Environmental Groups

B.C.’s only Green MLA doesn’t think that a new oil refinery on the West Coast is a bad idea. To the contrary, Andrew Weaver is convinced that the brainchild of newspaper publisher David Black makes sense. “Do I think David Black’s proposal has merit? I do. I think it’s being proposed for the right reasons,” Weaver told the Straight in a phone interview.

VANCOUVER — The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has accused Canadian law enforcement agencies of needlessly spying on environmental groups opposed to oil projects in the province, which it says may even amount to illegal activity by authorities.

After years of conflict that featured blockades and market boycotts, environmental groups and the forest industry have finally agreed on what can be logged and what must be protected in B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest. A detailed plan has gone forward to the provincial government and 27 First Nations that reside in the area. If approved by those entities, it will lead to the protection of 70 per cent of the land base in a rugged coastal region that covers 6.4 million hectares on the mainland coast.

Nuance. Nikolas Barry-Shaw and I heard that word in many difference Canadian cities we visited on our book tour. Our book argued that government-funded "Non-Governmental Organizations" are not just prone to dragging their feet politically, but are actually playing an active role in manufacturing consent for neoliberal policies and imperial military occupations.

WASHINGTON — Environmentalists have spent the past two years fighting the Keystone XL pipeline: They have built a human chain around the White House, clogged the State Department’s public comment system with more than a million emails and letters, and gotten themselves arrested at protests across the country. But as bad as they argue the 1,700-mile pipeline would be for the planet, Keystone XL has been a boon to the environmental movement.

Same techno-fix message from Greenpeace - all that is needed is investment in clean technologies...

A mind-boggling sum of about US$ 800 for each person on the planet is invested into fossil fuel companies through the global capital markets alone. That’s roughly 10% of the total capital invested in listed companies. The amount of money invested into the 200 biggest fossil fuel companies through financial markets is estimated at US$ 5.5 trillion.

A ferment in the environmental movement, brewing for many years, has now bubbled up into the blogosphere. We are dipping our ladle in here to take a little taste of it, even though we are quite certain it is not done fermenting. Bill McKibben has been stirring the wort of whether social activism can save us for many years. In Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, as in The End of Nature a quarter century earlier, he poignantly waffled, in elegant prose, between hope and despair.

Every day, the news about climate change and the harms that are sure to accompany it gets worse and worse. To many environmentalists, the answer is simple: power shift. That is, shift from fossil fuels to clean, green, renewable, alternative energy. Well-meaning concerned citizens and activists have jumped on the bandwagon.

As environmentalists began ratcheting up pressure against Canada's tar sands three years ago, one of the world's biggest strategic consulting firms was tapped to help the North American oil industry figure out how to handle the mounting activism. The resulting document, published online by WikiLeaks, offers another window into how oil and gas companies have been scrambling to deal with unrelenting opposition to their growth plans.

In the Austin, Texas-based office of global intelligence firm Stratfor, the "Shadow CIA", a curious string of names from BC were being mentioned as part of an oil sands presentation. West Coast Environmental Law. Dogwood Initiative. Environmental Defence. They were among 24 groups identified by Stratfor as leaders in the anti-tar sands push. The presentation was prepared by Stratfor in 2010, when North America's oil industry was mulling over how to deal with the growing anti-tar sands movement.