A group of Canadian climate change activists – including RAN campaigner Eriel Deranger, and numerous members of RAN Toronto – caused a ruckus in Canada’s Parliament yesterday. In doing so, they brought their demands for bold action on climate change directly to the country’s leaders – and they didn’t stop until they were expelled from the Parliament building, with five of them being arrested and roughly dragged out.

During a Parliamentary debate, several protesters stood up in the House of Commons Observation Gallery and began chanting loudly, voicing their support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act.

This news video shows the reaction on the floor of Parliament while the protestors were chanting (skip to 0:50):

The observation gallery was mainly filled with youth listening to the Members of Parliament, who were bickering about pension plans. One activist stood up and yelled: “Canada needs to sign and ratify the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” Security rushed over, grabbed the individual, and quickly escorted him out as another individual stood up and shouted: “Pass Bill C-311 and take action on climate change.”

As numerous individuals were being escorted out of the public gallery while chanting bold statements about indigenous rights and climate change, a third person stood up and began a call-and-response chant – and the vast majority of the public gallery joined in. “When I say ‘311,’ you say ‘Pass it.’”

“311!”

“PASS IT!”

The protestors then began chanting “311, PASS IT;” “INDIGENOUS, RIGHTS;” “CLIMATE, JUSTICE;” “SHUT DOWN, TAR SANDS;” and “WHO’S HOUSE? OUR HOUSE.”

A couple dozen individuals were escorted out of the gallery and asked to line up against the wall; however, after about 100 other youth kept chanting, they too were escorted out.

Over 150 youth were forced to leave the House of Commons public observation gallery, showing that Canadian parliament was not ready to hear a democratic voice. While escorting the youth out of the building, police violently arrested several of the protesters, dragging five people away and detaining them – including RAN’s Eriel Tchekwie Deranger and Dave Vasey from RAN Toronto. Blood was left on the walls and the hallways of Parliament after one protestor’s face was slammed into the ground. The rest of the protestors continued chanting as they were forced to leave the building, filling the normally quiet halls of Parliament with chants for climate justice and Indigenous rights.

A handful of individuals were met by the media just outside the parliament building doors, where Joe Cressy of the Polaris Institute explained what had happened inside. His sentiments were echoed by other protesters who expressed outrage at Canada’s inability to take any leadership role regarding climate change.

One participant, Rosa Kouri, said that while the Canadian government may not be ready for it, “our children will appreciate what we’re doing.”

Bill C-311 is the Climate Change Accountability Act, which would require Canada to agree to IPCC greenhouse gas reduction targets. If this bill were to pass, it’s likely that the government would also need to severely limit emissions from the tar sands, the fastest-growing cause of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. “In shutting down the tar sands, the Canadian government would admit that it is willing to safeguard the rights of indigenous peoples,” said one activist.

Tar sands development is jeopardizing the communities, mainly aboriginal, living downstream from the projects. The projects are causing water scarcity and contamination, causing increased rates of rare cancers, asthma, and cardio-vascular diseases, as well as destroying First Nations communities’ ability to maintain their traditional ways of life.

It’s uncertain whether there has ever been a protest of this sort in the House of Commons, and yesterday’s protest was truly a milestone in the Canadian youth climate movement. This incredibly bold protest has been getting media coverage all of the country – on CBC, CTV, the Toronto Star, the Globe & Mail, the Montreal Gazette, the Calgary Herald, and many more.

Canadian youth have been trying to show their disappointment with their government and their country’s disregard for international agreements, including those on climate change and the rights of Indigenous peoples. Many MPs who support climate justice have told youth that they need to be loud and put pressure on the government. Canadian youth as a group got closer to their parliament than they ever have, in order to tell their elected officials what they want.

Canadian youth want climate justice and are communicating their demands to the government very clearly. Canada’s youth want the government to pass Bill C-311 – the closest Canada has ever come to having a policy on climate change. They want Indigenous rights to be respected – which means shutting down tar sands developments, which are violating aboriginal treaty rights as well as destroying the environment and increasing Canada’s emissions in order to make profits for the oil industry. Canadian youth want climate justice, and that means a safe climate for all people of the world – including those within its borders.

