Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) purports to combat global warming by saving rainforests, but without reducing greenhouse gas emissions, nor putting the capitalist system and its excesses—the real causes of environmental disaster—on the table.
President Obama: We citizens for Tar Sands Action in Los Angeles laud your decision to send the Keystone XL Pipeline back to the State Department for re-review. Yet, ensuring climate stability, protecting land and water resources, and launching an alternative clean energy economy will take much more work.
Reducing oil dependence. Strengthening energy security. Creating jobs. Tackling global warming. Addressing air pollution. Improving our health. The Union of Concerned Scientists has outlined a US national blueprint for a clean energy economy.
Keystone XL, touted to bring jobs and energy security, will do neither. Even if the pipeline never spilled, even if the tar sands weren’t an environmental atrocity, this would still be a bad deal for the US public.
While thousands surrounded the White House, a hundred people marched through downtown Los Angeles in solidarity calling for Obama to reject the 1,700-mile tar sands oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast.
The world’s dirtiest oil is produced by strip mining the Athabascan Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada, destroying an area of Northern Boreal forest and wetlands the size of Florida, with toxic settling ponds that pollute rivers fished by First Nations people, requiring pipelines to the Gulf Coast and hauling routes through the Northern Rocky Mountains.
Peak Oil is the point at which petroleum production reaches its greatest rate just before going into perpetual decline. In “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth productions, radio host Thom Hartmann explains that the world will reach peak oil within the next year if it hasn’t already. As a nation, the United States reached peak oil in 1974, after which it became a net oil importer.