When: Monday, August 29, 2016, 6:30 PM
Where: News & Letters Library, 228 S. Wabash, Room 230, Chicago

News and Letters Committees invites you to a discussion:

Fires in Canada’s tar sands region and the creative revolt against climate chaos

Several wildfires have been raging in California this month. Climate change is a factor in the increasing number of wildfires and the longer wildfire seasons across the world.

Since May 1 a wildfire has been raging in Alberta, Canada, spreading to Saskatchewan. It swept through Fort McMurray, forcing the evacuation of all 88,000 people from that home of the tar sands industry.

In the Athabasca Tar Sands, the world’s biggest industrial operation extracts bitumen to produce heavy crude oil. Some of it is piped into the U.S. to refineries such as the BP plant on the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan. Dozens of people were arrested in May protesting that plant’s expansion to handle more tar sands oil. The extraction and refining processes are so energy-intensive, and the tar sands deposit is so vast, that leading climatologist James Hansen said if the tar sands get fully exploited it is “game over for the climate.”

We will explore the revolt by Indigenous peoples and others across the world, against climate change and the fossil fuel extraction and transport projects that drive it. (Based on the lead article in News & Letters, “Fires in Canada, drought in India inspire creative revolt”)

Speaker: Franklin Dmitryev, National Organizer for News and Letters Committees

312-431-8242 / arise@newsandletters.org / www.newsandletters.org