House passes Keystone bill, Senate action uncertain

REUTERS
FEB 16,2012

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives passed an energy bill on Thursday that would wrest control of a permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline away from President Barack Obama, who has put the project on hold.

The bill, part of a broader House Republican effort to fund highways and infrastructure projects, would also expand offshore oil drilling and open up parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

While approval of the Keystone measure by the House was widely expected, what happens with a similar proposal in the Democratic-controlled Senate is not yet clear.

Senate leaders were still negotiating on Thursday whether to allow a vote on Keystone as part of debate on a highway funding legislation, said Senator John Hoeven, a Republican from North Dakota who has been a key advocate for the $7 billion Canada-to-Texas project.

"I think on the merits we're going to get it done. I don't know when. I hope in the highway bill, but if not, we'll stick with it," Hoeven told Reuters.

Hoeven developed legislation that would see Congress grant TransCanada a permit for the project, and filed the bill as an amendment to the highway funding package.

PUMP PRICES SURGE

Republicans have seized upon the Canadian oil pipeline as a way to criticize Obama for his job creation and energy policies in the 2012 election race.

Continue reading...

Big news: We won. You won.

Source: TarSandsAction

News — admin November 10, 2011 at 4:23 pm

Um, we won. You won.

Not completely. The president didn’t outright reject the pipeline permit. My particular fantasy–that he would invite the 1253 people arrested on his doorstep in August inside the gates for a victory picnic by the vegetable garden–didn’t materialize.

But a few minutes ago the president sent the pipeline back to the State Department for a thorough re-review, which most analysts are saying will effectively kill the project. The president explicitly noted climate change, along with the pipeline route, as one of the factors that a new review would need to assess. There’s no way, with an honest review, that a pipeline that helps speed the tapping of the world’s second-largest pool of carbon can pass environmental muster.

And he has made clear that the environmental assessment won’t be carried out by cronies of the pipeline company–that it will be an expert and independent assessment. We will watch that process like hawks, making sure that it doesn’t succumb to more cronyism. Perhaps this effort will go some tiny way towards cleaning up the Washington culture of corporate dominance that came so dramatically to light here in emails and lobbyist disclosure forms.

It’s important to understand how unlikely this victory is. Six months ago, almost no one outside the pipeline route even knew about Keystone. One month ago, a secret poll of “energy insiders” by the National Journal found that “virtually all” expected easy approval of the pipeline by year’s end. As late as last week the CBC reported that Transcanada was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain, certain that its permit would be granted. A done deal has come spectacularly undone.

The American people spoke loudly about climate change and the president responded. There have been few even partial victories about global warming in recent years so that makes this an important day.

Continue reading...

Save the Delaware River from Fracking

Save the Delaware River from Fracking

Dear friends-

We've come a long way in the fight against fracking. The flaming faucets in GASLAND has been seen by upwards of 40 million people in 20 countries. A recent study shows that 4 out of 5 Americans say that they are concerned about the effect of fracking on drinking water.

But our most crucial stand is less than two weeks away.

On November 21st the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) will vote to approve a plan that will allow for 20,000 or more fracked gas wells in the Delaware River Basin . We need you to come out and protest the vote in huge numbers.

Because this moment is so important, I made a new video, my first video addressing fracking since GASLAND. You can watch it HERE.

The crucial decision to frack or not to frack the Delaware is in the hands of President Obama and the Governors of Delaware and New York . We need you to take charge and push them to do the right thing.

I have travelled all over this world, in over 30 states in the USA, to Africa, to Europe, Asia and Australia and one thing is clear: Fracking is not only one of the most destructive forms of extreme energy development, creating water contamination, horrific and hazardous air pollution and a health crisis, it is a world wide scourge that pushes us farther away from the renewable energy future that we need.

Now the fight comes back to my home, the Delaware River Basin , where it started for me. But this fight isn't about me. It's about the drinking water for 16 million people that the Delaware River provides.

If enough of us get out there, we can save the Delaware River and we can win a huge battle in the fight against fracking nationwide and worldwide. We can inspire the nation and the world to rid ourselves of this dirty form of energy.

 

THE CRUCIAL VOTE:

The Delaware River Basin Commission is an interstate body with five voting members, the Governors of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey and the Obama Administration as represented by the Army Corps of Engineers. Three out of five votes will either pass or reject the plan to frack the Delaware River .

It seems clear that the Governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania will vote to allow fracking on a huge scale in the River Basin, which is why we need all three remaining votes in order to prevail.

