October, 19 2020, 12:00am EDT
![Women's Earth & Climate Action Network (WECAN)](https://assets.rbl.ms/32012601/origin.png)
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Katherine Quaid, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, katherine@wecaninternational.org
Indigenous Women Leaders Warn Global Financial Companies to Stop Support for Tar Sands Oil
With key financial decision points looming on the Keystone XL, Line 3, and Trans Mountain pipelines, an open letter calls for policies respecting Indigenous rights and ruling out tar sands.
WASHINGTON
This week, over 40 Indigenous women from communities impacted by tar sands sent an open letter to 70 major banks, insurers, and asset managers, calling on them to respect Indigenous rights and stop providing financial support for the industry destroying their homelands.
In a letter addressed to the CEOs of these global financial institutions, the women wrote: "With fossil fuel corporations plowing ahead with pipeline construction in the midst of a global pandemic and massive financial meltdown, we urge your institutions toimmediately decline any additional support for TC Energy's Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline, and the Canadian government's Trans Mountain pipeline -- and to cut ties with all tar sands projects and companies."
The letter outlines the many risks and impacts that the fossil fuel industry, specifically tar sands, has caused in their communities. Construction for these pipeline expansion projects puts rural Indigenous communities at a higher risk for COVID exposure and sexual violence. The tar sands industry has devastated the northern communities through mining, extraction and refining.
There is a growing movement of financial institutions exiting the tar sands sector. To date, nineteen major banks have policies limiting tar sands financing, and nine insurers have restricted insurance for the sector, including two U.S. companies. Norway's Norges Bank - the world's largest sovereign wealth fund - divested from four of the largest Canadian tar sands companies, citing their "unacceptable" level of greenhouse gas emissions.
This Spring, the tar sands industry hit an all time low, producing barrels of oil at a loss. The signatories call on the finance industry to accelerate a just transition toward renewable, regenerative energy and away from this destructive fossil fuel for the sake of IndigenousNations, women, communities, and workers that depend on the industry for their livelihoods.
The original signatories for the letter include: Tara Houska (Couchiching First Nation), Giniw Collective; Rebecca Adamson (Cherokee), Founder, First Nations and First Peoples Worldwide; Joye Braun (Cheyenne River Sioux), Indigenous Environmental Network; Freda Huson (Unist'ot'en), Unist'ot'en Healing Centre; Winona LaDuke (White Earth Nation), Honor the Earth; Kanahus Manuel (Secwepemc), Tiny House Warriors; Eriel Tchekwie Deranger (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation), Indigenous Climate Action.
- - - SIGNATORY QUOTES - - -
"The land cries out for empathy, the people cry out for justice and both are met with silence. The tar sands industry is a tribute to human egoism and short-sighted benefit as the arboreal forest, the water, a multitude of ecosystems, and Black and Indigenous communities are sacrificed on the pyre of profiteering. As I see man camps appearing all over northern Minnesota to build Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands pipeline, I call on the financiers to end their relationships with those who harm our people and land without a second thought. I call for action, not more empty words and promises," said Tara Houska, Anishinaabe Land Defender and founder of Giniw Collective, living in a resistance camp next to the proposed Line 3 pipeline route.
"Social risk is now the number one risk facing the extractive industry. By failing to identify, manage and mitigate social risk competently corporate boards are leaving billions in stranded assets and facing significant material losses. They leave the investors with no choice but to divest," said Rebecca Adamson (Cherokee), Founder of First Nations and First Peoples Worldwide.
"The truth is written in the blood and tears of our sisters that tar sands and the subsequent pipelines are nothing more than death knocking at our children's future. As Indigenous women we know the fear of looking into our daughter's eyes hoping and praying they won't go missing or murdered. These industries bring that fear to our doorstep. They bring death to our cultures and our children. They are nothing more than evil incarnate. We must put a stop to them. We must stand and say enough is enough. Join us in saving our future. Join us putting the proverbial nail in the coffin of these dying unneeded industries," said Joye Braun (Cheyenne River Sioux), organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network.
