On Town Meeting Day, March 5th, voters in some 25 Vermont towns, including Montpelier and Burlington, will have an opportunity to vote to challenge proposed changes to an aging Northeast Kingdom oil pipeline that could have a serious impact on Vermont and our entire region. Recent visits to Montpelier by the CEO of the pipeline company — owned by ExxonMobil’s Canadian subsidiary — along with environmental officials from Alberta, highlight the importance of this issue for our future.

The Portland-Montreal Pipeline was built more than 50 years ago and now pumps up to 400,000 barrels of oil a day from the port of Portland, Maine to customers in Montreal and beyond, passing through ten Northeast Kingdom towns. It is connected to a vast oil pipeline network across Canada, and companies like Enbridge – a partial owner of Green Mountain Power – have applied to reverse the flow of a now-unused section of pipeline so they can transport highly corrosive and toxic material from the Alberta Tar Sands across Canada and northern New England.

Company officials continue to equivocate about their plans to reverse the pipeline through Vermont, but the evidence suggests such a plan is in process, including efforts to build a new pumping station in Dunham, Quebec, just across the border. With people across the U.S. and Canada challenging proposed projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, and the proposed Northern Gateway through British Columbia, this “Plan C” option could become the path of least resistance for getting tar sands to the coast for export.

Why is there so much opposition to getting oil from the tar sands? Tar sands mining is a massively destructive business, and has been called the most environmentally damaging project on Earth. Tens of thousands of acres of Alberta’s northern forest are leveled in the extraction process, which puts 3 – 5 times as much carbon pollution into the atmosphere as conventional oil drilling. Dr. James Hansen, one of our most respected climate scientists, says that if oil from the tar sands is added to the effects of burning coal, it is “essentially game over” for the earth’s climate system.

The material that is mined from the tar sands is nothing like liquid crude oil: it is highly acidic, corrosive, and 40 – 70 times thicker. To transport it through a pipeline requires dilution with toxic chemicals such as n-hexane and benzene that damage the human nervous system and can cause cancer.

In 2010, a tar sands pipeline in southwestern Michigan ruptured, dumping more than a million gallons of tar sands residues into the Kalamazoo River and forcing the relocation of 150 families. The clean-up, still unfinished, is the most expensive inland oil clean-up in history, costing nearly $800 million so far. The old pipeline to Portland has already experienced leaks, just transporting crude oil, including one in 1977 that contaminated the Black River and Lake Memphremagog.

On Town Meeting Day, 23 towns will have a warned item on this issue, and others will bring it up under New Business.  This is an important opportunity to challenge plans to pump this toxic material through our region. The resolutions voice the town’s opposition to transporting tar sands through Vermont, and call for a thorough environmental review of any tar sands pipeline proposal. In most cases, they also ask our towns to help investigate where our own fuel supplies come from, with a goal of phasing out purchases from refineries that use tar sands-derived oil. Larger cities and towns like Burlington will do most of the lifting here, with support from allies across New England. There is an effort in the Legislature to get the state of Vermont to do the same.

The Alberta Tar Sands are far away, but the impacts of mining there are global in scope.  By approving this resolution, town voters will help support efforts throughout Vermont and New England to assure that our region will be tar-sands free.

(First-hand account from Sunday’s protest in Burlington. – promoted by mataliandy)

There are some truly bizarre things in the police report from Sunday’s demonstration.  First, none of us who were on the sidelines of the confrontation described here saw anything remotely resembling a protestor dragging an officer, as was claimed by the Burlington Police.  People were shot repeatedly with heavy rubber projectiles, about 3/8 inch in diameter, not just “pepper balls”.  As police and their guard dogs were successfully pushing away those blocking the buses, heavily armored officers (presumably from the State Police) lunged into the crowd shooting.  In 30 years of political activism in Vermont, I’ve never seen anything remotely like this extreme overreaction on the part of police.

