Today more than 170 people rallied outside of the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC’s) Annual General Shareholder meeting (AGM) in Toronto after a series of creative non-violent actions all morning. Inside, First Nations Chiefs and community representatives from four different Nations demanded RBC phase out of its Tar Sands financing and to recognize the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous communities. Afterward, Indigenous leaders lead the crowd in a march to rally outside both RBC Headquarters buildings.

Other cities across Canada supported the First Nations voices inside the AGM as well with solidarity actions from (click on a city for pictures) London, Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Victoria and more. Check out photos from those and our events in Toronto.

And see some preliminary media coverage from the Wall Street Journal and Yahoo.

See beautiful photos from Allan Lissner here.

Since 2007 RBC has backed more than $16.7 billion (USD) in loans to companies operating in the tar sands—more than any other bank. Called, ‘the most destructive project on Earth,’ Alberta’s tar sands projects will eventually transform a Boreal forest the size of England into an industrial sacrifice zone complete with lakes full of toxic waste and man-made volcanoes spewing out clouds of global warming emissions.

Outside the shareholder meeting school children, bank customers of every age, First Nations community representatives joined Rainforest Action Network, Indigenous Environmental Network, No One Is Illegal, and Council of Canadians made their outrage at RBC’s investments heard – to the thumping beats of street Samba band, the crowd shouted “Cultural Genocide: who do we thank? Dirty investments from Royal Bank!”

Inside the shareholder meeting, Chief Al Lameman of Beaver Lake First Nation, Alberta,Vice Chief Terry Teegee of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council of BC, Hereditary Chief Warner Naziel of the Wet’suwe’ten First Nation of BC, and Gitz Crazyboy of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation addressed RBC CEO Gordon Nixon directly about the way tar sands extraction projects have jeopardized their health and their rights.

Downstream communities have experienced polluted water, water reductions in rivers and aquifers, declines in wildlife populations such as moose and muskrat, and significant declines in fish populations. Tar sands has all but destroyed the traditional livelihood of First Nations in the northern Athabasca watershed.

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Philly EPA Considering 16 New Mining Permits

This morning activists in Philadelphia descended upon their Regional EPA branch to put an end to Mountaintop Removal mining (MTR). Decisions made here in Philly have devastating consequences for Appalachian communities and our country as a whole.

Activists prepared to enter the building and risk arrest by sitting-in until they were granted a meeting with officials inside, and after a successful engagement and demands met, the rally of 40 people exited.

In recent months, the EPA has wavered in their position on mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR); in particular with the recent approval of the high profile Hobet 45 Mine permit. Philadelphia’s EPA has oversight of MTR permits for Virginia and West Virginia, which includes the Hobet 45 Mine. Philadelphia’s Region 3 EPA is considering 16 upcoming MTR permits and is responsible for the enforcement of the Clean Water Protection Act at existing MTR sites, which makes it a critical agent in ending the mining practice.

This has become a national issue. Appalachians can’t wait any longer, and Philadelphia activists met this urgency with action.

Meanwhile, there is a simultaneous rally at EPA’s region 4 in Atlanta GA, also responsible for MTR permitting.

Every day, across Appalachia, the coal industry literally blows the tops off of historic mountains, impoverishing communities, poisoning drinking water, clear-cutting entire forests, wiping out the natural habitats of countless animals, and sacrificing the heritage and the health of families across the region. The EPA estimates that more than a million acres of American mountains across Appalachia have already been lost to MTR, and yet they allow it to continue.

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Over the past 12 years, RAN has supported through our Protect-an-Acre small grants both Defense and Ecological Conservation of Intag (DECOIN) and Community Defense Council in the Intag region in the western Andes of Ecuador, a cloud forest ecosystem that is a globally significant biological hot spot. For 2 decades now, communities there have successfully led the struggle to halt all mining in the region, keeping out major Japanese and Canadian corporations.

Copper Mesa, until last year, was the owner of a two mining concessions in the Intag. But the company ran into a strong, organized opposition from communities, local government and, eventually even the national government, which eventually stripped Copper Mesa of its concessions in the country.

Now the Toronto Stock Exchange, which had been sued by 3 Intag activists, has delisted Copper Mesa from the exchange.

