Nix will be joined by dozens of people near White Rock, British Columbia on May 5. They will be in good company as tens of thousands of people around the world participate in global day of action to "connect the dots" between climate change and extreme weather. 

"There will be at least 1,200 actions in more than 100 countries," says Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, a U.S.-based environmental group. 

There's been a general perception that climate change is a future problem but with all the extreme weather disasters and weather records the public is being to realise that climate change is here, says Henn. 

"Recent opinion surveys show the more than 60 percent of the U.S. public are connecting extreme weather to climate change," Henn told IPS. 

The U.S. public is not wrong, say scientists. 

"All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be," Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, told IPS previously. 

Last year the U.S. endured 14 separate billion-dollar-plus weather disasters including flooding, hurricanes and tornados. 

This year, most of the U.S. and Canada experienced summer in winter with record-shattering heat waves in March. More than 15,000 temperature records were broken in the U.S. which had its first billion-dollar weather disaster of the year. In most places, the spring month of April was colder than March. 

"What kind of future are we leaving for our children if we keep putting more carbon into the atmosphere?" asks Nix. 

As a former scientist who used to work for the oil industry in Canada's tar sands, he has a pretty good idea of what's ...

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of ...

TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline permit hangs in the balance, up for a potential Senate vote this week, having already passed the House as part of the Transportation Bill last week. Other companies, meanwhile, are wasting no time pushing their own respective tar sands pipeline proposals while that drama unfolds.

Last week, DeSmogBlog noted that for example, Oneok is pushing a pipeline proposal that would bring oil and gas obtained via the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale down to “the pipeline crossroads of the world” in Cushing, OK, where it would be refined and sent further southward to Port Arthur, TX and then shipped off to the global export market.

Now yet another key tar sands export pipeline is in the works, this one making a voyage to New England: the Enbridge Line 9 Reversal pipeline.

Enter Enbridge’s Line 9 Pipeline

Enbridge, overseer of the controversial proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline which would send tar sands crude westward from Alberta, Calgary to Kitimat, B.C., has yet another pipeline in the works: the already existing Line 9 Pipeline.

Line 9 currently takes oil Middle Eastern/African oil ...

The controversy over TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline has raged on for years now, with no end in sight.

The Keystone XL pipeline would carry tar sands crude from the tar sands epicenter of the world in Alberta, Canada, take it down to Cushing, OK, and then eventually down to Port Arthur, TX, where it will be refined and placed on the lucrative oil export market.

While Republicans continue to try to make Keystone XL a campaign issue, President Obama has officially put the fate of the pipeline on the backburner until after the November 2012 U.S. elections.

But this has not stopped other key pipelines and pipeline extensions from being built "in the meantime, in between time," as the song lyrics made famous by the classic novel, The Great Gatsby, go.

Most ...

Americans’ long-term savings in stocks, bonds, pension, life insurance, and mutual funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touches local small businesses, the source of half the economy’s jobs and output. Is it possible to beat Wall Street’s 5 percent long-term performance by investing in your community? The answer is a resounding yes!

Co-op members who lent to the Weaver Street Market in North Carolina and to the Seward Co-op in Minneapolis earned well over 5 percent per year. Many outside investors who bought preferred shares of the Coulee Region Organic Producers Pool, a co-op of organic farmers, are still receiving an annual dividend of 6 percent. Equal Exchange has paid a dividend to its preferred shareholders averaging above 5 percent for 22 years. Investors who participate in New Markets Tax Credits automatically get a tax credit equal to 5 percent of their capital for each of the first three years and 6 percent for the next four—even if the investment generates ...

As the Senate debates the merits of the Canadian government's newly-passed omnibus crime bill, organizations across the country have raised serious issues with the legislation, particularly when it comes to amendments relating to the treatment of young offenders.

"The course we were on for young people was working, was contributing to public safety. There isn't evidence to show that putting more young people in jails, for lesser crimes, for longer periods of time, works," said Kathy Vandergrift, chair of the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children (CCRC).

