The power of this ferocious love [for places where people live and where they care about] is what the resource companies and their advocates in government inevitably underestimate, precisely because no amount of money can extinguish it. When what is being fought for is an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice, there is nothing companies can offer as a bargaining chip. No safety pledge will assuage; no bribe will be big enough. And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia’s defining feature.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. p. 342 (hardcover)
Resistance to infrastructure projects has become the norm in Canada’s resource sectors. As part of a four-month investigation, the Financial Post identified 35 projects worth $129 billion in direct investment — mostly private money — that are struggling to move forward or have been sidelined altogether because of opposition from environmental, aboriginal and/or community groups. The downside is adding up: slower growth, lower Canadian oil prices, investment chill, less control over domestic resources, over-reliance on the U.S. market, regulatory gridlock.
A $100-billion loss in direct investment is no drop in the bucket. It means an additional loss in value (roughly equivalent to the rate of return on the investment) of at least $8 billion to $12 billion a year for the life of the resource projects, generally 40 years, or $320 billion to $480 billion, estimated Jennifer Winter, energy economics professor at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
Bitumen pipelines from Alberta have dominated the headlines, but other projects have also come under attack, including the Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project in Newfoundland, a uranium mine in Quebec, a wind power project in Ontario, liquefied natural gas development in B.C. and fracking in New Brunswick. The list goes on.
In a sense, Washington has unofficially become the No. 1 state not to do business in if the project includes long, rattling lines of rail cars transporting oil or coal through crowded cities, past farmlands and pristine waterways.
As of a few years ago, more than a half-dozen crude-by-rail projects were seeking approval in just the western part of Washington, at ports along the Pacific Coast and Columbia River.
To date, none have succeeded.
Even as the Trump administration has tried to bolster the fossil fuel industry, proposed oil and coal projects in Washington state have been undone again and again by a skeptical state government and the vigorous opposition from Native American tribes and environmental groups, which warn of spills and explosions. And in liberal Washington state, opposition to these projects has been largely well-received by the public.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-washington-state-oil-terminal-20180204-story.html
‘Human rights before mining rights’: German villagers take on coal firm
Residents say they will not be ousted by energy firm seeking to expand the Garzweiler mine
A group of Inuit hunters have braved nearly a week of freezing temperatures to blockade a remote iron mine in northern Canada, in protest over an expansion plan they say will harm local wildlife.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/canada-inuit-hunters-blockade-iron-mine-expansion-plan
Although all the residents have left, several hundred climate protesters are determined to stop RWE getting at the lignite that lies underneath Lützerath.
Some have been here for more than a year, squatting in the abandoned brick buildings.
When we visited the camp a few days ago the activists were busy, reinforcing barricades and preparing piles of bricks.
Some were practising their rope-climbing skills. A series of treehouses, perilously high in the tall trees, are linked by rope so that the activists can move around above the heads of the police.
“That coal has to stay in the ground,” one of the protesters told the BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64233676
Greta Thunberg joins anti-coal activists to save German village | Climate Crisis News | Al Jazeera
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Luetzerath, deserted for some time by its original inhabitants, is set to disappear to make way for an extension of the adjacent open-cast coal mine, one of the largest in Europe. It is operated by the energy firm RWE.
Environmentalists say bulldozing the village to expand the Garzweiler mine would result in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions