“Drowning in oil”
First and foremost and not about anything in the title: happy Mother’s Day! I wasn’t sure if I should write another mom appreciation post, since I wrote one just last year (which is so weird to think about; it feels like ages ago now), and I feel the same way I do about my mom now as I did then, just more. So I’ll condense it a little bit: happy Mother’s Day, mom! I love you. You’re an incredible, caring, beautiful, compassionate, kind, intelligent, amazing woman, and you’re the best mom I could hope to ask for. You’ve helped me out more times than I can imagine, and just this week you helped me edit three final essays despite the fact that the world seems to be imploding around you (sorry about the essays). You take care of so many other people all the time, and it’s so inspiring, but I wish I could help you take care of yourself, too, because you deserve a break and you deserve to live your life more than just helping others. You’re so selfless making sure everyone else is ok, you barely have time to make sure that you’re ok. And I’m sorry I can’t do more to help ease that burden from you.
You’re such an incredible person, and everyone I know who knows you says that you’re one of the best people they’ve ever met, and there’s a reason for that. Things get tough sometimes, and you’re allowed to feel how you do. I’m sorry I’m not always there to talk to you about it, but I love you and hope that I can help you in as many ways as you’ve helped me. You deserve every good thing that comes your way, and none of the multiple bad things that do. But you still greet all those problems with a smile and a can-do attitude, and that’s something that I wish I could learn for myself. I love you, mom. Happy Mother’s Day.
Yay! It’s not much in the way of a Mother’s Day celebration, but it’s something. And speaking of Mother’s Day, something I keep hearing tossed around is that, for Mother’s Day, we ought to be thanking and celebrating our Mother Earth, too, and I think that’s a pretty good sentiment. But I also think it’s misplaced for the same reason that I think Earth Day is misplaced; right idea, but wrong time. Caring for and understanding the value and impact of the natural environment is something that shouldn’t happen on just one day (not unlike Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, I suppose), but something that’s necessary for us to consider every day, in every decision we make. Everything we do is tied back to the Earth in some way. Every piece of trash we throw out, every piece of food we eat, all that we touch, all that we take, all that we buy, beg, borrow, or steal, et cetera et cetera, it’s all from the Earth and all returns to the Earth. And, frankly, as a society, America has not been great about this. And we are still not great. But it isn’t just America. For once, let’s talk about Canada.
Canada is a weird country when it comes to environmentalism. Our neighbors to the north make great promises at all the climate agreements and such, and they’re really good at posturing about how much they’re going to do to help the environment, and how crucial renewable energy and environmental protections are to the future of the planet, but Justin Trudeau is also more than happy for pay for the construction of new oil pipelines straight out of his country’s pocket. But you know why they’re so eager to get those fossil fuel pipelines built? Because they can connect them to one of the largest existing oil reserves in the world; the Alberta Tar Sands. And getting that sweet, sweet crude oil is one of the single most destructive extractive processes in the history of oil production.
Tar sands, or oil sands, aren’t like other oil deposits. They’re relatively rare, with major deposits only really appearing in Canada, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Venezuela, but about 70% of those proven tar sands reserves are in Alberta, but the oil isn’t really a liquid. It’s mixture of sand, clay, rocks, and sticky black tar, kind of like warm asphalt, called bitumen. It’s an absolute pain the ass to collect and turn into something more refined; you either have to scrape out the entire layer for processing or pump superheated water into the earth just to collect it, and then to separate it and pump you’ve got to dilute the bitumen with a slew of toxic chemicals. It requires something like millions of gallons of water and millions of dollars of upfront cost. And that’s before it gets the refinery. It’s stupid expensive and stupid complicated to do, so why do people even bother? I’ll tell you why; Alberta alone has somewhere between 1 and 70 billion barrels of oil. That’s likely several billions of dollar in profit right there, and it’s up for grabs.
Except… it isn’t up for grabs. Most of the tar sands mining operations, or the remaining proven reserves, sit on First Nations lands, or the indigenous territories designated by the government of Canada where native peoples retain their rights to live off of and use the land as they so choose. Now, I’ve talked a little bit about what I know about indigenous peoples, at least in writing, and although I’m not Native American in any way, and my experiences discussing such matters with actual native peoples are limited to the class I took last fall, I know a little bit about the situation going on up there in Canada. And it’s not really pretty. See, Canada’s got a nasty track record when it comes to how they’ve treated indigenous peoples, only a step above what the United States has done (genocide), but the First Nations today seem to have a slightly stronger relationship with the Canadian government than US-based tribes have with the American government. Though the First Nations communities still tend to live in some of the poorest regions of Canada, without the same support systems are other people in Canada, and things like health and infrastructure are lacking thanks to a history of oppression and underrepresentation, to say the least. So what are they to do when a huge oil company comes along and offers millions of dollars in the form of payments and direct support in return for the ability to mine their land? It’s a hard deal to pass up. And sometimes, thanks to pressure from Canada’s government, they don’t have a choice anyway.