"We have too many young people falling through the cracks of fragmented support systems across provincial lines. Paying attention to that, we argue, would be a better investment and a much better contribution to public safety," she added.

Tabled as the "Safe Streets and Communities Act", or Bill C-10, the new crime legislation was passed in the Canadian House of Commons on Dec. 5, 2011. It bundles together nine separate bills on issues ranging from migrants entering Canada to organized crime and child sexual exploitation.

Among other provisions, the law would increase mandatory minimum sentences and pre-trial detention, instate harsher prison sentencing for young offenders and longer wait times for individuals applying for pardons, and make it more difficult for Canadians detained abroad to serve the remainder of their sentence at home.

According to Vandergrift, some components of Bill C-10 contradict Canada's responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the state's obligations to protect the privacy of youth offenders, and to prioritize the well-being of children above all else.

"We would like to see Part 4 (of Bill C-10), which deals with the youth criminal justice system, taken out of the bill and discussed separately. Youth justice should be substantially ...

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

READ FULL POST 10 COMMENTS

The Obama administration's decision Wednesday to reject a pipeline that would have carried crude from Canada’s tar sands deposits to Texas oil refineries isn’t likely to end investment in the carbon-rich fuel, industry analysts say.

In killing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama blamed congressional Republicans, who he said “forced this decision” by requiring an expedited 60-day review of the pipeline as a provision of the recent payroll tax extension.

Obama also reaffirmed his support for domestic oil and gas exploration and expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. “In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security,” he said.

But industry analysts question this rationale. “If your objective is improving our energy security, then Keystone should have been built,” said Sarah Emerson, president of Energy Security Analysis, Inc., an energy forecasting firm.

Environmentalists have reason to temper their excitement over the pipeline's defeat. They opposed pipeline builder TransCanada's project because of fears about spills and the climate-change implications of refining tar sands, which give off more carbon dixoide than traditional crude oil. But Obama threw his support behind additional U.S. drilling. And analysts say production of tar sands in Canada will continue.

“Is it a setback? Yes,” Emerson said. “Does it spell the end of the oil sands development? No.”

She predicts that America’s northern neighbor will go forward with a stalled pipeline to its Pacific coast. “I suspect that [Canada looks] at this as a ...

A provision attached to the recent payroll tax bill requires President Barack Obama to decide by Feb. 21 on the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States.

But even if the administration rejects the project, it may not be enough to kill it, industry analysts said. Americans' thirst for oil probably will push the administration and TransCanada Corp., the pipeline's sponsor, to find a way to transport Canadian crude across the United States even if it's not through a pipeline called Keystone XL, industry analysts said.

"We think it will be built," said Jamie Webster, senior manager for markets at PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm. "The interesting bit is, what is 'it'? The future of the pipeline could go a couple of different ways."

TransCanada said it had already started to work with Nebraska authorities to find an alternative route. Once one has been determined, the environmental review could take about nine months, TransCanada said.

Over the next six weeks, TransCanada could pull the Keystone application to avoid deepening the political fight over the permit and submit it later with a new route through Nebraska, said Frank Verrastro, director of energy and national security at the Center for ...

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review.  (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.)  Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had ...

The new Great Hope for job creation in Washington is the Keystone Pipeline, a plan to create a pipeline that would transport oil from Alberta, Canada, as far as New Orleans. According to the Republican leadership and other proponents of the pipeline, it is expected to create 20,000 jobs in construction and supplier industries.

There have questions raised about this number by the State Department, which must approve the pipeline, and other analysts. It seems that this 20,000 number refers to “job years,” not jobs. This means that if a construction worker is employed for two years working on the pipeline, she would count as holding two jobs in the 20,000 jobs number. The number of jobs created at a point in time would likely be closer to half of this figure, perhaps less than 10,000.

It’s also likely that many of these jobs will go to Canadians. This is good for them, but beside the point if the goal is to create jobs for people in the United States.

But even 10,000 jobs would be better than nothing, the question is how much better? Without some context the public is not well-positioned to assess the economic argument for the pipeline.

