Listen to this 23 min radio program hosted by The Current’s Anna-Maria Tremonti, debating the notion of “ethical oil.” In in “Ethical Oil” spokesperson Kathryn Marshall squares off against Nobel Laureate Jody Williams, Chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative – who recently signed a letter with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and six other Nobel Laureates calling for the Obama Administration to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands to the US Gulf Coast – and a business ethics professor from York University. (Dec. 6, 2011)
Read this story from The Globe and Mail on the swift and strong reaction by Gitxsan hereditary chiefs following Friday’s unauthorized deal with Enbridge, signed by the nation’s lead treaty negotiator, Elmer Derrick.
“Gitxsan hereditary chiefs on Monday called for the resignations of negotiators involved in a controversial pact with Enbridge. After
emergency meetings over the weekend, a group of hereditary chiefs
marched on the offices of the Gitxsan Treaty Society on Monday to demand
the immediate resignation of three of the society’s employees. Those
employees include Elmer Derrick, a Gitxsan Treaty Society negotiator and
a hereditary chief who on Friday announced a deal with Enbridge to
support the Northern Gateway project.
‘We put on our regalia and walked to the Gitxsan Treaty Society and
informed them that their services were no longer needed,’ Norman
Stephens, who is part of a group of hereditary chiefs speaking out
against the Enbridge agreement, said Monday in a telephone interview. The
employees refused to leave, saying that the society’s board of
directors – not the hereditary chiefs – governed the society, according
to Mr. Stephens. That resulted in a subsequent resolution by the
chiefs that the society directors could no longer sign or act on behalf
of the Gitxsan clans, Mr. Stephens said.
A call to the Gitxsan Treaty Office was not immediately returned.” (December 5, 2011)
The heated debate playing out in the BC media over the past few days regarding the now-disputed deal announced this past Friday between Enbridge and the Gitxsan First Nation warrants a closer examination of the lone Gitxsan man behind the deal. Just who is Elmer Derrick – besides a hereditary chief and lead treaty negotiator for the Gitxsan? It turns out Mr. Derrick also has a decade-long history as a key political appointee of the BC Liberal Party.
Mr. Derrick was among the first political appointees of Gordon Campbell (see Order in Council 847) when the former premier replaced most of the BC Hydro Board of Directors with his own appointees soon after coming to power in 2001. Derrick was among that first batch of board appointments and retained his position at least until March 2008, the last time he is listed as a director in the annual report of the crown corporation.
Mr. Derrick began his foray into politics under the NDP’s tenure, when he was appointed in 1995 to the board of the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (O.I.C. 1331). Six years later he was becoming a go-to appointee for Campbell. In 2002, Derrick was appointed to the First Peoples’ Advisory Committee (O.I.C. 385) to the Campbell Government as well. In his biography on the Northwest Tribal Treaties Association’s website, Derrick is also listed as a board member of Powerex – BC’s electricity trading crown corporation – and “a volunteer community member of the National Committee on Sustainable Development, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada for three successive reports to the Parliament of Canada.”
Mr. Derrick involved himself in the recent BC Liberal leadership debate earlier this year – throwing his support behind losing candidate George Abbott, according to a Black Press story which is no longer posted on the company’s websites but was re-posted on a Vancouver Island realtor’s blog, where it remains at the time of publication of this story. The story notes, “Also joining Abbott at the announcement were Klahoose First Nation Chief Ken Brown, Gitsxan Chief Elmer Derrick…” (emphasis added).
Mr. Derrick has also acted as co-chair of the Northwest Power Line Coalition, an industry-driven group designed to support the building of the Northwest Transmission Corridor – an initiative championed by both the provincial Liberal and federal Conservative governments – to open up mining and hydro projects in Northwest BC. Among a group of over 50 mining and industrial equipment companies, engineering firms and trade organizations are two First Nations entities, listed as, “Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs and Tahltan Development Corporation.” A Marketwire story form January 2010 quotes Mr. Derrick: “‘We look forward to working with and supporting [BC Transmission Corporation] in this process,’ added Coalition Co-Chair Elmer Derrick, Hereditary Gitxsan Chief. ‘We are confident that the needs, concerns and questions of those impacted by this power line will be met through the environmental assessment.'”
Mr. Derrick has come under fire by members of his own Gitxsan nation for brokering a deal with Enbridge in support of the company’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline. Several hereditary chiefs from the community claimed in a press release this past Friday that Mr. Derrick had no authority to sign an economic benefit agreement with Enbridge and are now seeking to reverse that move.
