This week’s Camp for Climate Action is actually a training event, taking place within sight of the City of London and preparing activists for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

The camp aims to provide volunteers with information on four aspects of Climate Change:

1) education
2) direct action
3) sustainable living
4) building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.

Tar Sands damage Canada via British involvement

It’s that second point that has brought five representatives of the Cree First Nations to the camp – they are highlighting the involvement of British corporations in the tar sand extraction taking place in Canada. A spokesman from Fort Chipewyan said that ‘British companies such as BP and Royal Bank of Scotland … are driving this project, which is having such devastating effects on our environment and communities.’

The Cree representatives say that the tar sand mining destroys ancient forestry, contaminates water systems with toxins and disrupts wildlife, which then threatens the aborigine lifestyle of the First Nations. The spokesman said it was ‘… the biggest environmental crime on the planet’ and that it was able to continue because very few people in Britain realised it was happening. BP and Shell oil companies are both involved in extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta – the oil is removed by using water under intense pressure, a process which uses up natural resources, requires high levels of energy and produces higher CO2 emissions. Royal Bank of Scotland is now part-owned by the British government following its financial difficulties and is being targeted by the Cree representatives because it has been a major funder of tar sand extraction schemes.

Climate Camp Mystery Location

The exact site of the camp is not yet known although campers are already arriving in the Greater London Area – the village will ‘spring up’ overnight on Wednesday and open on Thursday: the organisers fear the police may try to prevent the camp being built if they have advance warning of its location.

Alberta courtesy of fotographix.ca at Flickr under a creative commons licence

19 projects will be funded by the DOE. John Litynski, sequestration division director at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, explains:

These projects represent specific areas in monitoring CO2, both in the subsurface and at the surface, that helps to meet our goals to account for 99 percent of CO2 once it’s injected.  We’ve actually been doing monitoring for quite a while — ever since the program started 10 years ago, but we’ve been doing some field activities with the regional partnerships and now we want to make an effort to start looking at verification and accounting protocols after the field work. We’ve selected the new projects to fill in the gaps.

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With the spotlight shining on clean energy, the stage has been set for the U.S. to rid itself of a harmful addiction to foreign oil. The stars are aligned and the cards have been dealt. Soon we’ll have kicked the dirty habit, right?

Sarah Palin seems to think so. Perhaps you’ll remember her proposal to tap the natural gas supply found under the pristine Alaskan wilderness. As Governor of Alaska she “fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history . . . a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.”

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In his recent book Tar Sands: Diry Oil and the Future of a Continent, Nikiforuk lands a knockout blow on the kissers of the oil industry, oil-friendly bureaucrats, and petrol-guzzling North Americans. It is obvious that this Canadian is sick and tired of watching his own beloved habitat mutate from a pristine Northern ecosystem to a veritable toxic wasteland.

That said, Nikiforuk is clearly perturbed (another “p” word springs to mind…but this is a family-friendly blog). His book combines intensive research with a lively, caustic writing style…sort of enlightened invective. This makes for an astonishingly entertaining read that raises your hackles while raising your awareness about a seriously dangerous issue.

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According to a new report, the cumulative impact of developing Canadian tar sands over the next 30–50 years could be as high as 166 million birds lost, including future generations. Written by scientists from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Boreal Songbird Initiative, and Pembina Institute, the peer-reviewed paper suggests that avian mortality from continued development of Canada’s tar sands would provide a serious blow to migratory bird populations in North America.

“This report is yet another wake up call to the government in Alberta, as it confirms that the cumulative impact of oil sands development is on an unsustainable trajectory,” said Pembina Institute’s Simon Dyer, a contributing author to the report.

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1-Difficult to Extract Oil & High Environmental Impact

High oil prices are making it economically viable to utilize oil that is difficult to extract. One example of this is just north of the border.

In the U.S., our single biggest source of foreign oil is from Canada. Although this may be reassuring from a foreign policy standpoint, much of this oil comes with a steep environmental price tag. Known as tar sands oil, 2 tons of sand are needed to produce one barrel of oil in a very resource and energy intensive process.

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Arctic becoming the canary in the coal mine for climate change? But oil has briefly hit $100 per barrel and the U.S. economy is tanking. So let’s hold the first-ever oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea … just this once.

Canada’s Boreal Forest a carbon sink twice as powerful as the forests of the tropics? But rising fuel prices have suddenly made it profitable to tap the region’s vast reserves of tar sands … just this once.

Discovering that the coldest, most pristine place on Earth — Antarctica — might also harbor a wealth of oil and gas reserves? Let’s tiptoe around the continent’s edges trying to establish rights to resources below the seabed … just this once.

The list of “just-this-once” announcements from the past few months alone could go on and on, but would make for even more disheartening reading.

For the individual human addict, help sometimes comes in the form of an intervention from friends and loved ones who hope to confront the “just-this-once” behavior before it collapses into outright personal destruction. For an addicted human civilization, though, who will intervene?

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via Wikimedia Commons.

When those cannons fail, we see unfortunate accidents like the one this past summer in Alberta when some 500 ducks were killed after landing in a tailings pond. Toxic tailing ponds result in 8,000 to 100,000 oiled and drowned birds annually.

Authors of the report suggest that an immediate solution to the unsustainable pace of development and to environmental problems relating to tar sands oil development is a moratorium on all new projects, project expansions, and to clean up existing projects.

For Canada to take the kind of substantive action necessary to prevent the ecological damage suggested by this report, it may require international pressure; the kind of pressure that could be applied by a renegotiated NAFTA that strengthens environmental laws, something that president-elect Obama has suggested he would like to see.

Images courtesy of: 1. & 3. David Dodge/Pembina Institute; 2. & 4. D. Faucher/Ducks Unlimited; 5. Sun Media Corp.; 6. Jeff Nadler