But this year, a wide variety of activists, in B.C. and beyond, are reminding us that the 2010 Vancouver Olympics aren’t all fun and games. In fact, they’re resulting in huge developments on unceded First Nations land, massive spending on hyper-militarized security, and displacement of poor people and increased homelessness in Vancouver.

And, of course, it’s an opportunity for some good ol’-fashioned corporate PR. Companies from around the world with gruesome environmental and human rights track records – like Dow, Coca-Cola, and General Electric – are lining up to spend millions on funding the Olympics and sprucing up their tarnished images.

And the lead sponsor of the Olympic torch run: Royal Bank of Canada, the ATM for the Alberta tar sands. In fact, their website for the torch run calls on people across Canada to “make a pledge” to “make a better Canada,” and touts RBC’s “Blue Water Pledge” to “support watershed protection” – a little bit hypocritical, given that RBC has pledged $3.8 billion in financing to tar sands companies in the last six months alone.

So a group of folks in Vancouver decided to call RBC on their greenwashing. They issued a callout last week – endorsed by RAN - calling for protests at RBC branches across Canada every Friday at noon, to protest RBC’s attempts to use their Olympic funding to greenwash their role as the world’s biggest financier of the tar sands.

This past Friday – on incredibly short notice – protestors in Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton took their message to their local RBC branches.

In Toronto, the ever-amazing RAN Toronto set up a tar sands cafe: they served up delicious tar sands tailing ponds “tea” to customers and passers-by outside RBC’s Yonge St. branch. They also went inside and offered “tea” to the branch employees, who politely declined.

In Vancouver, a group of concerned people went to RBC’s Vancouver headquarters, and passed out a brand-new flyer about RBC’s role in funding the Olympics and destroying the tar sands. (You can download the flyer here.)

And our reports indicate that there was a protest at an RBC branch in Edmonton, too! (Of course, the coolest part about decentralized days of action like this is that it’s entirely possible that actions happened that we didn’t even know about.)

This was a great start to the campaign – three protests across Canada, only three days after the callout was issued! But this is only the beginning – after all, if RBC is raking in millions in profits from its financing of tar sands companies, then we’re going to have to make a lot of noise before they start to listen.

So email 2010corporatecampaign [at] gmail.com to find out if there’s a protest happening soon near you – and if there isn’t, you can go ahead and organize one! (And it doesn’t have to be on a Friday at noon, either – and if you’d like help organizing a protest, you can email us at answers [at] ran.org.)

RBC: MAKE A PLEDGE: STOP FUNDING THE TAR SANDS!

Meanwhile, more and more companies and business groups (Apple, Exelon, PG&E) are dropping their membership in the Chamber and public opposition to the Chambers’ climate change denial is growing. The latest opposition is coming from the high tech sector, where the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Joint Venture are running an ad campaign against the Chamber for its opposition. And the Chamber is on the run, having been forced to backpedal on its claims to be the voice of the business community; last week the Chamber claimed to ‘represent’ 3 million businesses, but this week it quietly reduced that number to ‘300,000’ members. Investors are calling for companies that they own shares in to drop their membership in the Chamber, and local Chambers are formally distancing themselves from the US Chamber’s opposition to action on climate change.

As well they should. The Chamber of Commerce is behind the times: most companies have caught up with modern public values on climate change. For nearly ten years, the Carbon Disclosure Project has been surveying the leading global companies for their responses on climate change. In the most recent report issued earlier this year, 82% of the world’s largest 500 companies responded to the questionaire on their carbon emissions, 68% are reporting and tracking their emissions, and 51% have disclosed emissions reduction targets, all to report to investors representing over $55 trillion in capital investments. These companies are implementing global action plans for a carbon-constrained world, but the US Chamber of Commerce representing many if not most of these companies is heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s a note to Corporate America: every single company that claims to be taking climate change seriously yet continues to support the climate-change denying Chamber of Commerce, companies like Cargill, Microsoft (MSFT), Toyota (TM), FedEx (FDX) and Ford (F) – it’s time to come clean.

