Western Conservation Group to Obama: “PUT UP OR SHUT UP!”

For immediate release - June 16, 2010

President poised to issue permit for world’s biggest greenhouse gas project in order to grow American’s oil addiction by one million barrels a day.

Missoula, Montana. A financial risk management firm calls it a "land-based" version of the gulf oil disaster. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the first scientist to warn Congress of the dangers of climate, calls it perhaps the planet’s “greatest threat,” and warns it “would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century.” Tom Woodbury, Montana director for Western Watersheds Project, calls it an "eco-suicide pact."

“It” is the Canadian tar sands oil development project, and sitting on President Obama’s desk waiting to be signed is a permit to build almost two thousand miles of pipeline to accommodate the increased flow from that project, which many decry as the largest and dirtiest industrial endeavor in history.

According to Tom Woodbury, a long-time conservationist in Montana where the pipeline would enter the U.S., “it is time for the President to walk his tough-guy talk.”

Obama has said that "the time has come to aggressively accelerate” America’s transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, and Woodbury was also alluding to the President’s widely reported comments about deciding “whose ass to kick.”

Oil from the Canadian tar sands is already the biggest source of US petroleum imports, and Alberta's recoverable reserves are estimated to be the second-largest worldwide after Saudi Arabia. In order to recover that oil, which is in the sand instead of under it, a boreal forest the size of Florida, home to some five billion migratory birds, as well as some of largest remaining populations of caribou, moose, bear and wolves on the planet, will need to be strip-mined. Hansen calls this “a double-barrelled threat,” as it first requires the destruction of a forest that stores more carbon per acre than any other ecosystem on the planet, and second it produces oil that emits two-to-three times the global warming pollution of conventional oil. Hansen also points out that a large fraction of North America's clean drinking water flows from this forest.

The RiskMetrics report goes so far as to suggest that the long-term impacts of the tar sands expansion on the people and environment of Alberta will “arguably [be] greater” than those posed by the Gulf blowout to the people and environment of the Southeastern coast.

Western Watersheds Project is urging President Obama to take a page from Sarah Palin's book by saying "thanks but no thanks" to Canada's provincial government. Woodbury points out the inherent contradiction in Obama’s promise to break the nation’s addiction to oil while at thet same time considering a permit to grow that addiction by 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest oil on the planet. The tar sands expansion is being funded by BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. "If President Obama does not stand up to the plate," Woodbury warned, "these giant corporations will push all of us right over the brink of global catastrophe, beginning right here in the boreal forests of Alberta".

According to the State Department, the need for this pipeline is being "dictated" by American's growing thirst for petroleum, which the Department assumes will grow by a million barrels a day over the next decade.

“To me,” Woodbury continued, “that sounds like a junkie’s excuse for buying bigger and better crack pipes, not like someone who is sincere about kicking the habit.”

In his attempts to express the rage of the American people over the incompetence of BP and his own Department of Interior’s handling of the Horizon Oil Well, Obama has noted that “[t]he time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future." Woodbury asks “how can we fully embrace a clean energy future while building a pipeline to grow our addiction with the planet’s dirtiest oil?”

In order to approve the pipeline, President Obama must determine that it is in the “national interest” to accommodate increased oil consumption at the rate of 100,000 barrels a day for ten years. Western Watersheds Project is challenging the President, instead, to prove his independence from big oil by freezing America’s petroleum consumption at current levels, and making it a national priority to meet the growing demand for energy entirely with safe and clean alternative sources.

In Woodbury’s frank assessment, “it is put up or shut up time for Mr. Obama.”

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Read WWP's Comments on the Project (.doc)

WWP is a regional, membership-driven, not-for-profit conservation organization, dedicated to protecting and conserving the public lands and natural resources of watersheds in the American West. WWP has its headquarters at the Greenfire Preserve in Custer County, Idaho, and is supported by more than 1,400 members located throughout the United States, including in Montana.