catch Up

The G7 countries have done the most to cause climate change. According to the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, they are responsible for 70 percent of historical carbon emissions, while hosting only 10 percent of the global population.

A commitment to a phase-out of fossil fuels in eight decades’ time is not a commitment. It is an easy promise for a politician, who probably will not even be in power in the next decade, to make. It is an easy promise for a rich nation, whose citizens are not the most vulnerable, to make.

G7 societies have grown rich by exploiting the human and natural world. They owe an enormous ‘climate debt’ to developing nations – yet they can barely scrape together the money they promised to the developing world via the Green Climate Fund.

Whether it’s an oil spill in Nigeria, a mega-dam in Mozambique or a coal plant in Java, the sources of our publicly-owned dirty energy are always sites of ecological and social devastation.

Access to energy is a right, but it should not come at the cost of other people’s rights – to clean air and drinking water, to land and food sovereignty, and to sustainable societies.

The international movement for climate justice is building, and will keep up pressure on governments to take money out of dirty energy and reinvest it in democratic renewable solutions that benefit everyone.

The global shift towards a just energy transformation has long been under way. Now, it’s snowballing. People from around the world are showing the way and implementing community-owned renewable energy solutions.

There is a hunger for change, despite continued inaction from governments. G7 leaders, take note: you are trailing far behind and have a lot of catching up to do!

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. 

Excerpt:

Edinburgh Castle, symbol of the Scottish capital, whose university has just decided not to disinvest in fossil fuels. Photo credit: Kim Traynor/CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Kirsty Haigh, Eric Lai, and Ellen Young
EDINBURGH, May 17 2015 (IPS)

The University of Edinburgh has taken the decision to not divest from fossil fuels, bowing to the short-term economic interests of departments funded by the fossil fuel industry, with little to no acknowledgement of the long-term repercussions of these investments.

The decision, which was announced on May 12, exemplifies the influence that vested interests have gained over academic institutions in the United Kingdom.“Our university has decided to take a reactionary approach to climate change, failing to make any statement of commitment to the staff and students who have been demanding divestment from fossil fuel companies for the past three years”

Collectively, U.K. universities invest over eight billion dollars in fossil fuels, more than 3,000 dollars for every student. The University of Edinburgh has the country’s third largest university endowment, after Oxford and Cambridge, totalling 457 million dollars, of which approximately 14 million is invested in fossil fuel companies, including Total, Shell and BHP Billiton.

Our university has decided to take a reactionary approach to climate change, failing to make any statement of commitment to the staff and students who have been demanding divestment from fossil fuel companies for the past three years.

Announcing it decision, the university said: ”The university will withdraw from investment in these [fossil fuel consuming and extracting] companies if: realistic alternative sources of energy are available and the companies involved are not investing in technologies that help address the effects of carbon emissions and climate change.”

However, given the fossil fuel industry’s continued destruction of the planet, the university’s approach leaves far too much to the imagination and indeed allows for the potential to not divest from harmful industries at all.

We are going to find our existence completely altered – and in a way that we do not want – if   we do not stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, and we know the big fossil fuel companies have no intention of stopping.

Climate change not only poses a massive economic threat but also presents the world’s biggest global health hazard – and its effects are hitting the poorest parts of the world hardest. The University of Edinburgh is fundamentally failing to acknowledge the part it is playing in funding climate chaos.

Our university claims to be a “world leader in addressing global challenges including … climate change” but if the university had any desire to take the moral lead, it would have divested. Divestment would have seen Edinburgh join a global movement of universities and numerous other forward-thinking organisations in divorcing itself from the tightening grip of the fossil fuel industry.

The University of Edinburgh came down firmly on the side of departments funded by the industry which have been scaremongering throughout the process

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests have revealed, for example, that the university’s Geosciences Department has received funding from a range of fossil fuel companies over the past 10 years, including BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips, as well as grants and gifts of money from Total and Cairn Energy.

Sixty-five students in the university’s School of Engineering have already signed an open letter to the Head of the School, Prof Hugh McCann, angered by his public opposition to fossil fuel divestment.

Their letter states: “The School of Engineering has and will continue to have a pivotal role in the university’s future. It is after all engineers who will be on the frontlines of the transition to a low carbon society.

“By basing its argument against divestment on engineering students’ chances of employment in one dead-end industry, the school appears to be failing to prepare its students for careers in the rapidly changing energy markets of the 21st century, whilst neglecting the faculty’s broader responsibility to the student body as a whole. As a consequence, they gamble employment against our common future.”

Divesting is a way of taking on and dismantling the big fossil fuel companies and the power they hold over our society and governments. We rightly condemn companies that do not pay their taxes or who exploit their workers, and so we must do this to the companies who are threatening our very existence.

Divestment is also about creating more democratic institutions where those who are part of universities can have a say in how their money is spent and invested. The university’s announcement has shown that we still have a long way to go in creating transparent, democratic and ethical institutions. It brings into question the validity of the university’s decision-making process.

For the past three years, students, staff and alumni have supported full divestment – yet the University of Edinburgh has ignored their calls. The consultation run by the university found staff, students and the public in favour of ethical investment. A year later we still have zero commitment to change.

A process which began with promise has been allowed to descend into a complete breakdown in communication between students and the university. Serious questions need to be asked about why the decision was taken in favour of the views from the university’s Department of Geosciences, which freely admits its vested interested in maintaining the status quo for financial reasons.

