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.

Not that he’s feeling so welcome anyway. Obama is limiting the meeting to just one hour. While the Canadian press is calling it a slap in the face, aides say Harper will turn the other cheek. “The economy, and the clean-energy dialogue,”one aide told the Globe and Mail, “will dominate the discussions.”

Astute followers of cross-border relations will understand the code. Long on hope and short on specifics the so-called “clean energy dialogue” is actually a diplomatic marriage of convenience. Obama needs to dodge the sticky issue of oil imports from Canada’s tar sands in the midst of the Climate Legislation debate. Harper needs a story to go with his photo-op ahead of a tough election.

Announced last February, the dialogue featurescarbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as its centerpiece. Global warming pollution from coal and tar sands “can be solved by technology,” declared Obama. Not to be outdone, Harper’s office announced that “A strengthened U.S.-Canada partnership on carbon sequestration will help accelerate private sector investment in commercial scale, near-zero-carbon coal facilities to promote climate and energy security.”

Half a year and billions of wasted tax dollars later, though, CCS is still a pipe dream. FutureGen, North America’s supposed proving ground for the unproven technology, can’t keep private investors to save it’s life. Two of its biggest private backers, Southern Co. and AEP, jumped ship last June. Around the same time,  sponsors lowered the goal-post on the project to just 60% less carbon. So much for near-zero-carbon facility.

Meanwhile, Haper’s tar sands loom like a dark cloud. With conventional oil supplies on the decline globally, Canada’s tar sands region is the oil industry’s last stand. Producers expect production to double by 2025. If so, the region is projected to produce more global warming than many European nations including Austria and Ireland–smashing any hope for Canada to meet its climate obligations.

No matter. Harper is back, hat in hand, looking for legislative handouts to an industry destined to ruin the climate.

So here’s our welcome to you, Prime Minister Harper. Now, please, go home.

And take your dirty tar sands with you.

For full coverage, visit http://ran.org/tarsands

Just one day before Prime Minister Harper’s first official visit with President Obama, three concerned citizens released a vivid 70-foot banner above the Niagara Falls; the banner is intended to call attention to Harper’s efforts to lock up the U.S. market for tar sands oil, and the threat tar sands holds for the climate. Against the dramatic Niagara Falls background, the most well recognized border between the U.S. and Canada, the banner is intended to send the message that Canadian tar sands oil threatens North America’s clean energy future.

Watch this page for updates.

UPDATE 6:14 am PDT: Here’s another photo, and a phone interview with one of the climbers (who is still hanging under the banner).

Sounds like a pretty important news story, right?

The Canadians obviously think so. When RAN hung a banner outside Royal Bank of Canada’s headquarters six weeks ago – only one of countless protests against the tar sands that have taken place in Canada in recent years – the protest was covered by Bloomberg, the National Post, the Toronto Sun, the Calgary Herald, and the Vancouver Sun. Search for “oil sands” on the Toronto Globe and Mail’s website, and you’ll find over 4,000 articles.

The British also think so. In London recently, five Indigenous Canadian activists joined the UK Climate Camp, to protest British corporations’ involvement in the Alberta tar sands. The protests that these activists organized against British companies that fund the tar sands made news across the country, with reports by the Guardian, the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, and the Times. But this was by no means the first time the tar sands were reported on in the UK: the Guardian did a detailed investigative report on the tar sands over a year ago.

And even… the Norwegians think so. In Norway, the tar sands have become a prime election issue: the opposition Liberal Party is attacking the government for allowing the state-owned oil company, Statoil, to invest in Canada’s tar sands. All you Norwegian-speaking readers out there can check out an editorial by Aftenposten, Norway’s biggest newspaper, denouncing Statoil’s investments in Canadian “oljesandprosjekter” (that’s “oil sands projects”). Skandaløs!

But in the U.S. corporate media? Radio silence.

This is especially ridiculous, given that U.S. corporations are far more involved in the tar sands than their British (or Norwegian) counterparts. Chevron and ExxonMobil have invested a total of over $10 billion in Alberta tar sands projects – Chevron is the majority owner of the 85,000-acre Ells River tar sands project, while Exxon’s subsidiary, Imperial Oil, owns 465,000 acres of “quality oil sands leases.” Citigroup is the biggest tar sands investor outside Canada, with $5.9 billion invested in Canadian tar sands companies since 2007 alone. And oil companies across the U.S. are building pipelines and retooling refineries to be able to process oil from Canada’s tar sands: a new pipeline from Alberta to Wisconsin, capable of pumping 450,000 barrels per day of Canadian tar sands oil to refineries in the Midwest, was recently approved by the Obama administration. And Chevron has been fighting against community activists for years to be able to “upgrade” its refinery in Richmond, California, so that it can process tar sands oil.

The Canadian tar sands aren’t a Canadian problem. They’re a massive project in which U.S. corporations are intimately involved, and hugely implicated.

And yet – with a few notable exceptions, like a recent article in the New York Times – the U.S. news media has ignored the issue. And thus, most Americans know nothing about the fact that the world’s dirtiest oil is being put into their gas tanks.

Next week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is visiting Washington to meet with President Obama. Harper is as conservative as they come – a lot of Canadians call him “Bush Light” – and is a strong supporter of the tar sands. One of his biggest priorities in coming to the U.S. is to ensure that new climate legislation being written in Washington doesn’t prevent the tar sands oil from continuing to flow to his southern neighbor.

And the Obama administration has signalled that it’s willing to play ball: in June, Energy Secretary Steven Chu stated at the Reuters Global Energy Summit that he believes that the “environmental issues” facing the tar sands would be overcome through technological advancements, stating that “I’m a big believer in technology.”

As Harper tries next week to sneak the world’s dirtiest oil into the U.S., will the U.S. news media report on it? Or will they look the other way, like they have until now?