Like the massive actions these past few months against Tar Sands development and the Keystone XL pipeline, this decision will be a "watershed" moment for President Obama and a must win for us fighting against extreme energy development.

Not only is the Delaware River the source of drinking water for 16 million people (or 5% of Americans), it is a designated Wild and Scenic river, a tourist destination for 5.4 million people a year and a national treasure. The proposed plan to frack the Delaware would forever industrialize and contaminate this precious and currently pristine watershed. We can work together now to protect our water. 

We are asking you to do two things:

1) Make calls. 2) Come join us in an amazing protest effort on November 21st.

MAKE CALLS RIGHT NOW:

Call the Army Corps of Engineers to urge them to vote no fracking in the Delaware River Basin . Tell them you will hold President Obama accountable for the vote and make it clear that you know that it is his decision. 703 697 4672 Leave a message for Jo Ellen Darcy, Obama's rep on the DRBC

Call Governor Jack Markell of Delaware . Delaware has been sitting on the fence on fracking. We need them clearly and unequivocally voting no. Tell him to vote no fracking on the upcoming DRBC vote.

302-577-3210

Call Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York . Tell him to oppose fracking in the Delaware River Basin watershed, just as he has in the New York city and Syracuse watersheds. 518-474-8390

PROTEST on NOVEMBER 21st in Trenton , N.J.

When: November 21, 8 am

Where: Patriots Theater at the War Memorial, 1 Memorial Drive Trenton , N.J.

Coming from another location? Bus sign up HERE.

Sign up for email updates HERE.

Delaware Riverkeeper Network will host a training session in lawful, peaceful, first amendment activity on November 2oth in New York City and Trenton .

NYC, Sign up HERE.

Trenton, Sign up HERE.

Questions: savethedelawareriver@gmail.com and/or continue to check back.

AND just for a shot in the arm, here is a special statement from our friend, Bill McKibben:

"We're obviously deep in the trenches in Keystone XL pipeline fight, which has galvanized the whole country. But it's not just the pipe we're fighting, it's the carbon it carries. And that carbon--that extreme energy, the second round of fossil fuels now that the easy stuff is gone--doesn't just come from tarsands. It also comes from removing mountaintops for coal, and from drilling deep under the ocean--and, urgently, from fracking. We've simply got to somehow slow the rush to this new and dangerous technology, which promises to overwhelm the atmosphere with global warming gases. "

I've never had more resolve, I've never been more challenged and yet I've never felt more proud of us and our strength that I do right now. I know we can win. Please join us and act quickly.

For more info go to www.savethedelawareriver.com.

Thank you,

Josh Fox

Director, GASLAND

Milanville, PA

P.S. Pass it on.

---

Gasland 2 is in production. Help us continue our work as the film comes to fruition! Donate HERE.

Pipeline to prosperity or channel to catastrophe?

Chris Turner
Last updated Saturday, Sep. 17, 2011 10:39AM ED

This 2007 photo shows construction near Grassland, Alta. on a pipeline running from Edmonton to the oil sands near Fort McMurray. (Larry MacDougal for The Globe and Mail)

There are countless little brooks and rivulets garlanding the islands and inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest in remote northern British Columbia, many without even a name. But the salmon know them well, and return each September, paddling relentlessly against the current, leaping over rocks and little waterfalls, shedding their skin and dying from the outside in to give life to another generation.

Because salmon are the keystone to this ecosystem’s food chain, many never make it back to their birthplaces to spawn. At this time of year, the banks of the streams are littered with salmon carcasses and splayed guts like the remains of some grisly bacchanal. Many are tidily decapitated and otherwise fully intact, because the local wolf packs feed only on the heads.

Later in the month, the black bears come, accompanied by a few of their elusive cousins, the kermodes, born with a recessive gene that leaves their coats a ghostly pale yellow. The locals call them spirit bears. Salmon give life to this lush band of forest stretching from Prince Rupert to the north shore of Vancouver Island, the largest pristine ecosystem of its kind left in North America. But the spirit bears are the icons: August’s National Geographic cover featured one, with the headline “The Wildest Place in North America.”

That wild place is set to become the front line of a battle over Canada's energy future.

At the beginning of 2010, the National Energy Board and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency formed a Joint Review Panel to consider an application made by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. for permission to snake a pair of oil pipelines 1,172 kilometres from the oil sands north of Edmonton to the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. Traversing the territories of more than 40 first nations, both pipelines would end at a new terminal in Kitimat, a small industrial town.