It was a disturbing end to what was otherwise a glorious day, which brought together an unprecedented variety of environmental and social activists from all across our region.  They included representatives of the Innu people, whose territory in Eastern Quebec continues to be invaded by Hydro Quebec’s apparently insatiable desire to increase hydroelectric production, as well as powerline opponents from northern New Hampshire, and Sierra Club members and other tar sands opponents from all across New England, along with Occupiers, labor activists and so many others.

The Burlington Police like to proclaim their commitment to free speech, which was admirably displayed throughout much of Sunday. But the sight of robo-cops on hair trigger alert, charging a few dozen people and firing their weapons out on College Street was a truly shocking and unnecessary end to an otherwise exceptional day.

(“The UN? Oh good grief.” -odum

Debunked here:

http://www.snopes.com/politics… – promoted by kestrel9000)

I was just stunned to receive a solicitation call from the National Rifle Assn.  It was a live person on the phone initially, but then they put on a recorded statement, promising that they’d be soliciting comments afterward. The recording claimed that the UN is trying to take everyone’s guns away and that people should support their effort to protest an upcoming UN conference in NYC. I was going to listen to the whole thing and then tell them it was full of crap, but it went on far too long for my patience to hold out.

So I guess the NRA is out recruiting here in the hills of central VT. May be worthy of some investigation…

( – promoted by odum)

     [… a lousy political agreement.”]

Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still trickling in, but a few things are quite clear, even as countries have stepped up the blame game in response to the summit’s disappointing conclusion.

First, the 2 1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to “take note” of are completely self-contradictory, and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn’t even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to “take note” of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.

Second, the global divide between rich and poor has never been clearer, and those countries where people are already experiencing the droughts, floods, and the melting of glaciers that provide a vital source of freshwater expect to find themselves in increasingly desperate straits as the full effects of climate disruptions begin to emerge. Not to mention the small island nations that face near-certain annihilation as melting ice sheets bring rising seas, along with infiltrations of seawater into their scarce fresh water supplies. Especially despicable was the changing role of the governments of the rapidly developing “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), who claim to speak for the poor – in their own countries and around the world – when it is convenient, but mainly seek to protect the expanding riches of their own well-entrenched elites.

Third, even the meager and contradictory progress of the past 17 years of global climate talks is now at risk, as is the flawed but relatively open and inclusive UN process.  

After the 2007 climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, the Bush administration tried to initiate an alternate track of negotiations on climate policy that involved only a select handful of the more compliant countries. That strategy failed, partly because its figurehead was George Bush. Now that the Obama administration has adopted essentially the same approach, with the full collaboration of the “BASICs,” the utterly substanceless “Copenhagen Accord” can be seen as this coercive strategy’s first diplomatic success.

As I wrote just as the Copenhagen meeting was getting underway (see my “Repackaging Copenhagen,” posted in early December on Counterpunch, ZNet, AlterNet, and Burlington’s TowardFreedom), the US had planned for some months to attempt to replace the quaint notion of a comprehensive global climate agreement with a patchwork of informal, individual country commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and undertake other appropriate measures. If the Copenhagen document means anything at all, it establishes that process as a new global norm for implementing climate policy. Nothing is binding, and everything is voluntary, only to be “assessed” informally after another five years have passed. (Pages 4 and 5 of the “accord” actually consist of a pair of high school-caliber charts where countries are free to simply write in their voluntary emissions targets and other mitigation actions, nominally by the end of January.)

The document was hammered out in a back room, WTO-style. It hedges all the important issues, and appends loopholes and contradictions to every substantive point that it pretends to make. While discussions will nominally continue under the two UN negotiating tracks established 2 years ago in Bali, the “accord” provides a justification for leading countries in the process-which Bill McKibben has termed the “league of superpolluters,” plus a few wannabes-to continue subverting and undermining those discussions in the name of a more efficient and streamlined process to continue business as usual for the benefit of the world’s elites.