"Trans Mountain is misleading insurers by suggesting they have secured the land base and Indigenous consent for the Trans Mountain pipeline. They do not have consent from the Secwepemc and failure to recognize Secwepemc title, land rights and indigenous jurisdiction, will only result in more conflict, direct actions, blockades and Indigenous land occupations which will increase the risks and economic uncertainty for Trans Mountain and its construction deadlines," said Kanahus Freedom Manuel, Secwepemc land defender, who lives in the Tiny House Warriors village in the path of the pipelines.
"There is a direct link between oil extraction and violence against largely Indigenous women and girls, which serves as an important reminder: violence against the land begets violence against women. This is yet another reason, on a growing list, why the pipeline expansions should be shelved. Financiers have an opportunity to walk the path towards a cleaner, safer and more just world for all women, girls and Mother Nature alike,"said Melina Laboucan-Massimo (Lubicon Cree Nation), Founder of Sacred Earth Solar and Director of Healing Justice at Indigenous Climate Action.
"These fossil fuel corporations, what they have should be enough, but it is not enough for them, what they want is more, more, more, more; and that is what is destroying the planet and that is what is destroying everything. They set up a system that has become very corrupt and they try to cover up everything that they did wrong and still try to push forward. We have to do the protecting now, or else Mother Earth will fight back, and all of us will have to pay," said Freda Huson (Unist'ot'en), Unist'ot'en Healing Centre, leader and spokesperson for the Unist'ot'en camps.
"It's time to move on. The most destructive and expensive oil in the world needs to stay in the ground. As we look down the barrel of Line 3, we can say this will be known as the most expensive pipeline ever built," said Winona LaDuke (White Earth Nation), Director of Honor the Earth, economist, and two time Vice Presidential Green Party candidate.
The letter was released in partnership with Giniw Collective, Rainforest Action Network, and Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). This letter and the signatories are supported by 160 Indigenous rights, environmental, and social justice organizations.
The Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International is a solutions-based organization established to engage women worldwide in policy advocacy, on-the-ground projects, direct action, trainings, and movement building for global climate justice.
LATEST NEWS
US Voter Registrations Surge as Republicans Try to Limit Ballot Access
One group said it has registered over 100,000 new voters since U.S. President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
Jul 26, 2024
The group behind a popular get-out-the-vote technology platform said Friday that it's registered more than 100,000 new U.S. voters since President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, a surge that came amid mounting Republican efforts to make it harder to register and vote.
Vote.org said that 84% of voters registered in the new wave are under age 35. Nearly 1 in 5 new registrees is 18 years old. Andrea Hailey, the group's CEO, said that "since 2020, we have led the largest voter registration drive in U.S. history," with more than 7.8 million people registered.
After dropping out, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to face former Republican President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) in the November election. The new presumptive Democratic candidate has already earned endorsements from many Democrats in Congress and groups advocating on issues including climate, labor, and reproductive rights.
Vote.org's success comes as Republicans at the federal level are proposing and passing legislation creating obstacles to the ballot box.
Earlier this month, U.S. House Republicans passed Rep. Chip Roy's (R-Texas)
Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of American citizenship to vote in federal elections. Republicans claim the bill is meant to fix the virtually nonexistent "problem" of noncitizen voter fraud.
However, Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.)
slammed the bill as a "xenophobic attack" meant to silence "Black voices, brown voices, LBGTQIA+ voices, [and] young voices."
Lee said the SAVE Act underscores the need to pass her recently introduced Right to Vote Act, "which would establish the first-ever affirmative federal voting rights guarantee, ensuring every citizen may exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot."
Earlier this year, U.S. Senate Democrats also reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation its sponsors say will "update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act."
Meanwhile, Republican-controlled state legislatures and red-state governors are enacting laws imposing tough restrictions on voter registration, with violations punishable by stiff fines that critics say are meant to dissuade people from registration drives and similar efforts.
Again under the guise of preventing fraud, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last year signed legislation limiting voter registration drives, with fines of up to $250,000 for violators.
