
For five years, the struggle over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline dominated U.S. and Canadian energy politics. When President Obama finally rejected the project last fall, he was able to start a new chapter with recently elected Prime Minister Trudeau, who seemed eager to move past the toxic politics of his predecessor, Stephen Harper.
But as Trudeau and Obama meet in Washington this week to discuss a joint approach on climate change, new fossil fuel fights, including several Keystone XL-like pipelines, pose challenges for both leaders and threaten to exacerbate tensions between neighbors.
“Keystone XL was just the beginning,” said May Boeve, executive director of 350.org. “This movement is now engaged in major fossil fuel fights on both sides of the border and is ready to oppose any new project that is proposed. Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is the new test for climate leadership and both Trudeau and Obama have more work to do.”
Organizing under the “keep it in the ground” banner, 350.org and other climate groups are engaging in a continental wide fight against the fossil fuel industry, challenging new projects and going after existing production.
High up on the list are a group of other tar sands pipelines that resemble Keystone XL. In Canada, both the Kinder Morgan and Energy East projects are facing tough opposition. In the U.S., local and national groups have targeted a system of Enbridge pipelines proposed across the Midwest.
“If Trudeau is serious about the climate pledges he made in Paris, he needs to freeze tar sands expansion as soon as possible,” said Cam Fenton, Canadian tar sands campaign manager with 350.org. “You can play with the numbers all you want and there’s still no way to match further tar sands production with keeping global warming below 2 degrees, let alone 1.5 degrees. New pipelines fail the climate test, plain and simple.”
Activists are also pushing both leaders to go beyond the Arctic and protect all coastal areas from offshore drilling. President Obama came under fire last year for allowing Shell to explore for oil off the coast of Alaska. He’s now coming under increasing pressure to ban all new drilling in federal waters, including in the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
“The Arctic is a spectacular treasure and so are the people, cultures and ecosystems in the Gulf,” said Boeve. “No community should have to live with the risk of a massive oil spill and constant pollution from fossil fuel development, especially low income and communities of color who are on the front lines of climate change. These communities got hit with Katrina, got hit with the BP Oil Spill, but they’re fighting to recover each and every day. Our government shouldn’t keep putting them directly in harm’s way. We say protect the polar bears, but protect the people too.”
A broad coalition of groups in the Gulf are planning a major protest at an auction for offshore drilling permits at the Superdome in New Orleans this March 23. The demonstration will highlight the irony of selling more fossil fuels at a national landmark for climate impacts.
In Canada, Indigenous communities and First Nations have an Aboriginal rights legal regime comprised of inherent and treaty rights embedded in section 35 of the Canadian constitution. This is a considerable power that Prime Minister Trudeau must consider and deal with, according to Clayton Thomas-Muller, Stop It At The Source campaigner with 350.org.
“The Trudeau government ran on the election promise to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples to say ‘No’ to pipeline projects on their lands, while also committing to implement the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples across the board” said Thomas-Muller. “Using Transcanada’s Energy East or Kinder Morgan’s Transmountain tar sands pipelines as the trade off to deliver on these promises shows yet another campaign promise being broken and shows that the influence of oil lobbyist money to Ottawa continues to flow.”
Over the coming months, 350.org and its allies will continue to intensify the fight against the fossil fuel industry on both sides of the border, protesting fossil fuel extraction on public lands in the U.S. and pressuring the Canadian government to stop tar sands at the source.
In May, groups will be coming together under the “Break Free” platform, a worldwide week of action targeting major fossil fuel projects around the world. In the U.S., activists will target new tar sands pipelines in the Midwest, fracking in the Mountain West, "bomb trains" carrying fracked oil and gas in New York, refinery pollution north of Seattle, offshore drilling in an action in Washington, DC and dangerous oil and gas drilling in Los Angeles. In Canada, activists are preparing to protest tar sands development while calling for clean energy solutions for communities who were on the front lines of pollution and climate change.
“In Paris, world leaders made a promise to move the world beyond fossil fuels,” said Boeve. “We intend to hold them to it and do everything we can to accelerate that transition. This problem is ultimately a race against the clock. Luckily, this movement is beginning to really hit its stride.”
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By David Konisky
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
By Jewel Fraser
Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.