Michael Riordon

the view from where I live

Tag Archives: fossil fuels


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We have to stop.

arctic-ice-1989

Image: NASA/Goddard.

Have a look at this time lapse animation, the life of Arctic ice from 1989 to the present.  It’s calmly explained by a sea ice researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

How he remains calm, I have no idea.

We have to stop.  Stop gorging on fossil fuels.  Fuels made from our ancestors, all the life that came before us.  The fossils are running out.  So is the ice.  So is life, and time.

I’m not saying anything new here.  But it can’t be said often enough, or loud enough.  We have to make them stop:

  • fracking
  • tar sands extraction
  • deep sea drilling
  • Arctic drilling
  • moving crude oil by pipelines (another one blew up this week in Alabama)
  • moving crude oil by train (another one derailed and 11 oil-filled cars burned in Oregon’s Columbia River gorge, this past June)
  • moving crude oil by ship (another one loaded with diesel oil sank off Heiltsuk First Nation territory in British Columbia mid-October)
  • subsidizing fossil fuels at our expense and the earth’s
  • displacing/killing people and other beings (some slowly, some in a flash) to get at fossil fuels
  • making war after war to control fossil fuels, and to continue fueling the war machine
  • burning fossil fuels as if there was no tomorrow, and no alternative.

It can’t be said often enough, or loud enough.  We have to stop.  And start…

Start points are everywhere – personal, local, regional, national, global, online, on the ground. Like this one:  Justice and Equity in a 100% Renewable World: a  live online conversation.  November 10, 2016, 10:00am Pacific/ 1:00pm Eastern.  Details here.

Or this:  Corporate and government response to the west coast diesel spill off Heiltsuk First Nation (see above, ‘moving crude oil by ship’) has been shamefully slow and lax.  The Heiltsuk people are fund-raising online to do research on the extent of damage to their coast and fishing grounds, essential for their survival.  Details here.

Or this:  Haven’t got around to accosting the big banks that finance the Dakota Access Pipeline?  The online grassroots organization SumOfUs has just made it a lot easier.  They also include a list of other practical ways to support the resistance to DAPL.  Details here.

 


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“Clean-up efforts are underway.”

The bad news:  Alberta pipeline spills 60,000 liters of crude oil into muskeg.

The spin: As usual, the industry and its government partners assure us that “clean-up efforts are underway.”  What else can they say, spill after spill…

Tar sands pipelines

Tar sands pipelines.  Image: newrepublic.com

The worse news:  The industry is poised to send millions of gallons of this muck via pipelines and trains across thousands of kilometres/miles through every kind of terrain and aquifer to the west and east coasts, and south through the US.

The good news:  Every step of the way, courageous people are resisting.

At Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, more than 100 resisters have been arrested to date for trying to block a scheme by the Texas-based Kinder Morgan corporation to ram a pipeline through the mountain.

Canada’s National Energy Board granted the company rubber-stamp approval to proceed with test drilling, despite the fact that the pipeline will cross – invade, actually – territory which the Indigenous First Nations have never legally ceded to either the federal or provincial government.

In May, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation launched the first Indigenous legal challenge to oil sands pipelines crossing B.C., in a direct challenge to the National Energy Board’s deeply flawed ‘review’ process.

Last week, a provincial court judge threw out the charges against the Burnaby Mountain resisters, which included both First Nations and non-First Nations citizens.

Unfortunately, the judge’s ruling was based on Kinder Morgan having provided inaccurate GPS boundaries for its drilling sites, which leaves the company free to get a new revised injunction against the resisters.

Stakes for resisters also rose sharply when Kinder Morgan launched a $5.6 million lawsuit against several resisters and two university professors who have spoken out against the company’s pipeline test work on Burnaby Mountain.

Still, as the enormity of the threat become more and more apparent, resistance continues to grow across the continent. It takes many forms. This past week, Concordia University in Montreal became the first Canadian university to start divesting from fossil fuels.

For a scientist’s insight on the tar sands and climate change, see chapter 9, in Bold Scientists.  Read an excerpt here.  Scroll down to ‘Pesky data.’