The protest against the 2,763 km Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to America’s Gulf States’ oil refineries are driven by a deeper concern than risk to Nebraska’s Sand Hills region and its underlying Ogallala aquifer. The same applies to The worldwide Occupy movement, too, is motivated by a deeper concern than unregulated banking practices and the growing disparity between rich and poor.
This deeper concern could be interpreted as criticism of the industrial and financial institutions that comprise the economic engines of our modern age. But even this is not deep enough. Both protests, it seems, have their deepest common cause in a loss of confidence in the system itself, a foreboding created by repeated warnings of profound environmental transformations that could traumatize our present civilization.
Granted, not everyone articulates this foreboding. But decades of multiple environmental warnings have been eroding confidence in a system that seems more interested in its own success than the ecological havoc it is causing. The cumulative effect of these warnings is a growing sense of anxiety and pessimism. Some people respond by entrenching their faith in the system and doing what they have always done; others are challenging the system by demanding change.
One of the forces behind the Keystone XL pipeline protests, for example, is an organization called 350.org. It contends that the continual burning of oil – especially the “dirty” oil of the Alberta tar sands – is environmental folly. Developing the tar sands simply entrenches an indefinite commitment to oil and prevents the necessary shift toward clean, renewable energies. 350.org believes that our reliance on fossil fuels is untenable so it is “defusing the carbon bomb” – 44 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from coal, 36 percent from oil and 20 percent from natural gas. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has now reached 393 parts per million from a historical level of 280 ppm, climate stability can only be assured at 350 ppm, and emissions are on a course for 450 ppm, a concentration that could reach the feared “tipping point” beyond which our planet’s ecology would shift into uncontrollable warming.
Science supports this prediction. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that by 2015, given our present global emission rates, we will have lost 90 percent of our safety margin for avoiding this tipping point. By 2017, without radical reductions in greenhouse gases, we will have reached this point. So, for 350.org, stopping the Keystone XL pipeline is literally a life-or-death issue. The next struggle will be to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline, a project by transnational corporations that intends to export Alberta’s tar sands oil from BC’s West Coast to Asia.
The Occupy movement is responding differently to the same foreboding. It implicates transnational corporations in a wide range of social, financial and environmental wrongs. While these corporations have generated considerable global wealth, they have done so by exploiting the disadvantaged at the expense of everyone else – the earnings of the world’s middle class have remained almost unchanged since the 1970s. Meanwhile, income of the wealthiest 1 percent has increased manyfold – the average 2009 income for each CEO of the 500 largest corporations was $8 million.
The Occupy movement also blames financial corporations for the Great Recession of 2008, the consequences of which are still echoing around the planet. The trillions of dollars borrowed by countries to shore up their banks and avert a financial collapse became an excessive burden on precarious economies already stressed by debt.
The other wrong that motivates the Occupy movement is the undue political and economic influence held by transnational corporations. Indeed, this influence is deemed so powerful that most nations equate economic health with corporate health. Meanwhile, these corporations show no allegiance to any particular nation – they invest where the constraints are lowest and the profits are highest. An analysis by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of the interlocking relationships of the world’s 43,000 transnational corporations revealed that a core of 1,318 controlled 80 percent of the world’s operating revenue. Within this core, 147 controlled 40 percent of all wealth (New Scientist, www.bit.ly/onkFR2). So these corporations own at least this share of the record 30.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted in 2010.
Meanwhile, transnational corporate investments continue in oil, gas and coal, helped by global government subsidies in 2010 of $470 billion. To the many billions already invested in the Alberta tar sands, an estimated $253 billion will be spent over the next 25 years. The $7 billion to build the Keystone XL pipeline is an extension of this investment. So, too, is the $5.5 billion for the 1,172 km Northern Gateway proposal. Then add the multiple LNG plants proposed for coastal BC. The Sacred Headwaters of the Skeena, Nass and Stikine Rivers in central BC, described by the renowned ethnobiologist Wade Davis as a world wilderness treasure, will be trashed by the planned gas, oil and mining industrial development there. Corporate salmon farms operate with the same intrusive aggression. Indeed, few places on Earth can escape corporate capital and its hunger to exploit resources and feed its market.
A growing number of critics now recognize this trend as pathological and dangerous – and others are beginning to recognize their complicity. This is the awareness that is motivating the Keystone XL protesters. The global Occupy movement is motivated by a similar awareness. Its action was inspired by a single question posed in Vancouver’s Adbusters magazine: “What is our one demand?” Both protest groups would probably agree that a complicated answer is coalescing into a few simple words: “Give us back our countries, our democracies and our planet.”