I can’t pretend to know what process the First Nations went through when they decided to allow the development of the oil sands, or even if they were consulted at all before development started (because breaking treaties to get to oil and/or a geopolitical goal is absolutely something a government would do), but it’s a hard challenge to parse out now, because for some of those communities, a vast majority of their economic development is reliant on tar sands. But, in general, the consensus now seems to be that native peoples want a moratorium placed on future tar sands development, while keeping the existing ones in place to try and find solutions that avoid the devastating economic fallout those communities would suffer if the tar sand shuttered completely.
Why do they want development stopped, though? Well, besides the fact that these industries are directly contributing to the continued existence of the fossil fuel regime and the greenhouse gas-spewing energy system the world uses, these tar sands mining operations usually require the leveling of entire forests. If all the tar sands were mined, it would be like clear-cutting the state of Wisconsin. And poisoning all the water to boot; some estimates propose that 95% of the water used in the tar sands extractive process is too polluted to be returned to the environment, and studies have found that priority pollutants found in waterways near the tar sands mines exceed legal levels set by the government of Canada and the US. It’s literally The Lorax, but instead of making goofy wool shirts, its crude oil, and instead of displacing little bears and geese, it’s people. Oh, and these mining sites also tend to see increases in rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Because everything gets worse when oil’s involved.
What does this have to do with the US, though? Because, after all, it seems like everything leads back to the good ol’ U-S-of-A at the end of the day. This country’s got its fingers in every damn barrel of oil, anyway. Well, there’s the thing; just like every war in the last forty years or so, if it’s got oil, it’s got US involvement. All the crude that’s being mined out of the ground and pumped through those fancy new pipes that Trudeau wants to build? Yeah, it’s going to the United States. Sometimes it even goes to Illinois! Which is a fact I hate! Yeah, in case you couldn’t tell, let me make my biases abundantly clear; while I’m relying on established facts about all this to build my opinion, I’m very anti-oil. That, uh, has probably been clear for a while now. But I’m also very anti-pipeline, too, for the reason that oil partially fuels the climate crisis (along with a bevy of racial injustices), and pipelines funnel the oil around. I hate pipelines. All my homies hate pipelines.
One particular pipeline I dislike (though there are many) is the Line 3 expansion pipeline, which you can read about on the Minnesota government’s website here, or read about on the dedicated anti-Line 3 pipeline website here. It’s a pipeline that transports those tar sands I talked about from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin, and the propose pipeline happens to be crossing through territories included in some treaties that United States government signed with indigenous peoples, specifically the Anishinaabe, years ago. The biggest reason for opposition is, of course, the limited lifetime of oil and tar sands, as we’re seeing the ever-growing existential threat of climate change push us towards renewable energy anyway. It’s profitable now, but it won’t be forever, and it shouldn’t be profitable now. Keeping this shit up isn’t ok when are there are better solutions out there. But the other problem with pipelines is that they leak. They leak like a motherfucker.
Sure, the energy companies like to say that their pipes are safer now, much safer than shipping by truck or train, and maybe that’s true, but they still leak. Line 3 is being constructed by Enbridge Energy, a company that seems pretty innocuous because no one knows who they are. They’re no BP or Shell or Exxon when it comes to brand recognition, but damn have they got the oil spills to put them up there with the big boys. It’s no Deepwater Horizon or Exxon-Valdez, but the largest inland oil spill in US history occurred in 1991 on the original Line 3, the pipeline that Enbridge is now trying to replace. And perhaps the second largest inland oil spill also belongs to Enbridge, on a different pipe of theirs. They do not have a good record with this stuff. Plus, forget about the big spills, these pipes leak anyway; oil seeps into the ground, contaminating both the surface water and the ground water, poisoning plants and animals along the entire run of the pipe. And considering that this new Line 3 pipe is proposed to run through untouched wetlands and Anishinaabe territory, what do you think’s going to happen when it spills? Because it’s not when, but if.