The University of Edinburgh needs to invest in alternatives to dirty and unhealthy energy sources. These alternatives will create new jobs, so that when the fossil fuel industry ceases to exist there is something to replace it and our students are trained to work in it.

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. 

Excerpt:

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

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.

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.

By Roberto Savio
SAN SALVADOR, Bahamas , Dec 27 2013 (Columnist Service)

At this time of hope for what the new year may bring, it would be useful to look at the legacy we carry with us from the year we leave behind. It was a year full of events – wars, rising social inequality, unchecked finance, the decline of political institutions, and the erosion of global governance.

Perhaps this is nothing new, since these trends have been with us for a long time. But some events have a deeper, longer-lasting impact. And here we will present them briefly, as a list to remember and to watch. They are not offered in order of magnitude, which is always a subjective decision.

Roberto Savio. Credit: IPS

1. Collapse of the Arab Spring. The situations in Egypt and Syria have discouraged other Arab countries from following in their footsteps. The internal struggles in the large and variegated world of Islam will take a long time to settle. The real challenge is how modernism can be used as an element making Islam viable.

The coup in Egypt has given new strength to the radicals who do not believe in democracy, and we will never know if the Muslim Brotherhood could have run the country effectively, or if it would have failed (as is most likely). Outsiders cannot solve this conflict, as the case of Syria, which has become a proxy war financed by external players, clearly shows.

2. U.S. self-sufficiency in energy. In five years the exploitation of shale oil and gas will cut American oil imports in half, and if this trend continues the U.S. could actually become self-sufficient in energy supplies. The impact on the price of oil is clear, and this will affect the strategic importance of the Arab world and petrodollar countries like Russia. American industry will receive a strong boost, but incentives for the development of renewable energy will decline worldwide.

3. The inability to reach a meaningful agreement on climate change. The failure of the last climate change conference in Poland demonstrates that there is little political will to reach a global consensus on ways to tackle this issue. Yet according to most climate scientists we are fast approaching the point of no return, with the prospect of irreversible damage to the global ecosystem.

Meanwhile, French investors are buying land in the south of England to grow vineyards. And Iceland is besieged by investors (including the Chinese), who want to get their hands on a large land area where cultivation will continue to be possible. And all nations are gearing up for the exploitation of mineral reserves under the melting Arctic ice, which is also opening up new avenues for marine transportation.

This shows that the business world has a clearer appreciation of what is happening than governments. But it also shows a lack of vision of social responsibility.

4. U.S. decline. President Barack Obama had to cancel his participation in the recent Asian summit because of the U.S. budget crisis. But Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to attend, and he has managed to successfully manipulate events in Syria.

Obama’s signature healthcare reform is in jeopardy, and Edward Snowden has shown the world that the U.S. does not respect its own allies. Meanwhile, the Tea Party has been able to paralyse the U.S. government and bring the Republication Party to espouse a policy of public sector decline.

People all over the world now consider the U.S. an unreliable partner, in an irreversible crisis, with a president who makes a lot of high-sounding promises but is unable to bring them about.

Nobody has managed to bring the financial sector under control, and scandals and gigantic penalties are a continuing reality. There is no solution in sight on Palestine, and the U.S. is facing great difficulties extricating itself from Afghanistan, while Iraq is reverting to chaos, and the talks with Iran are giving a strong boost to the radical Shia section of the Islamic world. The U.S. is a country of great resilience, but the future does not look at all promising.

5. European decline. The past year was one of disunity in Europe, and the definitive ascendancy of Germany in European affairs. Only macroeconomics counts today. Ireland is held up as an example, after it brought its deficit under control. But at the microeconomic level, the damage to the social fabric can be dramatic.

The same is happening in Portugal, and Greece is the most extreme example. Greeks have lost 20 percent of their income, unemployment has climbed to 27 percent, and more cuts are being demanded.

This is not the place for an analysis of how Germany is helped by its policy, which undercuts others without any hint of solidarity. But in the May 2014 European elections, people are likely to vote in large numbers for the anti-Europe parties, which have sprouted almost everywhere, with the sole exception of Spain. The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy, as the harsh laws on abortion and public order show, is far enough to the right to leave space to a more right-wing party.

The weakening of the European Parliament will be with us for a long time, until Europe recovers some of the appeal that it has been steadily losing among its citizens.

6. Chinese nationalism. The new president, Xi Jinping, has in a few months assumed an authority unprecedented since the time of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He is pushing the idea of a Chinese dream, to galvanise people under his leadership. This is based on the assertion of China as a great power commanding respect around the world.

And bold steps have been taken to affirm Chinese territorial claims that have opened up conflicts with South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan. With the Japanese government now run by nationalist politicians, many analysts are considering the possibility of a third world war beginning in Asia.

In the 16th century China had 50 percent of world GNP, and there is a strong desire among the Chinese to regain their “rightful” place in the world. The defence treaty between Japan and the United States makes this a potentially global point of conflict.

7. Changes in the Vatican. The election of Pope Francis has brought a much-needed change of direction in the Catholic Church. The Pope is binging back a focus on people rather than the market, using terms like “solidarity”, “social justice”, “exclusion” and “marginalisation”, which until recently had all but disappeared from political discourse.

President Obama has followed with a strong speech against the growing social inequalities in the U.S.

And according to the London School of Economics, in 20 years Britain will return to the level of social inequality it experienced during the times of Queen Victoria.

But Pope Francis is the only one denouncing the dismantling of the welfare system which emerged during the Cold War. Let us hope that his call will help prevent the writing of a new Das Kapital, where the victims will not be workers, but young people.

Excerpt:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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