Tar Sands Public Meeting
| When? | Friday 20th February 2009 |
| Where? | CUBE, Portland Street, Manchester |
| Why? | To highlight the damage that extraction of tar sands in Canada is doing to the local environment, indigenous people and climate change... |
On Friday 20th February, we popped into CUBE on Portland Street at the weekend to see a lawyer. Not your normal evening out in Manchester, but Jack Woodward is Canada's top aboriginal lawyer, and the Legal Council for the Beaver Lake Cree Nation of Alberta.
For over an hour he held his audience rapt whilst he talked about the beaver and the moose, the martens and the birds, and the relationship between the hunters and fishermen of the Cree people and their natural eco-system. And how the whole lot is being destroyed because their traditional lands sit on "tar sands".
Tar sands are exactly what they sound like – huge mineral deposits of sand, laced with organic tars. However, they are now becoming the front line in the battle against climate change. The Canadian national and regional government and private industry is sinking millions of Canadian dollars into setting up industrial extraction of these tars so they can be processed into oils and fossil fuels.
This is unlike the traditional methods of drilling for oil however. All the methods of extraction so far have involved clear felling the forest, draining natural watercourses and in most cases open-cast mining the sands – to devastating effect. Worse, once extracted the sands need to be washed and processed locally to extract the oil – resulting in lagoons of contaminated water the size of lakes, in dumps so large they are visible from space, with no plans in place to handle or deal with any of it.
Most frustrating of all, whilst the process does result in usable fossil fuel, the huge amount of energy that has to be put in to extract it is almost as great as the energy it contains. At the moment our economy and those of most of the developed world are still dependant on fossil fuels. But burning this kind of fossil fuel is the worst kind of energy economics.
Jack Woodward was here in Manchester because he is suing the Canadian Government. He is demanding that the Cree Nation's constitutional right to hunt and fish undisturbed on their traditional land is respected and he is asking for our support. He already has some important backers - he was in Manchester as part of a UK wide tour as a guest of the Co-operative Group and Manchester Friends of the Earth. Should he win, it is anticipated that extraction of tar sand fossil fuels in the Beaver Lake area will come to a halt - and he has a track record of winning.
Let's all hope he wins.
More information
Find out more
about the impact of tar sand extraction on The
Co-operative's website.
Read the WWF
/ Co-operative report "Unconventional
Oil: Scraping the bottom of the barrel" (PDF, 2 MB).
Take action!
Ask your
MP to sign Early
Day Motion 1250, which calls on the
Government to require all UK-listed companies in the oil, gas and power
sectors to report on their total carbon liabilities.
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