As #1 supplier of oil to USA, Canada’s tar sands kill the environment, locals, and pollute the world’s atmosphere. Canada can never control its emissions with this giant carbon smokestack to the sky.

Now they want to make the damage five times greater. To scoop off the soil in an area the size of Florida. Strip mining vast areas for the world’s dirtiest source of oil.

The U.S. group Environmental Defense launched a report February 2008 titled “Canada’s Toxic Tar Sands, The Most Destructive Project on Earth” A whole range of activists, from Greenpeace to the Council of Canadians, is fighting to stop massive expansion of the Tar Sands. The major oil companies want to strip away the surface of the Earth in a patch the size of Florida. They dump their toxic waste into giant man-made lakes dangerously close to the mighty Athabasca River, and by that river, to the sensitive Arctic.

All told, the Tar Sands projects, led by the world’s largest oil companies, create an octopus of toxic waste and global climate change. No one is exempt.

Three new speeches:

Jessie Kalman on environmental and social impacts. From the Polaris Institute. Update on latest situation, including the economic downturn;

Mike Mercredi – the industrial genocide of aboriginals. A member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation describes how his family and community are dying of cancer in unbelievable numbers, now that the Tar Sands mega-project is upstream. A really moving speech puts the poisons in perspective.

Will Horter, from the Dogwood Initiative, on new pipelines, ports and spills in British Columbia’s treasured forests and coast. Even the Great Bear Rain Forest is at risk, as tanker traffic is set to double in the wild and stormy West Coast of Canada, British Columbia. The pipelines will scar the rockies. The spills are inevitable, from this spiderweb of chemicals running from Canada’s North to all points south, and the American refineries.

The Radio Ecoshock Show 081205 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB

Production Notes: 30 second music bed for station ID at 29:30.
Music: “Dirty Little Secret” by All American Rejects.

P.S. be sure and visit notankers.ca to sign their petition.

Alex.
Radio Ecoshock