The US Chamber of Commerce is a national embarrassment, and corporations that continue to support this institution are standing in the way of progress in stopping climate change. It’s time for Chamber members to change or leave.

Recently divisions have cropped up in the U.S. Chamber. Three prominent utilities dumped the chamber in the last month, publicly slamming the Chamber’s position on climate change. Nike just left its position on the board of directors. Brad Figel, Nike’s director of government relations, told Greenwire that “We just weren’t clear in how decisions on climate and energy were being made.” And yesterday, computer giant Apple announced it was leaving the Chamber over climate policy.

What gives? What could the trade group be doing that has so offended its major members?

For starters, back in August, the Chamber filed a petition opposing the regulation of CO2 emissions by the EPA. This despite the fact that the EPA is acting under orders of the Supreme Court, which found in 2007 that CO2 is indeed a pollutant within the EPA’s mandate to regulate.

If that wasn’t sufficiently offensive to Chamber members, then the content and messaging surrounding the petition certainly should have been. The Chamber was setting about to equate climate science with evolution and link their denial of climate science with a belief in creationism. This, from the world’s largest business lobby.

Chamber VP Bill Kovacs publicly called to subject climate change to “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.” Kovacs goes further, believing that federal action on climate change will “virtually destroy the United States.”

Of course now that companies are calling them out, Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue has changed the tune, saying that “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continues to support strong federal legislation and a binding international agreement to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change.” Just not on these terms. Even though current climate legislation gives away all the rights to pollute to the industries currently polluting, that’s still not enough for the Chamber.

The Chamber’s actions as well as its rhetoric are out of step with modern public values. It’s time for more companies to distance themselves from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Walking in the streets with these people was powerful and achingly painful at the same time – almost all of them are living without access to clean drinking water and many of them can’t afford to buy bottled water. I watched as an elderly indigenous woman drank deeply from a plastic water bottle that had been handed to her by one of the Frente (the coalition of groups working to fight Chevron and represent the affected peoples), wondering when the last time was that she had quenched her thirst without poisoning her body. It sounds dramatic, but it is no word of exaggeration to say that these people are dying. The indigenous groups are losing the last of their land and livelihoods and the peasant farmers are barely surviving on land that is growing more and more toxic as oil from the waste pits leaches out into streams and rivers.

Is there any doubt about this? I don’t think so. Just two nights earlier, I was sitting in the lounge of our hotel in Quito when a clean-cut American man came into the room and began to work on his computer. I asked him what his business in Ecuador was and he replied that he was just here for a visit to the Galapagos Islands. But as it turns out, Rick is a biophysical chemist, specializing in cancer research. So I inquired without telling him why I wanted to know: “is there any way that there is NO connection between long-term exposure to crude oil and cancer”. I expected to get some scientific prevarication, but Rick didn’t even pause, not for a second. “No way at all” he said.

Are you listening Chevron? These people need something very simple – clean water, free from crude oil residue. Or they will die.

But I’d like to use this year’s World Rainforest Week to talk about a little-known threat that tar sands development poses to temperate (i.e. cold, not hot & sweaty) rainforests in British Columbia.

The areas marked in green are existing mature rainforest; the areas marked in red have been deforested.

“Rainforests – in British Columbia??” you might say. (Well, actually, if you’re savvy enough to be reading this blog, then you may well know that rainforests don’t just exist in the tropics.) That’s right: BC is home to the Great Bear Rainforest, an area of spectacular natural beauty and biodiversity, home to many species – like the “spirit” bear – that exist nowhere else in the world.

But this spectacular rainforest is facing an urgent threat: the proposed construction of an oil pipeline that would run from the tar sands of Alberta to Kitimat, a town at the end of a long, narrow sea inlet that passes through some of the most spectacular parts of the Great Bear Rainforest.