One pipeline would carry Alberta-mined bitumen to Kitimat for international shipping; the other would deliver condensate (needed to make bitumen viscous enough to flow through pipelines) back to Alberta. Transporting the product out of Kitimat would generate oil-tanker traffic of unprecedented frequency and scale.

Enbridge calls the project Northern Gateway, promising jobs, prosperity and expanded markets. Opponents, including nearly all of the first nations along its intended route, see it as an oil-spill catastrophe waiting to happen. Yet while pipelines are fast emerging as a flashpoint in the climate-change debate, so far the argument has been muted in Canada – a symptom of our conflicted feelings about the role our energy resources should play in our national destiny.

Oil pipelines are making headlines as never before. An all-star roster of climate-change activists staged a sit-in at the White House in the last two weeks of August over a pending State Department decision on the Keystone XL – a proposed expansion of an existing pipeline bringing oil from central Alberta to Texas refineries. More than 1,000 people were arrested, including climate scientist James Hansen, actress Daryl Hannah and authors Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein.

Nine Nobel Peace Prize winners signed a letter urging President Barack Obama to say no to the Keystone project, arguing that the pipeline would “endanger the entire planet.” If unconventional fossil fuels such as Alberta's bitumen were allowed to proliferate, Mr. Hansen said, it would be “essentially game over” in the fight to stabilize climate.

Meanwhile, politicians and industry leaders have been speaking another language entirely. Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged the U.S. to increase its oil imports “from the most secure, most stable and friendliest location it can possibly get that energy,” while Canada's ambassador in Washington talked up job creation. A spokesman for TransCanada Pipelines touted the “conflict-free” pedigree of Alberta's hydrocarbons.

Continue reading...

TheGlobeandMail.com

Nine Nobel Peace Laureates, including the Dalai Lama & Archbishop Desmond Tutu, are calling on President Obama to STOP THE PROPOSED KEYSTONE XL

Dear President Obama,
We—a group of Nobel Peace Laureates—

are writing today to ask you to do the right thing for our environment and reject the proposal to build the Keystone XL, a 1700-mile pipeline that would stretch from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast.
It is your decision to make.
The night you were nominated for president, you told the world that under your leadership—and working together—the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet will begin to heal. You spoke of creating a clean energy economy. This is a critical moment to make good on that pledge, and make a lasting contribution to the health and well being of everyone of this planet.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE : NRDC

Sincerely,

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate (1976) – Ireland

Betty Williams, Nobel Peace Laureate (1976) – Ireland

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Laureate (1980) – Argentina

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Laureate (1984) – South Africa

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Laureate (1989) – Tibet

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Peace Laureate (1992) – Guatemala

President José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate (1996) – East Timor

Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Laureate (1997) – USA

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Laureate (2003) – Iran

Something big is happening

Dear friends—

After a remarkable couple of weeks in DC, we have our work cut out for us.


By now you know what we accomplished: 1,253 arrests, according to some journalists the biggest civil disobedience action since 1977, and the most sustained since the epic campaigns of the civil rights movement. That was enough to take a regional issue and make it a national and even global one (many thanks to our friends, who picketed American and Canadian embassies on every continent).


Together we managed to make the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline the central environmental test for the administration, and to inform everyone who’s paying attention that Barack Obama will get to make the call by himself, without Congress in the way. In other words, you’ve laid the groundwork for a mighty victory—now we have to make it pay off.

The President will be making a final decision about the pipeline in about two and a half months - 90 days after the final State Department report - and we need to get to work if we're going to convince him to reject the pipeline.

Here’s the plan:

Our main efforts will be to keep the focus on the President, even as we engage the State Department hearing process and other technical aspects of the debate. We don’t want the President to be able to hide from the decisions he's making.

And we’re not going to do him the favor of attacking him. Instead, we’re going to pay him the dangerous compliment of taking his words from 2008 seriously. Remember this is the president who once declared: “Let's be the generation that finally frees America from the tyranny of oil"

We're still planning something big for October 7th or 8th - the 7th is the date of the last State Department hearing in Washington, DC - but first we need to go back into our communities to keep building this movement. The White House is going to be watching to see if our sit-in was an isolated incident or whether there really is a movement of people across this country rising up to stop the pipeline.