One basis of comparison is the economy’s normal rate of job creation. Back in the late 1990s the economy created 3 million jobs a year for four years. At this pace, the jobs created by Keystone ...

The world is increasingly committed to dangerous levels of global warming with yet another failure by nations of the world to agree to needed reductions in carbon emissions here in Durban. However, as the 17th Conference of Parties ended early Sunday morning, members did agree to talk about a new global treaty to reduce emissions.

After two weeks and an additional 29 hours of intense and even bitter negotiations, the 193 nations participating in the United Nations climate talks agreed to a complex and technical set of documents called the "Durban Platform." These include the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol, a formal structure for a Green Climate Fund, new market mechanisms, and more. 

The biggest development reached at dawn Sunday is an agreement to negotiate a new global treaty to reduce emissions by 2015. While this may look like simply agreeing to more meetings, it is the first time all nations have agreed to be governed by a new global emission reduction treaty under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Currently the promised emission reductions by industrialized countries and those of China, Brazil, South Africa, India and others under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord guarantee a world that is at least 3.5 degrees Celsius warmer on average according to climate science. It will be double that over large parts of ...

The Obama Administration’s recent decision to delay the approval process for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline has shifted attention to alternate routes for bringing a glut of tar sands oil in Canada to refineries and ports abroad.

Last week, Canadian firms bought up thousands of miles of existing pipeline in the U.S. Midwest, intending to reverse oil flows southward to Gulf Coast refineries – a “workaround” that would get oil flowing in the right direction, but still not enough to accommodate the volume of crude being produced.

A second – lesser known -- alternative involves piping tar sands oil westward across Canada to Vancouver, where it would reach West Coast refineries by tanker. California, which up until now has remained out of the fray in the fight over tar sands oil, would be key to such a northern pacific route.

“California is the prize,” said Greg Karras, senior scientist with Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment. “It’s where the [Canadian tar sands] industry is going. They have this gigantic reserve of fundamentally dirtier oil that they want to exploit, sitting above the best refining country in the world.”

The Golden State is well-positioned to take in tar sands oil, a heavier, lower quality crude that requires intensive processing, Karras said. Its oil refineries, in the last few years, have undergone upgrades to process heavier crude, and the state’s ports provide an easy gateway to Asia.

California’s sources of crude from within the state and Alaska are dwindling, leading to increased reliance on imports of heavier forms of crude to meet demand. The state currently imports half of its crude from the Middle East and Latin America, according to Karras, and that number could grow to three-fourths in the next 10 years.

Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-director of the UC Energy ...

The bursting to life of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the most hopeful development in American politics since Barack Obama was elected president three years ago this month. Obama's election has turned out to be largely a false hope. But that false hope might still be redeemed - and the president motivated to become the reformer he once pledged to be - if the Occupy movement grows into the kind of massive, broad-based, relentless movement no president can afford to ignore.

Already, the Occupy Wall Street website claims that the movement has spread to 100 cities in the United States and inspired sympathy actions in 1,500 cities around the world. Momentum appears to be building in other ways as well. Activists in other progressive movements - environment, labour, anti-poverty and housing - are beginning to collaborate with Occupy. TV commercials are airing on mainstream media outlets, even Fox News, spreading Occupy's message that the US political and economic system is rigged in favour of the top one per cent. And opinion polls are indicating that a sizeable majority of Americans agree with this analysis, though there seems to be less support for the Occupy activists themselves.

The latest big protest targeted the White House itself, when an estimated 12,000 people physically surrounded the home of the US president last Sunday to urge rejection of a ...

On Sunday, November 6, thousands of people encircled the White House as part of the ongoing effort to press US President Barack Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. If the nearly 1,700-mile pipeline were to be built, it would run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, through the heartland of the US, all the way to the Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico. Should the project go ahead, Obama will have made one of the single most disastrous decisions of his presidency concerning climate change and the very future of our planet.

In August, some 1,250 people were arrested in front of the White House while protesting against Keystone. One of them was James Hanson, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been studying for decades the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. Hanson argues that the pipeline would sound the death knell for the world’s climate. Oil from the tar sands of Alberta is the dirtiest in the world, and its extraction is already causing problems. If Keystone is built, there will be increased efforts to expand oil production there, making a bad situation much worse.