This pipeline, the Northern Gateway, is proposed by Enbridge – the same company that is building the Alberta Clipper pipeline from the tar sands to the Midwest that was recently approved by the U.S. State Department (and opposed by a coalition of environmentalists and First Nations communities). Apparently, the Alberta Clipper – with its capacity of 800,000 barrels per day – won’t be big enough to pump out all the oil from rapidly-expanding tar sands strip mining in Alberta. So, Enbridge is proposing to build this new 720-mile pipeline, which would carry 525,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day to the sleepy little town of Kitimat, nestled at the end of an inlet that is surrounded by beautiful mountains and pristine temperate rainforests.

Spills along the pipeline route are certainly a concern: the pipeline will run across several fault lines, and Enbridge hardly has a great safety record – its existing pipelines had 65 “reportable spills” of a total of 13,777 barrels in 2007 alone. But the really scary threat to BC’s rainforests is the shipping route that will carry tar sands oil by tanker, through 70 miles of narrow inlets, on its way to ports on the U.S. West Coast and in East Asia.

In March 2006, the Queen of the North ferry ran aground and sank, killing two people, along the shipping route that these oil tankers would be taking (see the green arrow on the map below; Kitimat is in the upper right corner). In fact, just over a week ago, on Sept. 25, a pulp freighter ran aground near Kitimat and needed to be towed to Vancouver for repairs. And under Enbridge’s Northern Gateway proposal, 225 oil tankers would need to make the trip through these challenging channels to Kitimat and back each year. Four or five of these ships each month would be supertankers – which are over 1,000 feet long and carry 2 million barrels of oil, eight times the amount spilled by Exxon Valdez.

Enbridge reassures us that “all vessels using the Kitimat terminal will be required to be double-hulled.” But a section of the Exxon Valdez that ran aground was double-hulled – and that didn’t prevent hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from spilling. In fact, a detailed 2006 study by an industry expert at tanker construction argued that double hulls do almost nothing to prevent major oil spills – due to the fact that any grounding or impact large enough to cause a major spill is easily large enough to rip through two hulls.

And as the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the 2002 Prestige spill in Spain have shown, all it takes is one screw-up to cause unimaginable damage to a coastal ecosystem. After Exxon Valdez spilled 265,000 barrels of oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska, 1,200 miles of coastline were polluted; within days of the spill, 250,000 seabirds, 1.9 million salmon, and 2,000 otters died. A 2003 study found that sequestered oil was still causing animal deaths, and that some shoreline habitats would likely not recover fully until after 2030.

And one of the things that is so amazing about the Great Bear Rainforest also makes it incredibly susceptible to oil spills: the forest and marine ecosystems are incredibly interdependent. Bears live off of the salmon and other fish runs; rainforest wolves, which swim from island to island, eat fish and barnacles; and animals carry salmon carcasses into the forest, where they provide vital nutrients to plants. If the marine ecosystem was devastated by a massive oil spill, the entire ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest would be tremendously affected.

And these salmon of BC aren’t just vital to the ecosystem of the Great Bear Rainforest – they’re also vital to the local economy.

The people of British Columbia – among the most progressive in Canada – recognize the dangers posed by the Kitimat pipeline: a July 2008 poll found that 72% of BC residents favored banning oil tanker traffic in BC’s Inside Passage, while only 19% supported allowing it. Furthermore, 77% agreed that the communities most affected by a potential oil spill should have first say in whether tankers should be allowed on BC’s North Coast.

And those First Nations communities that would be most affected by such a spill have made it very clear where they stand. In Dec. 2008, the Haida Nation stated that they “will certainly not accept tanker traffic where we would run the burden of risk an oil spills in our waters.” In March 2009, the Gitga’at First Nation stated that “there is nothing but risk in this whole process for the Gitga’at people.” And at a First Nations energy summit in June, the Chief of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation said bluntly of the pipeline: “We don’t want it.”

So why is this dangerous idea being pursued? Well, any RAN supporter could probably tell you the answer: because Big Oil supports it.