As some have pointed out, it could have been worse. A useless non-agreement may be better than a coercive agreement that entrenches insufficient targets and destructive policy measures, such as expanding carbon markets. But the potential loss of an accountable UN process could prove to be an even worse outcome than that. The US, of course, has always tried to undermine the United Nations when it couldn’t overtly control it, but replacing the processes established under the 1992 UN climate convention with a cash-for-compliance, anything-goes circus that more closely mirrors the World Trade Organization’s discredited mechanisms doesn’t bode at all well for the future.

Did anything positive happen in Copenhagen? For climate justice activists around the world, Copenhagen may have been a long-sought Seattle moment. It was a unique opportunity for activists and NGO representatives from around the world to gather, forge personal ties, and begin raising the global profile of an essential climate justice agenda. Independent journalists, most notably Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now team, helped amplify the voices best able to explain how climate disruptions are no longer an abstract scientific issue, but one that is already impacting the lives of those least able to cope. Even the mainstream US press featured some notable stories of people around the world who are struggling to live with the effects of climate chaos. More than ever before, people are coming to understand that the only meaningful solution to the climate crisis is to “leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the tar sands in the land,” following the slogan raised by campaigners against oil drilling in Ecuador’s endangered Yasuni National Park.

It was also a pivotal moment for the ALBA countries of Latin America-most notably Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela-which continued to the very end to stand up to intimidation from the US and other powerful countries, and refused to buckle under last-minute pressure to approve the vapid and destructive “Copenhagen Accord” as an agreement of the assembled nations. This is in stark contrast to the role of the European Union, which once stood for a strong worldwide agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, but has now fallen in line with the disruptive strategies of the US. Another positive income is that there was no new bone thrown to the world’s financial elites, who were banking on a Copenhagen agreement to help inflate their artificial market in tradable carbon allowances. Carbon prices in Europe have begun to decline, which may help prevent the enshrinement of carbon markets (so-called “cap and trade”) as the primary instrument of climate policy in the United States.

So now the struggle returns to the national and local levels, where people may be best able to create examples of just and effective ways to address the climate crisis. There is no shortage of positive, forward-looking approaches to reducing excess consumption and furthering the development of alternative energy sources, especially ones that can be democratically controlled by communities and not corporations. But the power of positive examples is far from sufficient to address the crucial problem of time. A few years ago, climate experts shocked the world by saying we had less than ten years to reverse course and do something to prevent irreversible tipping points in the global climate system. The disastrous outcome of the Copenhagen conference makes it harder than ever to feel confident that it isn’t too late.

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Brian Tokar is the current director of the Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org), author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale, editor of two books on the politics of biotechnology, Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders, and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press). He works with Climate SOS and the Mobilization for Climate Justice (climatesos.org, actforclimatejustice.org).

(I didn’t have the chance to write this up this week, but I’m glad someone did. – promoted by JulieWaters)

On Thursday morning, 8/20, Sen. Bernie Sanders held a hearing at the State House in Montpelier under the auspices of his Green Jobs Subcommittee of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee. There was a panel of 10 pubilc officials, alternative energy entrepreneurs, educators, union officials and others, followed by Sanders questioning the panelists, and a half hour for public comments at the end.  The main focus was on documenting the potential for solar, wind, and energy efficiency in Vermont and the associated job creation potential.

There was also a focus on the potential for a large scale conversion to alternative energy in VT, with David Blittersdorf of Earth Turbines, and founder of NRG Systems, saying that 100% renewables is a realistic possibility here (including small scale biomass) if we are able to realize the potential for up to 80% reductions in energy use in buildings through conservation and efficiency.  The CEO of Green Mt. Power responded that we might be able to exceed their provisional goal of 10% in-state renewables. As usual, her focus was on promoting the VT Yankee nuclear plant and their contracts from Hydro Quebec for power from Quebec’s mega-dams.  There was also considerable focus on implementing new technologies in VT, from smart grid technologies to plug in hybrid cars, the limited availability of working capital for even the most cost-effective, short-payback alternatives, and the need for ongoing workforce training.

