Tar Sands corporations to cut deal with ENGO’s

We can’t be silent as this corrupt behaviour is carried out by those who were supposed to be our allies.

It is up to us to tell Greenpeace, DSF, Pembina, Pew, FE, Tides and others NO deal to greenwash the tar sands.

Feel free to ask them all the hard questions about their involvement. Demand transparency and accountability.

We can only hope that every single NGO who is approached by this industry walks away from the offer of cash for becoming complicit with the destruction of the planet.

Time will tell. Dont hold your breath.

Oil industry eyes forest agreement
Published On Thu Oct 21 2010

Oil industry players have been sniffing around the landmark Boreal Forest
Agreement between industry and environmental groups, says one of the
agreement’s architects.

Avrim Lazar, who head the Forest Products Association of Canada, says he’s
fielded inquiries from senior civil servants, executives and oil industry
associations about how the forest industry got together with its one-time
adversaries.

“They’re saying: What were you thinking? How did you do it? What’s working,
what’s not working? What would your advice be?” Lazar said in an interview
Thursday.

“It seems like very honest, good faith curiosity.”

The forest agreement was signed in May between the forest companies and a
coalition of environmental groups who had fought the industry bitterly for
decades, and boycotted their products.

Under the pact, the 21 member forest companies agreed to suspend new logging
on 29 million hectares of forest. Environmental groups agreed to end their
boycotts.

The signatories set themselves a three-year target to set up detailed,
working agreements in areas such as developing more sustainable harvesting
practices and protecting wildlife and water systems.

Oil and gas officials, while expressing interest, are skeptical that a
similar process could work in their sector, says Lazar. “Who wouldn’t be? I
was skeptical when I started.”

“All that being said, there are pieces of the model which are very
importable,” Lazar said.

“A precondition of having a constructive conversation is acknowledging the
legitimacy of each other’s public interest.”

That means environmentalists would have to stop calling oil sands extraction
“an abomination that has to be stopped,” and acknowledge that the oil
industry is going to operate in the sands.

“We’re not debating that. We’re debating how, and at what pace and under
what conditions.”

The oil industry, for its part, must say: “We recognize that over time this
degree of greenhouse gas intensity, this degree of effluent in the water,
this disturbance of biodiversity, is not going to be acceptable. We know we
have to be quite a bit better. It’s a question of how, and how fact.”

“Once you have those two, then you have something to talk about. You can go
to problem-solving mode…It doesn’t become easy, but it becomes possible.”

Lazar says progress is continuing toward fleshing out the boreal forest
agreement.

A panel on acceptable forest practices has been established, for example:
Each of the three members was agreed to by both. The panel’s recommendations
must be accepted in whole by both sides, unless there’s a fundamental
disagreement.

A working group is pursuing protocols for protecting caribou habitat and
migration routes.

But hurdles remain. The agreement was negotiated at a national level, but
many areas lie within provincial jurisdiction. First nations groups were not
part of the pact; their participation is now needed.

And vast cultural changes must take place. Forest industry managers, for
example, were always rewarded for extracting every last scrap of fibre from
a given area. That must change.

“It’s complicated,” says Lazar. “But over-all, we’re moving forward.”

http://www.thestar.com/business/companies/article/879091–oil-industry-eyes-forest-agreement