Freaked out by the potential for tar-sands-oil-killing climate legislation in the U.S., the tar sands industry is hedging their bets by planning the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would allow them to export oil to East Asia – especially to China, which has recently taken a much stronger interest in the tar sands. While the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (which would limit the use of tar sands oil in California) was being considered in March 2009, the head of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers stated that “the only realistic… alternative to the U.S. in the near term would be exports off the West Coast to the Far East.”

And to make it clear that it isn’t just Enbridge that stands to benefit from the Northern Gateway pipeline, Enbridge announced in July that outside oil companies (they wouldn’t say which) are contributing $100 million to the effort to win regulatory approval for the pipeline. (This could be part of the reason why Enbridge’s CEO, when asked about how he’s going to deal with environmentalists’ concerns about the potential damage to the Great Bear Rainforest, simply said, “I think those can be addressed.”) And then there’s also the huge question of the (as yet unclear) involvement of Chinese oil companies in funding and promoting the pipeline.

Plus, the government of Alberta – the Saudi Arabia of Canada – is taking the cue from their oil industry buddies, and throwing down for Northern Gateway. In May 2008, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach stated that “we will not only depend on the American market, we will expand markets. And if that means building a pipeline to the coast and selling oil to another country, we will.” (Note the use of the word “we” when describing the actions of oil companies – that says a lot.)

And, to top it all off: what bank do you think loaned Enbridge $1.1 billion in 2008 (and thus presumably stands to gain from the pipeline’s success)? None other than the biggest corporation in the country, Royal Bank of Canada.

So who’s going to win? Big Oil, or the Great Bear Rainforest? An alliance of the Alberta government, RBC, and the biggest oil companies in the world – or an alliance of environmentalists and First Nations, backed by the public opinion of the people of BC?

You can help the fight against Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline by signing this petition by the Dogwood Initiative, by sending a letter to Prime Minister Harper, or by joining the Dogwood Facebook group. (Or, if you’d like to do something a bit more interesting, click here for the office numbers and email addresses of top Enbridge executives.)

Before I arrived in Ecuador, I read about the terrible health problems that settlers and indigenous people living in the oil-affected area are experiencing. I knew about the toxic oil pits and the constant gas flaring. I knew that people were sick. But I wasn’t prepared for Fabiola. Fabiola was born with her heart on the wrong side of her body and doctors said that she would never walk. She proved them wrong on that count, but she is tiny for her age and she and her mother have had to make endless trips to doctors, sometimes traveling for days, to try and diagnose her many illnesses.

Fabiola’s grandmother moved to Taracoa twenty-three years ago, looking for land to farm. Texaco (now owned by Chevron) was already operating in the area, but the family didn’t know that the land they chose was right beside a toxic waste pit. The oil company didn’t advertise the whereabouts of its disposal sites, and hundreds of people moved into the area to set up home, not realizing that they were settling in an area that was so profoundly polluted. Oil from the open waste pits has been seeping into groundwater and streams for decades, gradually contaminating all the potable water in an area the size of Rhode Island. Animals started to die and over time, people started falling sick at unusually high rates.

Fabiola’s mother told us that she used to tend to the cows close by their house when she was pregnant with her daughter. Most days she would spend walking around the oil pit, and drinking water from the family’s well. It smelt like crude oil, and had a constant film of oil floating on the top, but it was their only source of water. Chevron/Texaco for their part assured residents of the area that the crude oil was actually good for them, encouraging people to rub it on their skin to treat arthritis. To this day Chevron claims that there is no connection between exposure to crude oil and human illness, an assertion that would be laughable if the effects were not so tragic.

Fabiola was born with severe birth defects just like many other children whose families live on the edge of Chevron’s oil sites. The company claims that they have cleaned up their mess, but one look at a ‘remediated site’ makes it abundantly clear that the so-called clean up is a cover up at best. There is very little that the residents of Taracoa can do to help the little ones like Fabiola who have already been so affected by Chevron’s legacy. Almost everyone buys their drinking and washing water these days, but money is scarce, and many can’t afford it. Their best hope of a long-terms solution lies in a court case that is being fought to hold the giant oil company accountable for cleaning up its mess once and for all, and for providing healthcare and clean water for all the many people who have suffered from Chevron/Texaco’s irresponsible waste dumping. The company has been fighting the case every step of the way. But I don’t think that any Chevron lawyer or executive who met Fabiola could fail to have a change of heart, and I hope with all of mine, that Chevron will ensure that hers is the last generation to suffer.