Opposition to the pipeline throughout the US is growing in intensity – from the activists arrested in Washington, DC, to the governor of Nebraska, who is seeking state legislation to stop the pipeline from running through America’s biggest aquifer, to members of the US Congress, who have petitioned Obama about the project. The outpouring of opposition surprised the oil industry, its highly paid lobbyists, and especially TransCanada Corporation, which would build the pipeline. So, like many huge corporations facing public criticism, they and their allies are responding with a dubious new marketing effort.

"Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Jody ...

Support for ObamaCare has fallen to just 34 percent of the American public, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent tracking poll.  That’s down from 41 percent in just one month.

Can’t say I’m surprised. Just as they did during the debate on health care reform in 2009 and 2010, the special interests who profit from the status quo have been winning the messaging battle in their ongoing effort to scare people away from the new law. They have a well-planned and executed strategy to mislead people so thoroughly they will vote next year for candidates who promise to repeal the law, even if that means they will be voting against their own best interests. The strategy of the law’s backers—if indeed there is one —is simply not working.

One reason reform advocates cite for the decline in support:  relentless attacks on the law by GOP presidential candidates, especially during those free-for-all debates. At one of the recent get-togethers, Newt Gingrich even resurrected the biggest of the big lies —  that the law creates government-run death plans that will decide when to pull the plug on sick Medicare beneficiaries. Supporters can’t expect debate moderators to challenge the candidates on such baseless accusations, and they don’t have comparable forums to communicate how the law is helping millions of Americans. At least not yet.

Another factor in falling support for ObamaCare is that opponents are outdueling  supporters in placement of op-ed commentaries and letters to the editor. While I haven’t seen detailed analyses of the op-ed placement war, my own observation, as someone who reads a lot of newspapers, is that the critics have gotten way more ink than the ...

On a sunny, cloudless day, thousands of protesters encircled the White House Sunday in a show of numbers intended to persuade President Barack Obama to stop a proposed oil pipeline from being built.

The Keystone XL pipeline would stretch 1,661 miles from Alberta, Canada, to Texas' Gulf Coast and requires a presidential permit because it crosses the U.S.-Canada border. Environmentalists say the project is a key test of Obama's green credentials.

Wearing orange vests with the message "Stop the pipeline #noXL," protesters first heard from prominent environmentalists, a preacher, a Nobel laureate, and a movie star, and then gathered to hold hands in a ring that stretched in front of the White House and several blocks down side streets before joining up behind the White House lawn. Organizers estimated that the crowd exceeded 10,000 people.

"You can't occupy the White House, but you can surround it," said environmentalist and protest organizer Bill McKibben in a reference to the Occupy Wall Street movements spreading around the country.

With the failure of climate change legislation on Capitol Hill last year, environmentalists have made stopping the Keystone pipeline their major focus in recent months. They want the president to reject the pipeline because of the risks of spills and what they say is the likely ...

In Washington, D.C., conference rooms, the proposed pipeline running from Alberta, Canada, to Texas refineries on the Gulf of Mexico may look rather attractive. The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline would supply the United States with abundant crude from a friendly neighbor. It would create 20,000 jobs, says owner TransCanada. And it would be reasonably safe for the environment, according to a U.S.  READ FULL POST 7 COMMENTS

The top and the bottom of the list of countries in Newsweek’s recent cover story, “The 2011 Global Women’s Progress Report,” evoke images of two different worlds.

At the top of the list – the “Best Places to be a Woman” – we see the usual suspects: Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada. On that planet, we see rankings in the upper 90’s for the survey’s five categories: justice, health, education, economics, and politics. Women are out-earning men in college degrees (United States), domestic abusers are being banned from their homes and tracked with electronic monitors (Turkey), and female prime ministers are being elected (Denmark and Australia).

Now look at the ...