Read this follow-up correction story from The Vancouver Sun, setting the record straight after their erroneous Friday front-page story reporting that the Gitxsan First Nation had struck a deal with Enbridge regarding the company’s highly controversial proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline. As The Sun now reports, the only deal with Enbridgre was made by a lone rogue bureaucrat from the band’s treaty negotiation office and had no official support from the hereditary or elected leadership of the nation. The story reports leaders of the nation are considering firing the perpetrator of the illegitimate deal, one Elmer Derrick.
VANCOUVER — Two chiefs of the Gitxsan First Nation in northern B.C.
said they are “in shock and embarrassed” after Enbridge announced Friday
that the aboriginal community had become an equity partner in its
embattled Northern Gateway pipeline proposal.
Norman Stephens and
Marjorie McRae said they have the support of most of the other 63 chiefs
and the rest of the First Nation in denouncing Friday’s agreement
announced by Enbridge and Hereditary Chief Elmer Derrick. Friday’s deal
was projected to bring at least $7 million to the community.
“The
majority of the hereditary chiefs didn’t know that this nonsense was
coming — we didn’t even know he was negotiating with them,” said
Stephens, also a hereditary chief who goes by the traditional name
Guuhadawk. “The hereditary chiefs did not know about it and are opposed
to it.
“The claimed $7-million benefit shouldn’t even be a part of
it because it goes nowhere to compensate the Gitxsan for any damage to
our fishing stocks if there was a spill.” (Dec. 4, 2011)
Read this story from The Province on today’s watershed press conference held by First Nations from around the province to deliver a unified, unwavering message of opposition to the proposed Enbridge pipeline to Kitimat.
“B.C. First Nation communities have formed a united front against
pipeline expansion and oil tanker traffic, as Enbridge Inc. pushes ahead
with its plan to build a pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat. Several
new First Nations signed on to the Save the Fraser Declaration Thursday
in Vancouver, bringing the total number of bands supporting a ban on
pipeline and tanker expansion to 130. Collectively, the signatories represent an ‘unbroken wall of opposition’ from the U.S. border to the Arctic Ocean.” (Dec. 1, 2011)
Watch this 2 min Global TV news story on the significant proposed increase in Tar Sands tanker traffic out of KinderMorgan’s terminal in Burnaby’s Burrard Inlet. (Nov. 21, 2011)
The following is a press release from hereditary leaders of the Wet’suwet’en and Unist’hot’en Nations of Northwest BC:
November 15, 2011 – Setting up a road blockade with signs “Road
Closed to Pacific Trails Pipeline Drillers”, an alliance of the
Unist’ot’en and the Likhts’amisyu of the Wet’suwet’en Nation have
evicted and escorted out Pacific Trails Pipeline drillers and their
equipment.
According to Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Toghestiy, “We evicted
Pacific Trails Pipeline drillers from our territory this weekend. The
drillers in one vehicle actually cheered for our blockade and one
driller told us ‘Nobody wants to see any pipelines in the North –
especially one that operates as dirty as this one. Have a good day guys
and good luck.’”
“Pacific Trails Pipeline had moved in equipment to do directional
drilling around Gosnell River where our salmon spawn. Their exploratory
drilling and whole pipeline proposal will spell certain disaster in the
Peace River area. We have to protect our sensitive aquifers from the
destruction of pipelines – from the Alberta Tar Sands to our side of the
Rocky Mountains. You cannot make compromises with the life-sustaining
force of water” continues Toghestiy.
Kloum Khun, a Likhts’amisyu hereditary Chief who also participated in
the blockade, said: “We had a sign that said ‘No Pipelines’ and pointed
it out to the drillers. We told them to take out all their equipment
from our territory.”
The Pacific Trails Pipeline, official known as the Kitimat Summit
Lake (KSL) gas pipeline, is a proposed natural gas pipeline that will
move upto 1 million cubic feet per day of natural gas from Summit Lake
near Prince George to Kitimat using an underground 36 inch diameter
pipeline with an 18-metre right of way on each side. Much of this
natural gas is acquired through the environmentally destructive process
of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking. After processing, the
natural gas would be shipped in supertankers from ports in Kitamat to
the international market. In February 2011, Pacific Northern Gas sold
its stake in the project to the Apache Corporation and EOG Resources
(formerly Enron).
The Pacific Trails Pipeline has a similar proposed right-of-way as
Enbridge Pipeline in Wet’suwet’en territory. According to Toghestiy:
“Enbridge is using the fact that Pacific Trails is proposing the same
right of way as Enbridge to mitigate their own ecological footprint on
our territory.” During a May 2011 interview with Fox News, Enbridge CEO
Pat Daniel discussed Enbridge’s move into the natural gas market and the
possibility of “synergies” between the Enbridge’s Gateway Project and
the Pacific Trails Pipeline.