The report also finds that if we don’t take action to rein in the rapid global expansion of agrofuels we will in fact be making these problems worse. Particularly when expanding in rainforest regions, the carbon debt accumulated by agrofuels will take decades or sometimes centuries to pay back.

April 2009: Activists protest agrofuels in California

Read the full report at: http://ran.org/fileadmin/materials/comms/mediacontent/reports/Agrofuels_White_Paper.pdf

So RAN Toronto crashed the party, and reminded everybody that building an environmentally-sound headquarters while serving as the ATM for the tar sands industry is the crassest form of greenwashing.

Outside the building, the RAN Toronto crew held up banners, handed out pamphlets, and informed journalists and RBC employees heading to the event that RBC has extended and underwritten $19.5 billion in financing to tar sands companies since 2007 alone – more than any other bank in the world. (Much to the chagrin of building security – who watched and fumed from inside the lobby.

And before the protest started, two super-sneaky RAN Toronto activists – dressed to a T, and posing as interns in RBC’s Environmental Affairs department – snuck into the event on the 41st floor of the building, and handed out pamphlets to journalists and other attendees, describing a fake new RBC greenwashing program – “an important advertising campaign to convince you that we share your values and should be your destination for Sustainable BankingTM.” We thought the brochures were quite funny – but unfortunately RBC’s security didn’t share our sense of humor, and kicked the two activists out.

This is just one of many RAN Toronto actions against RBC: this crew confronted RBC CEO Gordon Nixon at a financial summit in September, held a die-in at an RBC branch opening in August, appealed to Gordon Nixon’s wife to help us stop the tar sands with a protest and banner hang in July, and confronted RBC executives at a conference at the University of Toronto in June. So maybe it isn’t terribly surprising that RBC security was beefed up for the unveiling of their new headquarters.

It should be clear to RBC by this point that this kick-ass band of rabble-rousers isn’t going to stop until RBC finally comes to their senses, stops their pitiful little greenwashing efforts, and starts taking true environmental leadership by ending funding for the tar sands.

Go RAN Toronto!

Too bad it’s such a disappointing day for climate in the US. Today Senators Boxer and Kerry released their first draft of the Senate climate bill, a companion to the House ACES bill passed this past June. It calls for the US to reduce emissions by 20% of 2005 levels by 2020. By comparison, island nations and the world’s least developed countries are calling for 45% emissions reduction from 1990 levels by 2020.

And it gets worse. The Boxer-Kerry draft bill subsidizes carbon capture and storage, a massive, scientifically uncertain boondoggle for coal fired electricity generators. The draft also repeats the most perverse problem in the House ACES bill by authorizing 2 billion tons of CO2 reductions to be achieved through offsets, instead of real emissions reductions.

Part of those offsets will come from a new, dangerous forest carbon market. The sellers of forest offsets will be tenure holders who are not required to operate with the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples. In fact, the forest offsets may not even guarantee the protection of the forest from future logging. The bill would create from scratch a new, risky
commodities market for carbon that could quickly become the largest market in the world, yet offers few specifics on how that market would be regulated.

To be fair, there are some safeguards for forests as well, requiring an increase in carbon stocks for forest offsets. And the ‘Supplemental Emissions Reduction Fund’ is also in the billp; this was the bright spot in the House ACES bill. If executed effectively, the fund could create a marketplace firewall between forest carbon and fossil carbon emissions reductions, and help forest countries to overcome their deep governance problems. The Boxer-Kerry draft bill also offers important incentives to plug in vehicles, renewable energy, and energy efficiency – tackling head on some the US’s lowest hanging fruit in addressing climate change.

But unfortunately, that won’t be enough to stop climate change. While the world is waiting for the US to step up to the plate, the US is still at home wrestling with its coal and oil demons.