With climate talks underway in Bangkok, Indigenous activists reviewing the text and engaged in the talks calling for no market-based REDD deal, Greenpeace activists blockading the tar sands in Alberta, and the EU investigating fraud in carbon trading schemes, today is a big day for the movement for climate justice. Too bad it’s such a disappointing [...]

RBC CEO Gord Nixon should be putting his bank’s money where his mouth is. Last week, he offered an incoherent defense of RBC’s “balanced approach” to the environment after RAN activists confronted him on the bank’s financial support for expansion of Canada’s tar sands. Recognizing his stumble, Nelson hit the papers this week to explain. [...]

Rainforest Action Network drops Seventy-Foot Banner Over Niagara Falls to Welcome Prime Minister Harper to the U.S. Banner: “Canadian Tar Sands Oil Undermines North America’s Clean Energy Future” See more photos here. Before dawn this morning, a small team of climate activists rappelled from the US observation deck at Niagara Falls. Dangling hundreds of feet above the [...]

Over the past decade, as oil prices have risen ever higher, oil companies have begun a massive – and massively destructive – project of tearing Canada’s boreal forest to pieces, in order to get at a layer of sand that contains 10% oil. To get the oil out, they need three barrels of natural gas [...]

Several weeks ago – while we were busy organizing a banner hang at the headquarters of Royal Bank of Canada, the world’s biggest funder of the tar sands – a senior lawyer from RBC faxed us a very polite letter, letting us know that if we didn’t stop using their corporate logo in our campaign [...]

Poor Big Oil. They’ve really been taking a hit lately. Between weak climate legislation that would marginally take a bite out of their mammoth profits, billion-dollar lawsuits accusing them of dumping wastewater in some rainforest somewhere, and direct actions blaming them for cooking the climate, oil companies have really been feeling the heat. And I’m [...]

Just Yesterday THIS magazine and Emily Hunter an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger posted a blog profiling myself and the work I am doing on the Tar Sands.   READ BLOG HERE Before there were any real hits on this blog and almost minutes after it was posted the Albert Government was on it asking for corrections [...]

In Toronto today, RAN appealed directly to Janet Nixon – the wife of Royal Bank of Canada’s CEO, Gordon Nixon – to help us end her husband’s company’s massive bankrolling of the Alberta tar sands. During rush-hour commute this morning, two Indigenous Canadian women – RAN’s own Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, and Heather Milton-Lightening – scaled flagpoles [...]

UPDATE: RBC CEO Gordon Nixon is outside at the rally watching the RAN activists who deployed the banner! More to come, but take a look at www.pleasehelpusmrsnixon.com. Members of the Toronto RAN chapter have just deployed a banner outside RBC headquarters directing people to the site: The site has a video of RAN’s executive director Michael Brune [...]

It’s pretty rare that I read a Green Scare smear piece that turns my stomach these days. But this one just took the cake. The Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute just released a report called “Resource Industries and Security Issues in Northern Alberta,” written by University of Calgary professor Tom Flanagan (the “man behind Stephen [...]