Now, the idea that they’d actually sue us is fairly ridiculous. Activists use and parody corporations’ logos all the time (see here, and here, and here, and here), but lawsuits against activists for copyright infringement are few and far between. Why? Well, partly because copyright law is written to stop companies from using other companies’ brands to make a profit – not to stop activists from using companies’ brands to make a point. But mostly because, pretty much whenever companies sue us, we use it as an opportunity to create such a huge publicity stunt that they end up dropping the lawsuit.

But that doesn’t stop companies like RBC from using the threat of lawsuits to try to scare groups like RAN into going away. But in this case, they clearly don’t know who they’re dealing with. So, we decided to have some fun with this.

First, we took their letter and rewrote it, using the same wording and format, changing it into a letter from RAN, politely asking RBC to stop funding the tar sands – failing which we would have no other option than to continue campaigning against them. Then, we got the fax number and email addresses of two of their top lawyers, as well as of one of their top PR people (how do we do it? Don’t ask). Then, we emailed thousands of RAN supporters, and asked them to fax and email this letter back to RBC’s lawyers.

As of this morning, 2,400 awesome RAN activists have sent emails and faxes back to RBC. (That’s 2,400 emails cluttering each of their inboxes, and 2,400 faxes sitting in an office somewhere.)

To see the letter we sent back to them, click here. (And please go ahead and send it, if you haven’t already!)

I doubt they’ll try this again. And if they do, we’ll think of something even more clever.

During rush-hour commute this morning, two Indigenous Canadian women – RAN’s own Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, and Heather Milton-Lightening – scaled flagpoles in front of the main entrance of Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC’s) headquarters in Toronto, dropping a banner reading “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon.com”. On the streets below, they were joined by dozens of Toronto RAN supporters, spreading the same message to every RBC employee they could talk to: an appeal to Mrs. Janet Nixon, the wife of RBC CEO Gordon Nixon, to lend her strong and influential voice to those fighting to protect Canada’s clean water and respect Indigenous rights by pushing RBC to phase out its investments in Alberta tar sands projects. They handed out flyers, held banners, and even circled the building on bikes with “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon.com” flags.

And at the same time as the banner was being unfurled, RAN supporters and allies began emailing a video to key RBC executives – in which RAN’s Michael Brune appeals to Mrs. Nixon to help RBC regain its environmental leadership by withdrawing its funding for the tar sands. Over 3,000 people sent over 12,000 emails to these top RBC execs. (If you haven’t participated in this online action yet, it’s not too late! Click here to view the video and email it to RBC executives.)

You can also view the video on YouTube (be sure to go to PleaseHelpUsMrsNixon.com and take action when you’re done watching):

The banner was up for about two hours, and a large crowd of people gathered to watch. (I heard a lot of remarks like “hey, that banner says ‘Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon’ like all those posters I’ve seen all over town”.) Several RBC public relations executives also joined us, and expressed their displeasure with what we were doing (”we support the right to public protest, but we are also proud of our environmental record”). In the end, the police let the two valiant climbers go without making any arrests; the climbers were given citations.

This action is also the culmination of a month-long guerrilla advertising campaign by RAN Toronto, who have covered the city with hundreds of posters bearing the message “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon” – leaving people in Toronto wondering what these posters are all about. (But in case Janet Nixon herself was unsure who she was being asked to help, we had a letter from RAN delivered to her home address yesterday.)

While Janet Nixon is the wife of RBC’s CEO, we are appealing her today because she is also a committed environmentalist, and has been instrumental in shaping RBC’s Blue Water Campaign. But while pledging $50 million to help fight water pollution over the next ten years, RBC has served as the ATM for the the dirty tar sands, loaning $2.3 billion to tar sands companies in the last two years alone.

Tar sands oil extraction has been called ‘the most destructive project on Earth,’ and its expansion is devastating the regional environment, contaminating Canada’s precious water supply, endangering wildlife, threatening First Nations’ health and preventing Canada from meeting its climate commitments. Indigenous First Nations communities downstream have experienced polluted water, water reductions in rivers and aquifers, increased cancer, and declines in wildlife population that threaten to destroy their traditional ways of life.

RBC has a critical role to play in investing in Canada’s clean energy future. RBC must require clients to provide evidence of free, prior and informed consent from First Nations on projects affecting their communities, as the first step of a phase-out of financing and advisory services to all tar sands projects which have adverse impacts on the environment. The bank must develop an action plan to reduce ‘financed emissions’ related to all lending activities that impact the climate.

Tar Sands extraction and processing is one of the greatest social and ecological injustices of our time. Unless they’re stopped by grassroots pressure, oil companies will transform a boreal forest the size of Florida into an industrial sacrifice zone – complete with lakes full of toxic waste that are so big that you can see them from outer space.

We know that Mrs. Nixon cares deeply about clean water, and so we’re appealing directly to her to help us push RBC to make a meaningful commitment to clean water, by ending its financing of the tar sands – rather than giving fistfuls of cash to Big Oil’s dirtiest project ever, while donating its spare change to clean water projects.

Mrs. Nixon, will you help us? (And Mr. Nixon: if you want to help us stop the tar sands too, there’s no need to wait for your wife to take the lead.)

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 appealing directly to the wife of RBC CEO Gordon Nixon asking her to help get RBC to stop financing tar sand oil expansion.

The Toronto RAN chapter has been flooding downtown Toronto with posters bearing the phrase “Please Help Us Mrs. Nixon” and a quick google search reveals that people have been hard at work trying to figure them out.

Mystery solved I suppose.

Check out the final glorious episode of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

In this one we talk to bands, Chrissy Swain from Grassy Narrows, RAN activists, and talk about how YOU can get involved with the campaign