During the question period, I raised several questions around the focus on carbon trading (cap-and-trade) in the climate bill recently passed by the House, and soon to be addressed by Sanders’ Senate committee. I briefly outlined the likelihood of financial manipulation, the carbon market’s volatility and its negative effect on the investment climate for alternatives, as well as the underlying problem of corporate giveaways (more on these issues at http://www.zcommunications.org…  Sanders responded briefly by saying we certainly don’t want to give anything more to ‘our friends at Goldman Sachs.’  He pointed out that in ’07, around Sen. Lieberman’s climate bill, he spoke against subsidies for the coal and nuclear industries and insisted that funds for renewables at least equal those.  He also raised the analogy with FDR’s reorienting of the US economy toward war production at the beginning of US involvement in World War 2, saying that climate change is a national security issue.  (This is becoming one of the Democrats’ leading talking points, as reflected in recent mainstream media coverage.).  He also said that this year’s stimulus bill raised more funds for renewables and conservation than in all previous history.

Some other relevant statistics from the hearing:

* Vermont currently spends $2 billion/year on fossil fuels.  A third of our energy use is for space heating.

* With current state and federal subsidies and tax credits, a typical homeowner can get all their electricity from photovoltaic panels for around $10,000, with a payback of around 10 years. PV costs have fallen 30% in just the past year.  Still many homeowners can’t get the financing they need.  A home-scale wind system now costs around $25K, but the cost is projected to fall by half in 5 years.

* The renewables bill passed by the VT legislature this year aims to reduce energy use by 25% in 25% of VT housing stock (80,000 homes) by 2020, but much bigger gains are feasible, with savings up to 80%.

* Vermont gets more sun than Germany, which has the highest level of solar energy use in Europe.

* 2 medium-sized biomass power plants (such as are now being fought all over Massachusetts, for example) would consume VT’s entire current wood harvest.  We need to be careful in allocating how our forest resources are used, and favor smaller, more local projects (with adequate pollution controls, as smaller generators can be more polluting).

The last week in August, Montpelier will come alive with a community-wide celebration of sustainable living, practical homesteading skills, and visions of a more resilient local  community.  The Village Building Convergence is modeled after a similar event that has energized Portland, Oregon for at least six years running, and will have its Vermont premiere during the week of August 22-30.

With events throughout Montpelier and surrounding areas, but especially at the Capitol City Grange on Rt. 12, the Kellogg-Hubbard Library, and the new Lamb Abbey performance space near the Pioneer St. bridge, the Convergence will give the entire community an opportunity to share ideas with some of our area’s most knowledgeable earth-centered practitioners.

“This past year has seen a nationwide resurgence of interest in sustainable living,” said Ben Graham, a Plainfield-based architect, natural builder, and one of the initiators of the Village Building Convergence. “With dramatic changes underway in our economic and energy systems, it seems that our collective sense of dissatisfaction with past practices is finally bubbling over into action.”

The Village Building Convergence is an extension of the “Transition Town” effort that began in Montpelier this past winter, which has attracted hundreds of participants to its workshops, trainings and meetings. The Transition Montpelier effort has inspired several other Vermont towns to begin initiatives as well. Transition Vermont, along with Envision Montpelier, the Onion River Exchange and other long-standing supporters of sustainable community, aims to create a national center for sustainable community here in the smallest capital city in the US.

“In Montpelier, the VBC is developing its own identity and will naturally evolve over the years as needs change,” says Graham. “We hope that over time, neighborhoods will propose community building projects that are public in nature and support our community connections. It’s about realizing the strength and beauty of our power when we work and play together.”

