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More than 100 to Protest RBC Shareholder Meeting
Media Releases | Rainforest Action Network | February 25, 2010
A nation with a deep environmental awareness pursues a destructive policy.
Some of my proudest moments over the course of my hockey career came from the opportunity to represent my country in three Olympics. The Canadians were fierce rivals then, and they still are today.
Canada is known for its winters — and for terrific hockey players, skiers and snowboarders. So it’s fitting that the Winter Olympics are being held this year in Vancouver.
The country is also a paradise of rich natural resources kept that way by deep environmental awareness and responsible policies. But while Canada has immersed itself in the excitement of the Winter Games, the country is also pursuing an energy policy that could have a huge impact on winter sports by accelerating global climate change.
The Canadian province of Alberta is home to a form of oil that is considered the dirtiest on earth. It’s called the oil sands, and each barrel creates three times the global-warming pollution of conventional oil. That’s a staggering amount of carbon.
In fact, oil sands are now the fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution in Canada. To make matters worse, producing this dirty oil requires clearcutting giant swaths of ancient forest, sucking up water from rivers and leaving behind lakes of toxic waste so large they can be seen from space. The earth is gouged where the oil-soaked sand is dug and loaded onto trucks. After being sent through crushers, the sand is mixed with hot water and moved through slurry pipelines to a plant where the bitumen is extracted.
The oil industry is now considering spreading this dirty oil into the United States through a vast, sprawling network of pipelines and refineries. These pipelines would crisscross back yards and farmland in Minnesota, as well as in Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Illinois and Texas, jeopardizing our drinking water and rural communities.
For Immediate Release
February 25, 2010
Tagged with: first nations, rainforest action network, rbc