First, we need to tell the story of what just happened in Washington by meeting with folks in our communities to talk about our experiences. This could be as simple as a small gathering in your home, or as elaborate as you'd like. Your story is the most powerful tool you have to keep building this movement. A few of our organizers got together to make a PowerPoint slideshow that you can use in a meetup, and if you'd like to host an event in your community to spread the word, sign up here: www.tarsandsaction.org/take-action/meet-up

Second, all around the United States, people will be going to Obama campaign offices in polite but firm fashion to remind him that we took him seriously—that he shouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it. Watch this video that just arrived from Seattle to get a sense of what we have in mind: http://youtu.be/lAfqFraOE0s. We’ll be trying to coordinate this work from city to city—if you’re willing to help in your town, and are certain you can deliver a calm, firm message, sign up here: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/take-action/office-visits/

For those of you in Canada, there's another critical next step for you to take: a coalition of groups similar to this has come together to lead an action on September 26th on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Sign up at ottawaaction.ca for more information

That’s our plan for now. I want to make sure that we use this opportunity to strengthen our connections with each other, and make this a true movement. This is your opportunity to start taking a leadership role in this campaign.

We’ll be giving you updates on plans for the 7th of course, and letting you know what's up. We have no guarantee we’ll succeed, but thanks to you this fight is very much on!

-Bill McKibben for tarsandsaction.org

PS - I wanted to make sure that you saw this amazing video capturing the last two weeks of our action. A must-see: http://youtu.be/dj6gN8u5flM




please support this effort

Monopoly Energy or Energy Democracy?

Published on Saturday, September 3, 2011 
source: CommonDreams.org

by Ceal Smith

Maybe it was the report from California that large solar lease investors are making an aggressive grab for Governor Brown's groundbreaking 12,000 MW of distributed generation in CA. Or it could have been an insider comment that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is, once again, under explosive pressure to auction off Colorado's few untouched public lands for oil and gas leasing. This, on top of Secretary of Interior Salazar's push to open 22 million acres of ecologically valuable public lands to industrial solar development, was simply too much.

Or perhaps it was re-watching a hilarious, but tragically revealing, 2010 Daily Show where Jon Stewart reminds us that our last 8 Presidents have vowed, and failed to various degrees, to achieve energy independence and end our dependency on dirty fossil fuels.

More likely, the State department approval of the Keystone-I tar sands pipeline was the final straw.
In any case, I found myself staring at the hard truth that we locally-distributed clean energy advocates, climate justice activists, and regular folks who just want affordable energy that doesn't wreck the environment, are losing. No, it's worse than that. 



Our pocketbooks, planet, public safety and welfare have been hijacked as we are aggressively forced to depend on increasingly destructive and dirty energy sources.

 

Continue reading...

Ceal Smith is a biologist, sustainability consultant and founder of the Renewable Communities Alliance in Colorado.

please vote on the poll below

Keystone Pipeline Infographic: 'Built To Spill'

First Posted: 8/29/11 07:05 PM ET Updated: 8/29/11 07:11 PM ET   
Source: Huffington Post
   
The construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, planned to run from the Canadian tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, has caused quite a stir. And now it's also led to the creation of a very detailed infographic.

Currently, thousands of protesters are conducting a two week sit-in at the White House to push President Obama to deny the permit for the oil pipeline. According to Tar Sands Action, over 300 people have been arrested to date.

On Friday, the State Department found that the pipeline would have "no significant impact" on the environment and suggested that the project move forward. Over the weekend, an interview aired of a former State Department official saying that Clinton would likely approve plans for the pipeline.
Earlier this month, an editorial in The New York Times opposed the pipeline, reading, "We have two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does."

In a Tar Sands Action Press release, NASA’s Dr. James Hansen said, “If Obama chooses the dirty needle it will confirm that the President was just green-washing all along, like the other well-oiled coal-fired politicians, with no real intention of solving the addiction.” Hansen was among the protestors arrested at the White House Monday morning.     

Check out the infographic below:
CLICK TO ENLARGE

Continue reading...


Please vote on the poll below -thank you

Daryl Hannah arrested in White House protest

By Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jill Serjeant | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah was briefly arrested outside the White House on Tuesday during a protest against a proposed $7 billion oil pipeline, police said.

Hannah was released after paying a $100 fine, following her arrest for failure to obey a lawful order, said U.S. Park Police spokesman Sergeant David Schlosser.

More than 70 people were arrested in the Tar Sands Action protest on Tuesday, which is named after efforts to block the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project to bring oil sands petroleum from Canada to Texas refineries.

Continue reading...