Greens Target Oil Sands Before Obama-Harper Meeting

Greenpeace

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Breaking out their familiar u-locks and mountain gear today, climate activists engaged in several acts of daring-do to spotlight Canada’s oil sands in advance of Wednesday’s meeting between President Barack Obama and prime minister Stephen Harper. Members of the Rainforest Action Network rappelled off the observation tower above Niagara falls to hang a 70-foot banner, and Greenpeace’s monkey-wrenchers blocked a giant oil sands dumptruck, locked themselves to it, and webcast the affair.

The first Washington meeting between the two leaders is expected to cover a range of issues, including climate change and energy. Massive strip mining of Alberta’s oil sands deposits–also known as tar sands–have made Canada  the US’ top supplier of foreign oil but also caused it to miss its emissions targets under the Kyto Protocol. Obama and Harper are expected to look for ways to keep the sands pumping. They’ll likely discuss cooperation on carbon capture and storage technologies (also a potential boon to coal country). And enviros also fear they’ll seek ways to exempt the sands from the federal low-carbon fuel standard; producing oil from the sands emits up to three times the greenhouse gases as pumping and refining oil from the Middle East.

As the world’s largest oil reserve outside of Saudi Arabia, the tar sands presents the Obama administration with a vexing political problem. Relying on the sands is exacerbating global warming, creating an environmental wasteland the size of Florida, and sickening and displacing a vocal native community–outcomes at odds with Obama’s environmental and climate agenda. But the sands also insulate the US from the volatile Middle East.  So far, there’s little doubt which is a bigger government priority: On his first official visit to Canada, in February, Obama was mum on the sands’ environmental footprint. And last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved a trans-border pipeline that will send us a whopping 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day–equivalent to 8 percent of net US oil imports. Environmentalists are challenging the approval in court.

The activist website Dirty Oil Sands has more on how green groups are targeting Harper leading up to the meeting.

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate