Archives for category: Environment
Actor and environmentalist Robert Redford recently added his name to the list of prominent individuals who are calling on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
Robert Redford: Tar Sands Oil Is Killing Our Planet – NRDC
http://www.nrdc.org/
Mark Ruffalo Supports The Tar Sands Action
Mark Ruffalo said : “I’ve seen the kind of damage that out-of-control energy development can do to water and to communities near my own home, where fracking for natural gas is causing widespread pollution … All these problems are connected — we need to get off fossil fuels.”
“The world is already leaving us behind. We’re being left behind. America. Because the gas and oil industry has a strangle hold on us. And our politicians.”
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben has expressed strong disapproval for the planned Keystone XL pipeline. In fact, he was one of the first of over 1,200 who were arrested at the Tar Sands Action sit-in at the White House in August.
Bill McKibben: On Sept. 21st, Draw the Line on Keystone XL
Bill McKibben on Fight Against Keystone XL, Fossil Fuel Divestment and Obama’s Failures on Climate
Bill McKibben : “The people who’ve carried this fight for three years are indigenous people on both sides of the border who have a huge stake in it because it’s on their land, and farmers and ranchers from places like Nebraska … It wasn’t until I sat down and read Jim Hansen’s analysis of how much carbon was in those things that I understood that this was not just a national issue, it’s a global issue of the first order.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus: See You at the White House!
Dreyfus recalls when Obama said “Let us be the generation that ends the tyranny of oil.” But she says, “Big Oil is still pretty much running the show.” She claims that by rejecting the pipeline, Obama has a chance to “make good on [his] word.”
Louis-Dreyfus asks Obama, “Denying the permit for a brutally stupid, money-grab like the Keystone XL pipeline is a no-brainer, right Mr President?”
Actress Daryl Hannah has also lent her voice to the movement against the Keystone XL pipeline.
In August, Hannah was one of the over 1,200 people to be arrested as an act of civil disobedience in front of the White House. Shouting “no to the Keystone pipeline” as she was handcuffed, Hannah made it clear she opposed the proposed Canada to Texas pipeline
Daryl Hannah: Why I Joined the Tar Sands Action
Maude Barlow, The Council of Canadians
http://www.canadians.org/
Maude Barlow, a Canadian author and activist and chairperson of The Council of Canadians, was arrested in September at a Keystone pipeline and oil sands protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
She was one of over 100 protesters of the demonstration’s estimated 400 to be arrested.
Barlow blogged, “I did it because I fear we are killing the planet and I can no longer be content to only write and speak about it. Today my feet spoke for me as I crossed that barricade and took away one more fear in my life.”
She also said, “By investing trillions of dollars into these pipelines, governments and the energy industry are ensuring the continued rapid acceleration of tar sands development, instead of supporting a process to move to an alternative and sustainable energy system.”
Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians
Kyra Sedgwick said: “Just like the BP oil spill, one glitch in the tar sands pipeline could destroy our clean water sources, possibly forever.”
Kyra Sedgwick Urges the President to Reject the Tar Sands Pipeline
David Strathairn: Join the Fight Against Keystone XL
David Strathairn said: “Obama ran for office speaking of the dangers of our fossil fuel addiction, promising to fight climate change and fully embrace a clean energy future. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is a dangerous step away from that commitment.”
TPP threatens to undermine the very notion of the public good, by giving corporations more power to undermine public policy.
Under TPP this will get worse, way worse
As Marsden describes it, the industry is so damaging and irrational that you’d think someone would slam the brakes.
Instead, projects are rubber-stamped and supported with generous tax breaks and lax oversight. Through the stories of families sickened or financially devastated by polluted water or air, Marsden describes how the government and regulators ignore victims and trample opponents.
In fact, he says, the oil sands, combined with Alberta’s growing mania for extracting natural gas from coal seams by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground – thereby poisoning some of the dwindling supply of drinking water – threaten to create a parched, deforested, polluted wasteland. “At the end of the day you will have a pot of gold with no place to live.”
“Why are Albertans so stupid?” William Marsden asks in his provocative new book
Alberta Oil Sands exhibit – British Columbia photographer Garth Lenz
About Garth Lenz
Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil
Full Bio
Transcript:
http://www.ted.com/talks/garth_lenz_images_of_beauty_and_devastation.html
Tar Sands Oil Extraction – The Dirty Truth
David Suzuki On The Alberta Tar Sands
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada has, by far, the world’s most nuclear waste per capita, and the second-most total nuclear waste. And yet we don’t have nuclear arms, use nuclear power for only 14 percent of our electricity, and have a strong anti-nuclear movement (British Columbia even has a no-nuke policy). So where is all this waste coming from?
The Conservatives have taken their battle with environmentalists to new levels of lunacy, some groups said Tuesday, after a Tory senator suggested they would accept funding from Al Qaeda.
“Let me ask you this, honourable senators: If environmentalists are willing to accept money from Martians, where would they draw the line on where they receive money from? Would they take money from Al Qaeda, the Hamas or the Taliban?,” Senator Don Plett, the party’s former president, asked in the Senate.
“It’s jaw-droopingly bizarre,” Devon Page, executive director of EcoJustice told The Huffington Post Canada late Tuesday. Read more …