More than 200 Canadians engaged in civil disobedience, with 117 arrested in Canada’s quiet capital city on Monday. The reason? To protest the Stephen Harper right-wing government’s open support for the oil industry and expanding production in the climate-disrupting tar sands.

The normally placid and polite Canadians shouted, waved banners and demanded the closure of the multi-billion-dollar tar sands oil extraction projects in northern Alberta to protect the global climate and the health of local people and environment.

“People are here because they know that if we don’t turn away from the tar sands and fossil fuels soon it will be too late,” Peter McHugh, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Canada, told IPS.

“The tar sands are unsustainable. Canadians are willing to shift away from fossil fuels but our government isn’t,” Gabby Ackett a university student and protester, told IPS as she stood in front of a long line of police.

In what was proudly touted as “civil” civil disobedience, protesters aged 19 to 84 were arrested for using a step-stool to climb a low barrier separating them from the House of Commons, the seat of Canadian government. The police were friendly and accommodating because the organizers had promised there would be no violence.

“We live downstream and see the affects of tar sands pollution on the fish and the birds,” said George Poitras, a former chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation in northern Alberta.

“Some our young people have rare forms of cancer,” Poitras told more than 500 protesters.

“Expanding the tar sands is not the way to go in a world struggling with climate change,” he said.

Carbon emissions from the tar sands production have increased 300 percent since 1990 and, at 45 to 50 million tons annually, are greater than most countries. And that does not include the carbon contained in the oil ...

Several months ago, John Stansbury, a soft-spoken professor from Omaha, Neb., took his 12-year-old grandson to a public meeting to discuss Keystone XL, the proposed mega-pipeline that would carry oil from Canada across his home state to the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Stansbury knew almost nothing about the pipeline and had never done anything particularly political. “I'm not really an activist,” he says, a bit sheepishly. But he wanted his grandson to “see democracy at work.”

The 61-year-old civil engineer also happens to be an expert in the transport of hazardous materials. And as he learned more about Keystone XL, he saw a disaster in the making. After the meeting, Stansbury began poring over official risk assessments of the pipeline and thought they grossly underestimated the probability of a spill. He was so troubled that he did something he’s never done before—he courted media attention. He drafted an independent report on the pipeline, asked the organization Friends of the Earth to help announce his findings, and held a press conference. He predicts the pipeline could have approximately 91 significant spills over the next 50 years—eight times as many as the energy company TransCanada estimated.

Keystone XL has enough strikes against it to turn political neophytes like Stansbury into first-time activists, and to compel some unusual alliances between conservatives and progressives. ...

What does it mean to live in an energy sacrifice zone? For many First Nations of Canada, it means that the land and water your families have lived on for generations is no longer safe. Nearly every major oil company in the world is participating in making the homelands of indigenous peoples unsafe by investing in the Athabascan tar sands.

In what is called by the Environmental Defense Fund the “world’s most destructive project,” an area the size of Florida is slated for various forms of mining. Locked up in sand, clay, and bitumen, tar sands oil is one of the hardest to mine and refine and is also one of the dirtiest: extracting it creates three times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil. Mining the tar sands means not only deforestation but also the creation of massive lagoons filled with toxic wastewater. These ponds are leaking 11 million liters of toxic water each day and by 2012 are expected to leak 72 million liters a day.

The project’s carbon footprint is global. Mining the tar sands requires special equipment that is manufactured in Korea, shipped across the ocean, and barged through Portland, Oregon, up the Columbia and Snake Rivers through the Nez Perce reservation and on to Idaho. The current plan is to haul it on massive trucks to northern Alberta. American highways have never seen trucks of this size, and the haul will require major modifications to roadways along the way.

Oil giant TransCanada hopes to expand the project even further by building a pipeline that will pump dirty oil from northern Alberta, across the headwaters of major rivers, and down to the Gulf of Mexico where special refineries exist to handle the lower-grade oil. The pipeline, named Keystone XL, is expected to actually raise gas prices in the states it crosses because the refined oil will have to be shipped back up from the Gulf. This rise will be the equivalent of a “$4-billion-a-year tax on oil we already get from ...