The most powerful man in Hollywood just confronted the most powerful industry on the planet. Director James Cameron wrapped up a three-day tour of Alberta where big oil is making its biggest play for the planet's dwindling oil reserves in the form of Canada's colossal tar sands project.
Cameron made the trip on the invitation of George Poitras on behalf of Indigenous Environmental Network, whom he met last year at the UN. Poitras has been a long-time advocate for his small community, Fort Chipewyan, just downstream from the toxic tar sands development in Northern Alberta. Those in Fort Chipewyan along with several other Indigenous communities are resisting the tar sands development because of the devastating health, human rights and environmental impacts the project poses.
"We need to put the brakes on expansion and learn more about how to extract this resource in a safe manner," Cameron declared to a packed press conference, "we must include the First Nations in these important policy decisions because right now they can't even trust the water they are drinking."
National news networks carried live coverage of Cameron's trip in the US and Canada as pundits from all sides clamored to interpret the director's every word. The attention could not have come at a better time. This year, tar sands became the biggest source of oil imports into the US, with more than a million barrels per day of the dirty crude flowing across the border. If big oil gets its way, investors will pour $218 billion of investment capital into tripling oil production from tar sands by 2020, and another $35 billion or more to expand pipelines and refineries to process the muck.
A 2009 report by WWF and the Co-Operative Bank concludes that if production continues at this rapid pace around 87 billion barrels of tar sands oil will be mined, burned and ultimately released into the atmosphere as more than 50 gigatons of CO2 by 2050.
This week, James Cameron added his voice to the chorus of voices pushing to stop the destruction caused by tar sands development. It is critical that we in the US, the largest consumer of this dirty oil, do the same. The real solution to the horrors of the tar sands is to transition away from this devastating source of oil extraction and toward a green energy economy.
The Transition movement explains tar sands extraction with this lively metaphor: imagine a pub where beer has been spilled onto the carpet for a century, and one is extracting all the little spots of spilled beer in the carpet.
insanity when you think of all the sunlight and wind -- the "fuels from heaven" all around us.
I sympathize with those who want to preserve their lands - this spoilage and waste generation represents an unprecedented tragedy for the human race. We are literally watching the death of nature. But the problem is unchecked population growth that was fueled by cheap petroleum. 6.8 billion hungry souls now demand petroleum to produce and ship food, and even now the current industrial food production system (and its globalized political organization) can't adequatey feed everyone. We could control and reduce population, but nature will likely do it for us.
Now to keep the donor parade going, the eco-groups have moved to the OilSands but they still play their deceptive games.
Fort Chipewyan is NOT on the Athabasca River - check for yourself on Google Maps - Google Earth. Fort Chip is on Lake Athabasca and the water that flows by it is lake water that flows north to meet up with the Athabasca River - look for yourself and when you do- plug in 'Uranium City ,Sask.
It's on the north side of the lake and it closed 1980 but for 50 years it dumped its radioactive tailings in the lake. Here's what the Sierra Club said in Mine Watch in 2001 - scroll down to Uranium City :
http://www.miningwatch.ca/en/toxicanada-13-good-reasons-establish-clean-canada-fund
Fort McKay is halfway closer to Fort McMurray and is actually on the Athabasca River yet they have less than half the cancers and illnesses of Fort Chip. But they haven't been eating radioactive fish for 50 years either.
do not assume for one minute that the proposed pipeline will cross british columbia, this is the home of greenpeace and of so many environmental groups that they have a directory, there have been damaging criminal attacks against another gas pipeline recently... do not confuse british columbia with alberta
unfortunately, many canadians consider the tar sands to be a litter box, you go there to do your business and leave before the smell gets you, very few live there for long or care, but will continue to go there as long as americans buy the oil
I am all for alternative energy & the green economy, BUT ... that transition doesn't happen overnight.
And, all Americans had better start riding bicycles.
Ogallala Aquifer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
Nebraska Sandhills: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hills_(Nebraska)
Map of Proposed and Existing Keystone Pipelines: http://pipelinesinternational.com/news/transcanada_responds_to_keystone_xl_pipeline_concerns/041815/
One Sandhills Visitor's Blog about the Sandhills: http://top100golf.blogspot.com/2006/07/sand-hills-golf-club.html
And, of course, the migratory flyover route of hundreds of varieties of birds, especially the cranes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhill_Crane
Hope that helps to clarify our concerns.
I think I shall buy a a 8200 sq ft house replete with large swimming pool and tennis courts, plus another house as an environmental show case, and then fly around the world in private jets lecturing people endlessly of the dangers of their greedy, opulent, CO2-belching life styles and the big, rich, evil oil companies that support it.
It's the least I can do.