DECOIN organizer Carlos Zorrilla wrote in an email to Intag community supporters:

“This is a key victory in Intag’s very long and exhausting battle against mining interests. So big in fact, that I still find it difficult to believe. After all, this has been a dream of ours and something we’ve been working on for almost six years.”

Copper Mesa’s shares lost about 60% of their value in the 48 hours after the TSX delisting.

Today, 100 delegates from the Copenhagen climate talks – mostly from NGOs, but led by two members of the Bolivian government delegation, and with dozens of members of organizations from the Global South and Indigenous groups – marched out of the Copenhagen climate talks and tried to join the People’s Assembly at the Reclaim Power protest outside, only to be blocked and severely beaten by Danish police (who were working closely together with UN security).

The police cracked down incredibly hard on the Reclaim Power protest today – both inside and outside the Bella Center – and arrested 240 people (on top of the over 1,000 that they’ve arrested in the past week), but they didn’t prevent the protest from being an incredibly powerful and formative moment in the global movement for climate justice.

The Reclaim Power protest was co-organized by Climate Justice Now! and Climate Justice Action, two international networks of people’s movements, Indigenous groups, and grassroots activists from around the world – including Via Campesina, Indigenous Environmental Network, Focus on the Global South, Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment. The action sought to subvert the undemocratic and unjust UN COP process by creating a People’s Assembly, which would privilege the voices for climate justice of Indigenous peoples and people from the Global South – those groups that have been most marginalized from the COP-15 talks.

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So I really like the Winter Olympics – they really put the Summer Olympics to shame. Hockey, luge, figure skating, bobsledding, downhill skiing… and even that sport that combines cross-country skiing and target shooting! (Whose idea was that??)

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.

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The controversy surrounding the US Chamber of Commerce continues. The labor coalition Change to Win recently issued a report on how the Chamber has been hijacked by right wing ideologues, whose opposition to regulation of greenhouse gas pollution has included calling for the EPA to conduct a ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ on climate change. In a letter to members sent today, Chamber COO called groups like RAN who believe that climate change is a real problem ‘environmental extremists’.

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.
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I’m sitting opposite the ‘Hotel Black Gold’ as the sun goes down over Lago Agrio and the streets start to hum with evening traffic, people returning home from work and families out walking together. It’s hard to believe that just a few short hours ago this street was filled with hundreds of indigenous people and peasant farmers loudly, passionately protesting Chevron’s (which became synonymous with Texaco when the two companies merged) continued refusal to clean up the toxic mess that they left behind almost twenty years ago. One man held a sign that said bluntly: “My family was killed by cancer, Texaco”.

As Chevron works overtime to complicate, undermine and even corrupt the trial that is very likely to find them guilty of health and environmental damages to the tune of $27 billion, the resistance of the affected people grows stronger and more determined. The crowd marched from three directions and converged on the courthouse, where a member of one of the Indigenous group approached the doors to ask if he and four spiritual elders could enter to perform a cleansing ceremony. The guard refused, saying (with a straight face and not a hint of irony) that it was impossible because the men would need to light tobacco and that might contaminate the inside of the courthouse. Undeterred, the elders from the Cofan, Siona and Secoya peoples performed their ceremony for the crowds on the street, grinding and drinking the bitter yoco root to give them all strength and renewed determination to fight Chevron.

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.

Check out episode 6 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

Check out this great video from the Cliffside Climate Action.

A few hours ago hundreds of protesters converged on the headquarters of Duke Energy in Charlotte NC to demand a stop to the construction of the Cliffside Coal-fired power plant. This is just the latest in the growing wave of civil disobedience that is building around the country demanding that we get America off coal – the number one cause of global warming pollution in the US. Duke Energy stands out as one of the most hypocritical utilities – on the one hand professing to care about the climate, and on the other, continuing to pursue the construction of two conventional coal-fired power plants. Citi and Bank of America both have outstanding financial relationships with Duke – and this protest, coming on the eve of Citi’s shareholder meeting and just a week before Bank of America’s, underscores the escalating reputational risk associated with their continued support of dirty coal.

Stay tuned for a report and photos from the ground from Scott Parkin.