"These draconian laws and rules are like taking a sledgehammer to hit a flea," Cecile Scoon, an attorney and president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters,
toldThe New York Times in an article published Friday.
Three years after Kansas passed a law making "false representation" of an election official a crime, campaigners say it's become extremely difficult to sign up new voters.
"In 2020, even with the pandemic, we had registered nearly 10,000 Kansans to vote. Now, we haven't been able to register anyone," Davis Hammet, president of the youth voter mobilization group Loud Light, told the Times.
In Louisiana, Republican state lawmakers quietly passed legislation making it easier for election officials to toss out absentee ballots with missing details, limiting how people can mail in other voters' ballots, and restricting the ability to assist people with disabilities with their ballots.
"What we've found is that these measures have a disproportionate impact on voters with disabilities, both Black and white," NAACP Legal Defense Fund senior policy counsel Jared Evans
toldNola.com earlier this week.
"It's clear that their goal is to make it harder to vote, harder for specific communities to vote especially," Evans added. "What they don't realize is that these laws hurt white voters, too."
In Nebraska, Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen last week
ordered county election offices to stop registering voters with past felony convictions who have not received official pardons. The move came after the state's unicameral Legislature passed a bill granting voting eligibility to felons immediately after they have completed their sentences instead of waiting two years.
"We refuse to accept thousands of Nebraskans having their voting rights stripped away," ACLU of Nebraska legal and policy fellow Jane Seu said in a statement. "We are confident in the constitutionality of these laws, and we are exploring every option to ensure that Nebraskans who have done their time can vote."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Critics Warn Manchin-Barrasso Permitting Bill 'Is Taken Straight From Project 2025'
"You thought Project 2025 was just a threat after the election? It's actually happening *right now,*" said one climate campaigner.
Jul 26, 2024
Climate and environmental defenders on this week implored U.S. senators to block a permitting reform bill introduced this week by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that campaigners linked to Project 2025, a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
Common Dreamsreported Monday that Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Barrasso (R-Wyo.)—respectively the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that although the proposal "includes several positive reforms for the accelerated development of transmission projects," it also advocates "limiting opportunities for communities to challenge projects, loosening oversight for drilling and mining projects, extending drilling permits and fast-tracking [liquified natural gas] permits, and several other provisions friendly to fossil fuel giants."
"This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
These are nearly identical policies to what's proposed in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. The plan, which was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, calls for "unleashing all of America's energy resources," including by ending federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands; limiting investments in renewable energy; and rolling back environmental permitting restrictions for new oil, gas, and coal projects, including power plants.
While Manchin has been trying—and failing—to pass fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform legislation for years, Brett Hartl, director of public affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that his "Frankenstein legislation is taken straight from Project 2025, and it's the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry."
Hartl said the bill "deprives communities of the power to defend themselves and gives that power to Big Oil by making it harder for communities to challenge polluting projects in court," and "prioritizes the profits of coal barons over public health."
"And it mandates oil and gas extraction in our oceans," he continued. "The insignificant crumbs thrown at renewable energy do nothing to address the climate emergency."
"Monday was the hottest day in recorded history," Hartl noted. "It's shocking that as the climate emergency continues to break records around us, the Senate continues to fast-track the fossil fuel expansion that is killing us. This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
Hartl added that "to preserve a livable planet," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "must squash this legislation now."
Manchin—who has said this will be his last term in office—has been a steadfast supporter of the fossil fuel industry, partly because his family owns a coal company. The senator says his permitting reform bill "will advance American energy once again to bring down prices, create domestic jobs, and allow us to continue in our role as a global energy leader."
However, Allie Rosenbluth, Oil Change International's U.S. manager, warned Thursday that "this bill is yet another dangerous attempt by Sen. Manchin to line the pockets of his fossil fuel donors, sacrificing communities and our climate along the way."
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else," she continued. "It would unleash more drilling on federal lands and waters, unnecessarily rush the review of proposed oil and gas export projects, and lift the Biden administration's pause on new LNG exports."
"We urge Congress to reject this proposal and commit to action that protects frontline communities from the impacts of fossil fuel development and the climate crisis," Rosenbluth added.
