[R-G] ‘Tar sands are killing us’

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/global/40856617.html

‘Tar sands are killing us’
Cree, Metis, Dene tell Sen. John Kerry
By Kate Harries, Today correspondent

Story Published: Mar 11, 2009

Story Updated: Mar 6, 2009

TORONTO – Dene, Cree and Metis activists from First Nations affected  
by Alberta tar sands development made themselves heard in Washington  
as Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice was making the rounds of  
Capitol Hill.

They hand-delivered a letter to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., head of the  
powerful Foreign Relations Committee, and later about 50 young people  
from Canada demonstrated outside Kerry’s office when Prentice went in.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, Canadian tar sands campaigner for the  
Indigenous Environmental Network, said the goal was to pre-empt  
Kerry’s meeting with Prentice and ensure the senator got a complete  
picture of the disastrous effect of the tar sands on environmental and  
human rights.

“Pollution from these projects are adversely affecting peoples’  
health, way of life and violate established treaty rights,” says the  
letter signed by Melina Laboucan-Massimo, of the Lubicon Cree Indian  
Nation, Gitz Crazyboy of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and  
Myron Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation.

“Animals are dying, disappearing, and being mutated by the poisons  
dumped into our river systems. Our traditional lands and water houses  
our culture. They are one and the same. Once we have destroyed these  
fragile ecosystems we will have also destroyed our peoples,” the  
letter adds. “The tar sands are killing us.”

The activists urged Kerry to focus on renewable energy and energy  
efficiency in the “clean energy dialogue” between Canada and the U.S.,  
part of the agreement signed by President Barack Obama and Prime  
Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa Feb 19.

After half an hour with Kerry, Prentice said, “the subject never came  
up,” in regards to the tar sands.

Laboucan-Massimo thinks the message is being heard in the U.S. “It’s  
coming to the point where Americans have to decide – is it about  
energy security or is it about the life and sustainability of the  
planet?”

Coming from a community under siege from industrial forestry and oil  
development on Lubicon territory, Laboucan-Massimo intends to dig in  
on the tar sands front lines. She’s currently working on a Master’s  
Degree in environmental studies at York University in Toronto and will  
be returning to Alberta soon to take up a position as a Greenpeace  
campaigner.

It was Prentice’s misfortune that his diplomatic mission March 2 and 3  
coincided with PowerShift, a youth initiative that attracted 12,000  
people to Washington for four days of workshops, protests and lobbying  
congressional leaders on clean energy.

Another recent strike against tar sands promotion is a long article on  
Canada’s oil boom in the March issue of National Geographic. “Nowhere  
on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca  
Valley,” writes author Robert Kunzig. Four tons of Earth, in fact, for  
each barrel of oil and the waste water from the process has filled 50  
square miles of tailings ponds.

The article has been criticized by mainstream Canadian politicians,  
including Liberal Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff, although Kunzig  
takes pains to depict the prosperity that even First Nations that  
bemoan the loss of fishing and hunting grounds have gleaned from the  
development.

Such caveats cut no ice with James Hansen, NASA’s top climate  
scientist, who in 2006 defied efforts by the Bush administration to  
muzzle him for sounding the alarm over global warming.

Hansen has called for the phasing-out of coal, the main source of CO2  
emissions in the U.S. But the tar sands are even worse, he told  
Reuters before the Obama visit to Ottawa.

“This unconventional fossil fuel is a total wild card on top of that,”  
he said. “You just can’t do it, that’s what politicians and  
international leaders have got to understand. You can’t exploit tar  
shale and tar sands without pushing things way beyond the limit.  
They’re just too carbon intensive.”

Obama made no direct comment on the tar sands issue in Ottawa,  
although he did say that “increasingly we have to take into account  
that the issue of climate change and greenhouse gases is something  
that’s going to have an impact on all of us and as two relatively  
wealthy countries, it’s important for us to show leadership.”

He has since called on Congress to pass legislation he will be putting  
forward to limit carbon pollution and make clean energy profitable.

He and Harper agreed that one focus of the clean energy dialogue will  
be on carbon capture and storage (CCS). Although the agreement  
referred to CCS only in the context of coal-fired plants, the Harper  
government is touting the technology as a way of scrubbing the tar  
sands clean.

That’s a notion that Thomas-Muller dismisses as ludicrous. CCS  
retrofitting may offer benefits for coal plants, but its efficient  
application is an impossibility for the tar sands, with multiple  
emissions points, both in the boreal forest and thousands of miles  
away at refineries all over the continent.

While the current recession has put some expansion plans on hold,  
Thomas-Muller warns that the infrastructure that’s projected to flow  
from tar sand development is “insane.”

A massive pipeline grid is to transport fuels to process the tar sands  
and to take tar sands crude oil to the lower 48 for refining.

New pipeline projects are planned to send the crude oil to refineries  
in Ontario and Quebec as well as to Montana, Wyoming, Colorado,  
Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania and  
Texas.

Many of the pipeline projects will traverse traditional aboriginal  
territories where consultation with First Nations and American Indian  
communities has been inadequate.

Plans are also in the works for pipelines to take oil to ports in  
British Columbia for shipping to California refineries, which would  
involve lifting a moratorium on oil tanker traffic in British Columbia  
coastal waters.