So this pipeline sucks. I hate it. Hopefully you hate it, too. Hopefully you’re as outraged as I am that some massive corporation is going to willy-nilly try to extend the lifeline of a dying industry by building faulty and environmentally dangerous infrastructure that flies in the face of existing legal treaties and threatens the safety and livelihoods of indigenous peoples. But what is there to do? What can we do? Well, I’m glad you asked because, actually, there’s a lot we can do. Allow me to direct you to the experts, the indigenous peoples on the frontlines of this fight, to answer that question. They’ve got info about signing petitions, sending letters to your elected officials, sending donations and resources to the frontline (where the direct action, like protests and sit-ins and shutting down the pump stations, is happening), and even information about going to the frontlines to help out the protests there. I, personally, hope to try and go there at some point and lend my hands. And, alternatively, here’s another thing you can do if you’re so inclined: change banks.
One of the more indirect, but still effective, ways you can help stop Line 3, and other pipeline projects, is to hit them where it hurts; right in the bell sacks. Major banks (namely Citi Bank, Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America, among others) tend to fund these projects with peoples funds as a way of making money on investments. As my third grade teacher explained, the money in your bank account isn’t static; it’s put to work on investments, and those investments raise money for things like compound interest and cocaine for bank executives. But unfortunately, those investments tend to be shady as fuck. Case in point, Line 3 receives several billions of dollars from each bank I just listed, sometimes to the tune of ten billion dollars. And they’re expecting to make a profit. So if you don’t want your money funding projects like that, close your accounts and be sure to tell them why. Move your money to another bank, maybe a local one, and protest the massive ones funding these projects. I was lucky enough to participate in a protest at Urbana’s Chase Bank with my own Line 3 affinity group, and I don’t know if any Chase employees even saw us, but people on the street did, and that’s more what matters. Raising awareness.
So, that’s kind of it in a nutshell. I don’t like tar sands, I don’t like pipelines, and I hope, now, you don’t either. I’m not going to pretend there aren’t benefits to pipelines, but I’m also not going to talk about them here, because I don’t believe the benefits outweigh the downsides in any meaningful way, and I think they’re irrelevant anyway in the face of a necessary shift to renewable resources. Shit is wack, man. Those tar sands tear up the earth, and those pipelines carry it all away, doing so much damage all along the line. If we ever want to have a chance at averting the worst of climate change, or even someday reversing the damage we’ve done, we have to start somewhere, and dismantling the fossil fuel industry, while upholding the rights of indigenous peoples and the sanctity of healthy land and water, is as good a place to start as any. We need to kill the black snake that is covering this earth, to borrow a phrase from the movement, and for my money, I’m going to follow the lead of indigenous peoples. It’s their land, and we’re just living on it. But we can all be good stewards. There’s so much more that I can do. That we can all do.
Oh, yeah, one last note; I’ve been planning this article for a while, but I think it’s funny that it happened to coincide with that huge ransomware attack on that already-established pipeline out east. I know what they did was illegal, and could disrupt peoples’ lives (and thankfully no one was hurt), but part of me was hoping it was some sort of radical environmental group trying to send a message about the vulnerabilities of the fossil fuel energy structure. Nope, turns out it’s just some maybe-Russian-maybe-not cybercriminal ring that makes money by extorting corporations. Which, ya know, fuck the corporations, but it isn’t even environmental now, it’s just a business thing. Is it weird to say that I’m disappointed it didn’t do more damage to that corporation, though, or that it wasn’t a protest thing? Obviously it’s more complicated than just an attack on a pipeline; it’s an attack on infrastructure and could be signs of bigger things to come; it isn’t that difficult to shut off entire power grids with cyber attacks. And no one was physically hurt this time, but that doesn’t mean it won’t always be the case, if a group hacks a hospital or something. That would be terrible. America needs stronger cyberdefenses. Everyone does. But this is a fossil fuel corporation so… Eh, fuck ’em, Colonial Pipelines or whatever they are. Corporations aren’t people. This is also a good reason why we need an energy grid that’s more resistant to attacks like that, too; an energy grid, perhaps, that’s decentralized and sustainable and relies on a series of power sources that cater to each region’s individual needs, instead of one giant oil blob in a metal tube? But that’s a story for another day…
#StopLine3
I love all
Of this blog, but especially the first few paragraphs! 😉 love you!