The Village Building Convergence begins on Saturday, August 22 with an opening ceremony at the Lamb Abbey, featuring Carolyn Baker, author of five books, including “Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse,” as well as a community drum circle.  Workshops throughout the week will focus on topics from terraced gardens,  medicinal plants, and edible landscapes, to alternative energy and community planning. Evening events will include an elder stories circle and a discussion of bicycle-powered transportation. This will be followed by a bicycle tour of Montpelier gardens on Saturday, August 29^th . The closing event on Sunday afternoon, August 30 will feature a talk by Jim Merkel, the nationally renowned author of Radical Simplicity, followed by a panel on how change happens, and a rousing performance to close the week by the Burlington-based Brazilian samba group Sambatucada.

Most of the events are free and open to everyone, and flyers and programs will be posted throughout the area containing detailed schedules, locations and other information.  A full schedule is also available on the web at www.villageconvergencevt.org.

( – promoted by odum)

Many Central Vermont residents have noticed the change this year in how large acreages of field corn are being grown along the Winooski River between Plainfield and East Montpelier.  For the first time (see Update below on this point), we saw large fields of dying grass with new blades of corn growing up right in their midst.

This can mean only one thing: the largest local growers are now using corn varieties that are genetically engineered (GE, also known as GMO, for ‘genetically modified organism’) to withstand large doses of broad-spectrum herbicides, which will normally kill most plants. Only conifer trees and a few particular varieties of flowering plants are naturally resistant to herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup.  The only way corn can possibly grow in fields of recently herbicide-killed grass is if it contains the same company’s so-called “Roundup Ready” package of artificially inserted genes from bacteria and petunias. One or two other companies market GE corn varieties engineered to resist their own proprietary herbicide (e.g., Bayer’s “Liberty Link), but Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” varieties are by far the most prevalent.

Many people have been under the impression that Fairmont Farms and other large growers have been growing GE corn all along, by virtue of the roadsigns advertising particular corn seed varieties. Those signs alone really don’t say much at all, other than that the corn is all of a specific variety. Advertised varieties are not necessarily GE.  On the other hand, the corresponding roadsigns in southern Quebec, for example, nearly all designate specific GE traits, such as “RR” (“Roundup Ready”), “LL” (“Liberty Link”), and “BT” (for insecticidal genes obtained from Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria).

Last week, Free Speech Radio News (6 pm on WGDR in Plainfield) carried a story from Argentina describing a new study from the country’s top medical school, which showed that Roundup-family herbicides (based on the active ingredient, glyphosate) are lethal to amphibians at lower doses than was previously documented.  You can listen or download this story at http://www.fsrn.org/audio/mons… (or simple go to the page for Thursday, June 18th from fsrn.org). In South America, GE soybeans have overtaken vast acreages of what used to be pasture land. Here in Vermont, the main commercial crop continues to be corn for feeding to dairy cows. Acceptance of genetically engineered corn varieties here has significantly trailed national trends, but may now be catching up.  Nationwide, over 2/3 of US field corn is genetically engineered, along with more than 90% of the soybeans.

“Roundup-Ready” herbicide tolerant corn is being sold to Vermont farmers as a way to practice “no-till” agriculture, with implicit environmental benefits. Indeed, some rotations of corn with other crops can be implemented with neither tilling nor herbicides.  But this particular variety of herbicide-dependent “no till,” while it may grant farmers a significant convenience factor and enable them to plant ever-larger acreages with less labor, can in no way be described as environmentally friendly.

In the early years of this decade, voters in 85 Vermont towns passed resolutions opposing genetically engineered food and crops in Vermont. In 2005, Gov. Douglas vetoed a rather cautiously worded bill that was aimed to put some legal clout behind this commitment. Now that we’re seeing more visible fields of GMOs arise here in Central Vermont, what will be the public response?

UPDATE:  In some email conversations following my initial posting of this to some personal contacts, some agreed this was new this year, but one person, a regular commuter alongside some of the fields of interest, said she’d seen the same phenomenon in previous years. Readers, what have you observed?