Written by Dave Vasey from RAN Toronto.

On Tuesday, RAN activists disrupted a speech by Gordon Nixon, president of RBC at Ryerson University. Nixon was speaking as part of a business conference on Canadian Manufacturing. RAN activists interrupted the speech four times with banners and comments, as well as once during the question and answer period.

During the event, Nixon admitted that tar sands projects were the largest polluters in Canada, though declined to take responsibility for financing the projects. Instead, Nixon maintained RBC was not an oil company.

“Nixon admits that tar sands projects are the largest polluters in Canada, yet he seemingly fails to understand that these projects cannot go forward without financing. Pretty disturbing given he is the president of Canada’s largest bank” noted RAN activist Maryam Adrangi.

Tar sands oil has serious environmental, climate and human health impacts. Described by the United Nations Environment Program as one of the world’s top “environmental hot spots,” global warming pollution from tar sands production is three times that of conventional crude oil. Unconventional tar sands oil is derived from lower-grade, difficult and expensive-to-access raw materials, which have enormous consequences for air quality, drinking water and the climate. In addition, as this oil spills into the U.S., refinery communities face air and water pollution from tar sands oil, which contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel and five times more lead than conventional oil.

The action continues a series of actions performed by RAN Toronto who are lobbying RBC to divest funding from tar sands projects. RBC is the world’s largest financier of tar sands projects and has invested over $20 billion USD over the last 5 years. To extract tar sands oil requires churning up huge tracts of ancient boreal forest and polluting so much clean water with poisonous chemicals that the resulting waste ponds can be seen from outer space. The health impacts to Alberta’s First Nation communities are severe, with cancer rates up in some communities as much as 400 times its usual frequency.

So we’re in the midst of a campaign to save Coal River Mountain and end mountaintop removal.

About two weeks ago, on a Nation Day of Action to End Mountaintop Removal, dozens of actions happened around the country targeting the EPA, coal financier JP Morgan Chase and other political,utility and regulatory pillars of mountaintop removal.

Last week (and continuing into this week), over 63,000 people have taken online action calling the signatories of last June’s Memo of Understanding on the regulation of mountaintop removal to stop the blasting at Coal River Mountain.

NOW while we have been advocating, protesting, sitting-in, calling and emailing to stop the blasting on Coal River Mountain, it turns out the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection actually took some steps and did their job. Last week, they cited Massey Energy for using TOO large a load of explosives on Coal River Mountain.

Ken Ward reports: “But last week, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection quietly cited Massey subsidiary Marfork Coal Co. for using too large a load of explosives in its blasting operations at Bee Tree.” More »

All of you are AMAZING! At the end of last week, a number of organizations took online action to save Coal River Mountain.

350.org, Center for Biological Diversity,CREDO, Greenpeace, ilovemountains.org, Natural Resources Defense Council, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and Waterkeeper Alliance all had their online membership (somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000) email the signatories of last June’s Memo of Understanding (EPA, CEQ, Army Corp of Engineers) about the ongoing destruction at Coal River Mountain.

So far over 63,887 people have emailed the signatories. The federal agencies that have oversight over mountaintop removal and what’s happening at Coal River Mountain are hearing our message loud and clear. We need to keep up the pressure and end the destruction on this beautiful mountain (and all the mountains in Appalachia) and people power is going to help end mountaintop removal. Great work. Onward!

Sunday, November 8th, 2009- Philly activists protested and flyered today outside the Opening Session of the American Public Health Association’s 137 Annual Meeting at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was a keynote speaker.

The activists were demanding that Ms.Jackson end blasting on Coal River Mountain in Coal River, WV. The mountain is the site of a campaign by local residents for a commercial-scale wind farm. A wind resources assessment and economic study commissioned by the group Coal River Mountain Watch in 2008 revealed that Coal River Mountain has enough wind potential to provide electricity for over 85,000 homes.

Instead, the EPA has allowed Massey Energy, one of the largest coal producers in the country, to begin blasting at Coal River Mountain as part of mountaintop removal mining excavation. The blasting is occurring near the Brushy Fork impoundment, the largest slurry dam in Appalachia. Critics of mountaintop removal argue that an estimated 1,000 lives are at risk if the dam at Brushy Fork were to fail. Last December, a containment pond in Kingston, Tennessee burst, flooding the area with over one billion gallons of coal ash sludge, producing the largest environmental disaster in United States history.

Attendees to the APHA’s annual meeting were given flyers on their way into the opening session urging them to “Tell Lisa Jackson: Save Coal River Mountain.” Ms. Jackson and the EPA have been the targets of a campaign by a coalition of environmental groups working to end mountaintop removal for several months.

The Barcelona Climate Talks are wrapping up, and the world is disappointed. We have seen two vocal protests in the first hour inside the closing plenary and expressions of frustration and disappointment from one developing country after another. The Alliance of Small Island States says simply: ‘the level of ambition called for is both technically and financially feasible, the only remaining obstacle is political will.’

So what’s the bottleneck? By all accounts, on all sides of the debate except one, the single largest problem to solving the climate change problem is the United States. Everyone except for Jonathan Pershing, deputy US climate envoy, that is, who fiercely defends the US’s actions, which include proposing to end the Kyoto Protocol altogether in favor of a ‘pledge and review’ system of voluntary commitments from nations.
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Last week, Massey Energy began dynamiting Coal River Mountain in West Virginia—the site of a proposed 328-megawatt wind farm—to prepare for a massive mountaintop removal coal mining operation.

Today, more than half a million people have received emails from organizations across the nation, including Rainforest Action Network, Appalachian Voices, 350.0rg and many others, asking supporters to send a powerful message to the Obama Administration to stop the blasting on Coal River Mountain and protect our clean energy resources. With your help, this could be a day of action that makes history.

