The governing Liberals in BC and Conservatives in Canada insist that jobs, public revenues and economic growth all depend on expanding fossil fuel exports. Christie Clark’s Liberals won the 2013 BC election promising a future of jobs and rising public revenues based on the export of liquified natural gas. Now two years later faced with widespread protests and declining oil and gas prices, no LNG project has proceeded.
For the past four years we have been visiting the Unist’ot’en camp and since then, we just can’t shut up about them. Why? Because their form of protest is beyond words and it’s manifested in direct action. They have created a real physical wall of opposition to all the proposed pipelines that could bring oil from the tar sands and fracked gas to world market in the Pacific ocean.
We would do well to pause, and ponder both the data and implications presented in the Post Carbon Institute’s latest report, released a few days before Halloween, “Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check On U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom”.
This week, we look at the fierce militant protests against Columbus Day by the indigenous Mapuche nation in so called Chile. Also the uncompromising resistance of Normalista students who have nearly brought the Mexican government to its knees, as they demand the safe return of their 43 kidnapped comrades. In Kobane we learn how an anarchist inspired Kurdish liberation movement has kicked out ISIS out of their liberated zone, and it was done with the efforts of the women’s brigade of the YPJ.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, we identified a new phenomenon that we called ‘energy conflicts’ and showed that these conflicts were intimately linked to the differential profitability of the leading oil companies. Figure 1 below, which was first published in 1995, adds new data to bring this connection up to date.1
The third century Christian theologian Tertullian is famously credited with defending his faith with the outrageous claim, “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe, because it is absurd). That is a paraphrase of Tertullian’s actual statements from De Carne Christi, notably “certum est, quia impossibile” (It’s certain because impossible). Some have claimed that Tertullian was appealing to an Aristolean notion that it is possible to deduce an argument of probability from the astonishing improbability of an event.
What does the Keystone XL pipeline mean to you? Unless you have been schooled in the process of producing oil from tar sands and transporting it, along with the deadly mess it leaves, you probably don’t know. Fortunately, with a little effort of discovery, there is enough proof of its costs. Some are quite deadly.
As concerned citizens mobilise for climate change demonstrations across the world, never has it been more important to embrace a collective demand for ‘system change’ as the surest way to limit global warming and ensure environmental sustainability.
We the undersigned call upon the United States Senate, House of Representatives, and President Obama to work together to introduce, promote, and pass legislation that puts a price on carbon pollution and returns revenues to the American people, either directly or by reducing taxes.
— From Pricing Carbon Initiative’s Petition to the Congress and the President of the United States
All of the elements required to create climate justice seem to be in place. The climate movement can put hundreds of thousands on the streets, organize creative civil resistance, get thousands to risk arrest and mobilize blockades of tar sands, fracking, oil pipelines and mountain top removal.
