[IPSM] George Monbiot: "Shut down the tar sands, as quickly as possible"

[Macdonald Stainsby]

George Monbiot stirs debate over fate of tar sands
By Matthew Burrows

George Monbiot wants the Alberta tar-sands industry shut down “as 
quickly as possible”.

The best-selling author, Guardian columnist, and environmentalist told 
the Georgia Straight he would like to see “large-scale direct actions” 
to make that happen.

When Monbiot granted the Straight an interview in late August, in a 
small restaurant in the Welsh town of Maccynleth, where he resides, an 
election had not yet been called. Canadians are now officially headed to 
the polls on October 14, and Monbiot—who penned the 2006 book Heat, to 
high acclaim—said Canada must step up on the environmental front.

“There is a huge gulf, it seems, in Canada between people’s awareness 
and their determination to do something to protect the environment and 
the actual results of Canadian policy,” Monbiot said on August 21. “That 
gap has to be closed, and it has to be closed very quickly. One of the 
first actions that needs to be taken is to shut down the tar sands. I 
would like to see large-scale direct actions aimed at the tar sands, 
with the objective of ending that industry as quickly as possible.”

Read a complete transcript of the Georgia Straight's interview with 
Guardian columnist Georgia Monbiot here.

Michael Byers, NDP candidate in Vancouver Centre, told the Straight that 
climate change is the “principal reason” he entered politics. He said 
his wife gave him the go-ahead to run after she read Heat, and he noted 
that he is a “big fan” of Monbiot. On September 25, a CBC news clip 
played up Byers’s statement that the tar sands should be shut down. 
However, Byers said the clip took his comments out of context.

“What I should have said, had I known I was going to be clipped, was 
that the tar sands should be wound down,” Byers explained by phone.

Byers noted that NDP leader Jack Layton successfully steered the Climate 
Change Accountability Act through the House of Commons on June 4, and in 
doing so secured agreement from the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois that 
any future Canadian government is bound to an 80-percent reduction in 
Canadian greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

“That is an 80-percent reduction over 1990 levels,” Byers said. “If you 
do the mathematics on that, it entails the shutting-down of the tar 
sands or the sequestering of the CO2 produced by them. When you add that 
to the NDP climate-change policy, which is to withdraw all of the 
massive tax cuts to the tar sands as well as [placing] firm caps on all 
of the large emitters—which will be ratcheted down fairly quickly—and a 
massive investment in alternative-energy technologies, you are going to 
see a winding-down of the tar sands. It is rapidly becoming the single 
largest point source for carbon dioxide on the planet.”

However, Byers added that he “would not” support the direct action 
advocated by Monbiot.

“I believe in the rule of law, and I believe in using peaceful 
mechanisms of political change, which is why I am running for political 
office,” he said. “I would put my decision to run for office as an 
example of how I believe that existing political structures need to be 
engaged by those who are fully aware of the climate-change crisis and 
committed to doing something serious about it.”

Vancouver Centre Conservative candidate and former two-term MLA Lorne 
Mayencourt disagreed with Monbiot’s analysis.

“I think that the economic devastation that would follow a shutdown of 
the tar sands would rival the Great Depression,” Mayencourt told the 
Straight in a phone interview. “The reality of it is that the tar sands 
employ in the neighbourhood of 65,000 employees, and having them all of 
a sudden not be able to work would be a huge problem. Canadians know 
that they need to buy gasoline to drive their cars, to get to work, to 
get their kids to school or sporting events or what have you. So we are 
going to be using fuel as we go forward in the next little while. 
Shutting down the tar sands would be a pretty bad thing to happen in the 
Canadian economy.”

Monbiot said he was involved in recent direct action to oppose open-pit 
coal mining in Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales.

“I’d never come across it, but it was a huge, huge mine,” Monbiot said 
of the Ffos-y-Fran mine. “I mean, not huge by Albertan standards, but by 
British standards this is a very big mine for a very small country.…So 
these people said, ‘Look, we’ve tried everything. We need some direct 
action here.’ So I came back here and spoke to some friends, and they 
assembled the best group of activists ever assembled. It was fantastic. 
There were only about 25 of us, but we shut down the mine completely on 
two days and managed to give it much more profile than it had before. 
Suddenly, now open-cast [pit] mining is back on the agenda.”

Within Wales, the protest has helped to create pressure for much 
stricter conditions for mining, including a 500-metre buffer zone 
between a mine and the nearest home, Monbiot added.

“What we didn’t know—and we have since found out, thanks to a lobby 
group called the Coal Forum—[is] that would sterilize all the remaining 
useful coal reserves in Wales,” he said. “Of course, the mining 
communities were built right on the coal. That would effectively wipe 
out open-cast mining in Wales. And then, the Coal Forum points out, if 
this spreads to England, there would be none there either. So we have 
found a way of stopping them.”

In a 2006 foreword to the Canadian edition of Heat, Monbiot called Prime 
Minister Stephen Harper an “irresolute wimp” for claiming Canada could 
no longer meet its Kyoto targets.

“It strikes me that Harper is now greatly improving his rhetoric but 
doing as little as he can get away with,” Monbiot said in the 
restaurant. “That’s my impression. It’s a question of creating enough of 
an impression of action to prevent this from becoming a major political 
liability. Of course, Canada’s projected emissions are catastrophic, 
thanks largely to the tar-sands operations in Alberta.”

http://www.straight.com/article-165166/george-monbiot-stirs-debate-over-...