The $5.5-billion proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline would
carry 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Alberta to Kitimat. In
August 2010, representatives of Enbridge in Smithers, Michelle Perret
and Kevin Brown, received formal notice from Wet’suweten hereditary
chiefs Hagwilakw and Toghestiy that Enbridge did not have permission to
build a pipeline on their lands and was trespassing on unceded
Wet’suwet’en lands.
Freda Huson, a spokesperson for the Unist’ot’en Clan of the
Wet’suwet’en, says her community was not consulted about these proposed
pipelines: “The corporations never informed us or consulted us about
their plans. Pacific Trail Pipeline’s proposed route is through two main
salmon spawning channels which provide our staple food supply. We have
made the message clear to Enbridge and Pacific Trails and all of
industry: We cannot and will not permit any pipelines through our
territory.”
The Unist’ot’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en participated in the First
and Second Indigenous Assembly Against Mining and Pipelines in BC. Says
Mel Bazil: “The plans of Christy Clark and the BC government to push
mining and pipeline developments into our territories will fail. We
reject the short-term interests of profit that motivates those mining
and pipeline developments that are trespassing on our unceded Indigenous
lands.
– 30 –
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Freda Huson: spokesperson for Unist’hot’en: (778)210-1100 or (250) 847-8897
Toghestiy: (250) 847- 8897
Kloum Khun’s: (250) 847-9673
Mel Bazil: 250-877-2805
Read this report from the New York Times on the invasion of prime hunting lands in Pennsylvania by the natural gas fracking industry.
“Some of this state’s most prized game lands lie atop the Marcellus Shale, a vast reserve of natural gas.
And now more and more drills are piercing the hunting grounds. Nine
wells have cropped up on this one game land of roughly 7,000 wooded
acres in Potter County, and permits have been issued for 19 more.
An old dirt road that meanders up a ridge here has been widened and
fortified. Acres of aspen, maple and cherry trees have been cut. In
their place is an industrial encampment of rigs, pipes and water-storage
ponds, all to support the extraction of natural gas through hydraulic
fracturing, a process known as fracking.
‘Who wants to go into their deer stand in the predawn darkness and
listen to a compressor station?’ lamented Bob Volkmar, 63, an
environmental scientist who went grouse hunting the other day through
these noisy autumnal woods. ‘It kind of ruins the experience.’”(Nov. 12, 2011)
Editor’s Note: We are pleased to welcome Ottawa-based environmental journalist and educator Mark Brooks to our team of Common Sense contributors. A former analyst for the Government of Canada and an author whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail and Ottawa Citizen, Mark brings a national perspective to The Common Sense Canadian.
————————————————————————
Strolling around Washington, D.C. last weekend, I came upon an impressive memorial to the famous wartime president Franklin Roosevelt. Upon the gray granite walls were inscribed many of FDR’s most memorable quotations. “Men and nature must work hand in hand,” he wrote in a 1935 message to Congress. “The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.”
Having traveled to the U.S. capital to cover the latest protest of the Keystone XL project, I wondered what FDR might say about TransCanada’s controversial pipeline proposal. A pipeline that would transport tar sands crude from northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, Keystone has been described as a 2700 km “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet” in the words of author and activist Bill McKibben. Protest organizers had hoped to encircle the White House with at least 4000 people in what McKibben called both an “O-shaped hug” and “house arrest.” Instead, at least 10,000 protesters showed up, young and old, from all over North America, ringing President Obama’s residence three-deep.
This action was the latest in a growing campaign to try to choke off supply routes to the tar sands. The company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, responded in an entirely predictable manner, betraying an almost total lack of understanding of some very legitimate concerns. “What these millionaire actors and professional activists don’t seem to understand is that saying no to Keystone means saying yes to more conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela filling American gas tanks,” TransCanada spokesman James Millar said. “After the Washington protesters fly back home, they will forget about the millions of Americans who can’t find work.”
Only a few months ago, approval of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline was considered a fait accompli by many of the project’s supporters. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called the approval a “no brainer” and TransCanada was so sure it would get the go-ahead from U.S. regulators, they had already bought the pipe and was stockpiling it in North Dakota. The company claims to have already spent $1.9 billion to secure land and equipment for the project and it fully expected to begin construction early in 2012. This has all changed dramatically now that President Obama has ordered the U.S. State Department to conduct a thorough re-review of the project, effectively delaying approval of Keystone until after next year’s U.S. elections.