Coal River Mountain must become our line in the sand. The Obama administration officials who could stop this need to know that it’s not just people in the hills of Appalachia who can hear the explosions–we all know what’s going on.  And we know that every lump of coal that comes out of those hills adds to the carbon burden of the atmosphere we all share.

Demand that the Obama Administration stop the blasting today.

Cross posted from Alternet

Last week, blasting began on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. This is a part of the country where dynamite routinely goes off — turning the region’s historic mountain ranges into dust for the tiny coal seams that lie beneath their surface.

But Coal River Mountain is special, or, rather, you can decide whether it becomes special. Right now, Coal River Mountain represents the best and worst our country has to offer. It is one of the most dangerous examples of blasting for dirty coal and one of the most profound examples of hope that exist in our country. It is a crossroads.

Coal River Mountain can be a wind farm that provides 85,000 households with electricity, creates 700 long-term green jobs, gives back $1.7 million in annual county taxes and stands as a model for clean energy across coal country. Or, it can be a 6,000-acre dirty energy wasteland.

Stretching across thousands of acres of diverse and pristine hardwood forests, Coal River Mountain is one of the last intact mountains in the vicinity. It is also home to some of the few remaining headwater streams that have not been polluted with heavy metal-laden mine waste. To local residents, the mountain is a last stand.

When blasting began on Coal River Mountain this week, explosives began going off less than 100 yards from the largest coal sludge impoundment in the country. To put this in perspective, we are talking about more than eight billion gallons of coal slurry held back by an earthen dam. Were the dam to fail, and it has happened in the past, hundreds of people would have less than five minutes to save their lives.

It’s unfathomable to think that there are people in Coal River Valley who went to sleep last night fearful that a tidal wave of toxic coal sludge could break down their door. Or, it should be.

But almost as hard to fathom is why any political leader paying attention would allow a coal company to obliterate intact mountain ranges, sacrifice precious drinking water or risk losing people to a tsunami of coal sludge, when the mountain could be a wind farm instead?

Coal River Mountain’s real economic worth isn’t underground, but up in the sky. It is for this reason that Coal River Mountain is a major test for our country’s climate and energy future. It’s not that we lack alternatives to fossil fuels. It’s that while our nation’s leaders debate which solutions to put in place and at what rate and by what time, the fossil fuel industry continues to build more pipelines, belch out more pollution, and destroy more mountains. We are moving backwards even as we talk of a better future. But we don’t have to be.

In the last several months, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken some good steps to curb mountaintop removal mining, largely through strict oversight of mining permits. But now it’s time for leaps.

To save Coal River Mountain and preserve our nation’s clean energy potential, it’s critical that the Obama Administration, in particular the EPA, the Council for Environmental Quality and the Army Corps of Engineers, hear from all of us to counter the pressure that they are getting from coal lobbyists and coal industry-pocketed politicians. The Obama Administration can and will intervene if we decide that Coal River Mountain is where we draw a line in the sand.

Over the next two days, RAN along with Credo Mobile, Sierra Club, NRDC, 350.org, the Center for Biological Diversity, Appalachian Voices among others have asked our supporters to contact those in the Obama Administration who have the power to immediately stop the blasting on Coal River Mountain and to protect our clean energy resources. With your help we can build the national outcry necessary for immediate action.

I was going to tell you that there are two urgent reasons to help save Coal River Mountain: because people are in danger, and because we are blowing up, literally dynamiting, one of our most promising sources of energy. But really, the most important reason for you to act is because you can.

It is time stop talking about a clean energy future and start living in a clean energy present.

To help save Coal River Mountain and protect our clean energy resources visit Save Coal River Mountain.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was founded to create a path towards sustainability in the palm oil industry. A voluntary process, oil palm producers, traders, buyers, and NGO’s have joined up to find an alternative to the massive forest destruction, social conflict, and climate chaos the booming palm oil industry is bringing to the world’s rainforests. But eight years into the process, there is still nothing sustainable about the palm oil the RSPO endorses.

Early on, the RSPO identified accountability and transparency as key criteria to reduce the palm oil industry’s corrupt, dirty, and dangerous practices. Reflecting such, the first criteria for joining the RSPO are commitments to transparency.

But even a basic level of transparency is too much to ask from the USA’s largest producer and trader of palm oil, Cargill. Cargill was quick to sign up for the RSPO and to claim their support for the RSPO’s criteria. But when it comes to actually following the RSPO’s criteria for sustainable palm oil, Cargill is a non-starter. Hiring a questionable audit firm, Cargill has managed to pay its way into RSPO certification without living up to RSPO criteria.

This week, I attended the RSPO’s annual conference with two victims of Cargill’s oil palm operations in Indonesia. These community members, one of them the head of his small Indonesian village, traveled thousands of miles to meet Cargill face to face, to fight for the land Cargill has taken away from them. More »

Execs from Arch Coal and Peabody recently joined the board of Washington University in St. Louis and then had a conf on campus called “America’s Energy Future”

Students and community activists had something to say about that (including folks from St. Louis Rising Tide).

As I have written about on Understory before, Sumatra’s Bukit Tigapuluh is one of the last great forests of the world. It’s breathtaking biodiversity, high conservation importance, and value to three indigenous cultures withstanding, Sinar Mas -Indonesia’s largest producer of palm oil and owner of Asia Pulp and Paper- is actively destroying significant portions of the Bukit Tigapuluh ecosystem.

Just minutes ago, the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) passed a resolution, introduced by the Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS), to expel any member who clears portions of the Bukit Tigapuluh ecosystem, which has been found to contain large numbers of High Conservation Value Forests (HCVFs).

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