“Now comes my favorite time of day in jail—the two quiet hours between breakfast and 7 a.m. before the television clicks on and we are ordered to make our beds and the loud day begins…”
Photo: Common Dreams
Biologist and author Sandra Steingraber hand-wrote this letter from her cell in a New York county jail, writing on scrap paper provided by a fellow inmate, a young mother jailed for stealing a pumpkin.
Along with other resisters, Steingraber was jailed for non-violent civil disobedience. They tried to block the driveway of Texas-based Crestwood Midstream, which is pursuing a lunatic scheme to store under high pressure toxic products of fracking/hydraulic fracturing – methane, propane and butane – in abandoned, crumbling salt mines adjacent to Seneca Lake.
So far in the Seneca Lake campaign, 59 people have been arrested. The majority await sentence.
They consider the cost of doing time very small compared to the cost of doing nothing. Steingraber writes, “…Time offers the possibility of rededicating oneself to the necessary work ahead: dismantling the fossil fuel industry in the last 20 years left to us, before the climate crisis spins into unfixable, unending calamity.”
More on the ominous links between fracking and climate chaos, and the powerful interests driving both, here. (Scroll down to chapter 10, The Unsolved problem.)
The more people learn about the extreme dangers of bitumen, tar sands oil slurry, the more resistance grows along the planned routes of pipelines to transport the toxic muck across country to refineries and coastal ports. And as resistance grows, so do propaganda and dirty tricks from the industry and its partners in government.
Oil pipeline spill, Yellowstone River, 2011. Photo: The New York Times.
A new must-read exposé from PRWatch, a US-based investigative research group, takes an inside look at what we can expect in the escalating battle over the proposed TransCanada pipeline from Alberta to Quebec/New Brunswick, aka “Energy East”:
“Leaked documents expose a plan for TransCanada to launch an ‘aggressive’ American-style PR campaign to persuade Canadians to support a Canada-based alternative to the stalled Keystone XL pipeline, to get controversial tar sands oil to refineries in eastern Canada for export. [MR: Prices are higher overseas, and diminished domestic supplies will ensure higher prices here, too. Oil-pushers call this a win-win situation.]
“According to the documents, this Canada-centric campaign would actually be run out of an office in Washington, DC. And the digital campaign is being led by a rightwing American political operative employed by the world’s largest public relations firm…”
Their battle plan includes investigations [read: attacks] on Canadian groups opposing the pipeline, and recruitment of buyable scientists “to build an echo chamber of aligned voices.”
“A recent New York Times editorial, referencing the rapid development of the Alberta oil sands, went so far as to describe new communications restrictions on government scientists as ‘an attempt to guarantee public ignorance.’” – from an open letter to the current Canadian government, signed by more than 800 scientists from 32 countries.
Image: Steve Nease, The Toronto Star
The international roster of scientists called on the Harper government to end “burdensome restrictions on scientific communication and collaboration faced by Canadian government scientists.” More detail on the story here.
The call was made in an open letter drafted by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS represents U.S. scientists, and fosters “rigorous science to build a healthier planet and a safer world.”
The need for this unusual intervention is strongly reinforced in a new report from the Canadian organization Evidence for Democracy. It assesses the communication and media policies of 16 Canadian federal government departments.
For more on the fight for open science and democracy, see chapters 9 and 12 in Bold Scientists. Read an excerpt here.
Tar sands oil is a cumulative disaster at every stage: extraction, processing, transport, refining, and end uses that dump incalculable amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
But the oil industry and its government backers are hell bent on getting their dirty plunder to port, for shipment overseas to countries where they can get a higher price.
Lac-Mégantic oil train disaster, July 26, 2014. Photo: Boston Herald.
A well-oiled corporate/government PR machine relentlessly denies the overwhelming risks, even after they’re proven by bitter experience. Fortunately for all of us, people living along the routes are onto these lies, and organizing to block the dangerous traffic.
These two crucial initiatives need and deserve support:
* The Enbridge corporation is pushing to activate the notorious Line 9 through southern Ontario and Quebec. If they succeed, within the next few weeks this aging, vulnerable pipeline could be pumping heavy oil under pressure through a densely populated region laced with vital freshwater sources. Citizens groups along the way are working hard to stop it.
In June, 2014, the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation launched a legal challenge to the National Energy Board’s approval* of Line 9, on the grounds that constitutional obligations for consultation and accommodation of Aboriginal rights had not been met. (*The NEB pretends to be independent, but the federal government has effectively stacked it with oil/gas industry supporters.)
* Now the St. Lawrence River in eastern Canada is also being turned into a transport route for tar sands oil, one of the world’s dirtiest fuels. On September 24, the Suncor corporation shipped the first ever vessel of heavy crude down the St. Lawrence River from a port east of Montreal, bound for Italy. A second vessel was stopped recently on the St. Lawrence and temporarily blocked from departing for safety reasons.
The St. Lawrence River is the second longest river in Canada, flowing from the Great Lakes into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way it provides drinking water to millions of people. The river includes four areas designated under the UN Convention of Wetlands of International Importance. The Gulf is the world’s largest estuary, bordering five of 10 Canadian provinces.
All of this faces imminent, irreversible threat. The oil corporations plan to send 20 to 30 vessels loaded with dirty crude down the river each year.
Author Michael Riordon in dialogue: Whole food for free range minds.
Michael Riordon 