While another version of Keystone XL may yet be approved, the delay represents a substantial victory for those groups opposing the pipeline. It is also another significant setback for the beleaguered tar sands industry coming as it does on the heels of a European Commission move to classify oil from the tar sands as carbon intensive and highly polluting.
Truth be told, Keystone approval has been plagued by problems for some time now. The U.S. State Department came under heavy criticism this summer for releasing a hasty environmental assessment that found the project would pose no significant environmental risks. It was later revealed that the Department not only allowed TransCanada to select the contractor that conducted the review, the company chosen, Cardno Entrix, turned out to have business ties with TransCanada and would likely stand to benefit from the project’s approval. Environmental groups also released emails that showed a friendly relationship between officials at State and representatives of TransCanada.
The Nebraska legislature then began considering legislation that would have forced TransCanada to reroute the pipeline away from the Ogallala aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the region. Comments by President Barack Obama further fuelled speculation that the writing was on the wall when he took personal responsibility for approval of the pipeline and said that “folks in Nebraska, like all across the country, aren’t going to say to themselves, ‘we’ll take a few thousand jobs’ if it means that our kids are potentially drinking water that would damage their health or if … rich land that is so important to agriculture in Nebraska ends up being adversely affected.”
The decision to delay was nonetheless remarkable given the current dismal economic climate in the U.S. and the well-financed campaigns being waged by TransCanada and the governments of Canada and Alberta promising jobs and economic growth should Keystone be approved. In the end, a hodge-podge collection of environmental and labour groups, Nebraskan residents, a few politicians and a handful of U.S. celebrities have managed to, temporarily at least, derail the $7 billion project. As Naomi Klein tweeted after the decision was announced, when the campaign against Keystone XL began, “most Americans hadn’t heard of the tar sands, let alone Keystone. This is what 3 months of amazing campaigning can do.”
The governments of Canada and Alberta both expressed disappointment with the decision but remain optimistic that the project will eventually be given the green light. But rather than addressing the very legitimate concerns of the many disparate groups who have come together to oppose Keystone XL, Federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said recently that “if they don’t want our oil…it is obvious we are going to export it elsewhere.” TransCanada immediately warned that the delay could kill the pipeline but vowed to work with the State Department to find a new route. The company’s Chief Executive Russ Girling has suggested a legal battle could ensue if the pipeline is delayed.
What backers of the pipeline have not yet been able to fully grasp is that, for the growing movement opposing the project, this campaign goes far beyond Keystone. At its core, this is a struggle over the kind of energy future we want to build for ourselves. When I spoke with Naomi Klein in Washington, she put it this way. “This is not just about Keystone, it’s about all the pipelines. Whether it’s in Nebraska or British Columbia, whether we’re talking about Northern Gateway or Kinder Morgan, people have made it clear they’re willing to take actions in line with the urgency of this crisis. Even if they approve this pipeline or any other, they have to know there will be people in front of every bulldozer.” Sure enough, in the hours following the State Department decision, the Twitter-verse was buzzing with individuals committing to take non-violent action should the Keystone project ever be approved.
Also speaking in D.C., NASA scientist James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, captured what many in the crowd and a growing number around the world are coming to realize, that we are at a critical juncture. “There is a limit to how much carbon we can pour into the atmosphere. Tar sands are the turning point in our fossil fuel addiction. Either we begin on the road to breaking our addiction or we turn to even dirtier fossil fuels.” If Keystone XL or the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to the west coast of B.C. is built, it will ensure increased tar sands production and a commensurate rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
For climate justice activists, labour groups and citizens assembled in Washington, this scenario is no longer acceptable. The decision to delay Keystone XL is no doubt reason for optimism, but it likely represents only the beginning for a movement that now appears to be at last finding its stride. What these folks are demanding is not simply that the tar sands pipelines be re-routed to safer terrain or that adequate measures are put in place to prevent oil spills, they want a long-term plan to gradually wean ourselves off fossil fuels and towards a clean energy future that could create millions of green jobs, something the governments of Canada and the U.S. have thus far refused to consider. Until they do, it will mean that “the arteries that are carrying this dirty oil all over the world” must be blocked, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians told me. “If we can stop Keystone, we can stop Enbridge going west. It’s the beginning of a real movement with Americans and people around the world to say this is the wrong model.”
Mark Brooks’ Video of Naomi Klein speaking in Washington, D.C. on November 5
November 15, 2011 – Setting up a road blockade with signs “Road