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else."
NRDC managing director of government affairs Alexandra Adams said Wednesday that "this bill is a giveaway for the oil and gas industry that will ramp up drilling and environmental destruction at a time when we need to be putting a hard stop to fossil fuels."
"We cannot afford to roll back so many of our bedrock environmental and community legal protections and offer a blank check to the oil and gas industry," she stressed. "We need new solutions for permitting if we are going to meet our clean energy potential and address the climate challenge. But this is not it."
"This bill would altogether be a leap backward on climate, health, and justice if passed into law," Adams added. "The Senate should reject it and look toward alternative solutions already being considered."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Nothing To Eat': War-Torn Sudan Faces Mass Famine as Military Delays Aid
Both parties in Sudan's civil war are to blame for a looming mass famine, experts say, and the military's blocking of U.N. aid at a border crossing with Chad exacerbates the problem.
Jul 26, 2024
Sudan's military is blocking United Nations aid trucks from entering at a key border crossing, causing severe disruptions in aid in a country that experts fear may be on the brink of one of the worst famines the world has seen in decades, The New York Timesreported Friday.
The border city of Adré in eastern Chad is the main international crossing into the Darfur region of Sudan, but the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the state's official military, which is engaged in a civil war with a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has refused to issue permits for U.N. trucks to enter there, as it's an RSF-controlled area.
U.S. and international officials have issued increasingly alarmed calls for steady aid access to help feed the millions of severely malnourished people in Darfur and other areas of Sudan.
Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., said that the SAF's obstruction of the border was "completely unacceptable."
Both warring parties in Sudan continue to perpetrate brazen atrocities, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. This piece focuses on the SAF's ongoing obstruction of essential aid. The situation is catastrophic. The policy is criminal. https://t.co/FKhqQh3EI9.
— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum) July 26, 2024
The Sudanese who've made it out of the country and into Adré reported dire and unsafe conditions in their home country.
"We had nothing to eat," Bahja Muhakar, a Sudenese mother of three, told the Times after she crossed into Chad, following a harrowing six-day journey from Al-Fashir, a major city in Darfur. She said the family often had to live off of one shared pancake per day.
Another mother, Dahabaya Ibet, said that her 20-month-old boy had to bear witness to his grandfather being shot and killed in front of his eyes when the family home in Darfur was attacked by gunmen late last year.
Now the mothers and their families are refugees in Adré, where 200,000 Sudanese are living in an overcrowded, under-resourced transit camp.
In addition to those that have made it out of the country, there are 11 million people internally displaced within Sudan, most of whom have become displaced since the civil war began in April 2023.
An unnamed senior American official told the Times that the looming famine in Sudan could be as bad as the 2011 famine in Somalia or even the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
In April, Reutersreported that people in Sudan were eating soil and leaves to survive, and The Washington Postcalled it a nation in "chaos," reporting that World Food Program trucks had been "blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted, and detained."
In late June, a coalition of U.N. agencies, aid groups, and governments warned that 755,000 people in Sudan faced famine in the coming months.
The U.S. last week announced $203 million in additional aid to Sudan—part of a $2.1 billion pledge that world leaders made in April, which some countries have not yet delivered on.
Some officials including Thomas-Greenfield, who has dubbed the situation in Sudan "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," have called for the U.N. Security Council to allow aid delivery into the country even in the absence of SAF approval; it's believed that Russia would veto such a measure.
Sudan's civil war has seen a great deal of international interference. Amnesty International on Thursday published an investigatory briefing showing that weapons from Russia, China, Serbia, Turkey, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been identified in the country. And The Guardian on Friday reported that the passports of Emirati citizens had been found among wreckage in Sudan, indicating the UAE may have troops or intelligence officers on the ground, though the UAE denied the accusation.
The International Service for Human Rights on Friday warned that both the SAF and RSF were engaged in wrongful killings and arrests, especially targeted at lawyers, doctors, and activists. The group called for an immediate cease-fire.
The SAF and Sudanese government figures have cast doubt on international experts' claims about famine in the country.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular