#forwardonclimate

All spills in order of occurrence:

March 11 – 21: Gwagwalada Town, Nigera A week-long leak of Kilometer 407.5 NNPC (Nigeria National Petroleum Corp) pipeline. No official number of barrels spilled released, however the spill saturated a hectare (10,000 sq metres) of marshy ground near a major water source.

Tuesday, March 19: Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories Canada Enbridge Norman Wells Pipeline leaks 6,290 barrels of crude oil

Monday, March 25: Fort MacKay, Alberta Canada Suncor tar sands tailings pond leaks 2,200 barrels of toxic waste fluid into the Athabasca River

Wednesday, March 27: Parker Prairie, Minnesota U.S. CP Rail train derails and spills 952 barrels of tar sands crude oil

Friday, March 29: Mayflower, Arkansas U.S. Exxon Mobil’s Pegasus Pipeline suffers a 22 foot-long rupture, spilling at least 12,000 barrels of diluted tar sands bitumen

Sunday, March 31: A power plant in Lansing, Michigan U.S. 16 barrels of an oil-based hydraulic fluid spills into the Grand River

Tuesday, April 2: Nembe, Nigeria After suffering a reported theft of 60,000 barrels of oil per day from its Nembe Creek Trunkline pipeline, Shell Nigeria shuts off the pipe for nine days to repair damage

Wednesday, April 3: 350KM southeast of Newfoundland, Canada A drilling platform leaks 0.25 barrels of crude oil

Wednesday, April 4: Chalmette, Louisiana U.S. 0.24 barrels (100 lbs) of hydrogen sulfide and 0.04 barrels (10 lbs of benzene) leak at an Exxon refinery

Monday, April 8: Esmeraldas, Ecuador The OPEC-managed OCP pipeline leaks 5,500 barrels of heavy crude oil, contaminating the Winchele estuary

Tuesday, April 9: 29KM NE of Nuiqsut, Alaska U.S. Human error during maintenance spills 157 barrels of crude oil at a Repsol E&P USA Inc pipeline pump station

Oklahoma Grandmother Nancy Zorn, 79, has U-locked her neck to a piece of KXL heavy machinery, effectively halting construction near Allen, OK.

Nancy is taking action today in solidarity with residents of neighboring Mayflower, Arkansas who have been forced from their homes and are suffering the health impacts from tar sands toxins.

For anyone following this, Anna and I have decided to do a joint blog for all of our eco-hearted adventures. Here goes:

Hey there! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Kristie Okimoto. I’m a first year, Conservation and Resource Studies major at UC Berkeley. And maybe a Portuguese or Chinese minor. Or both. (I’m Brazilian and Japanese, but I take Chinese.)

Anyways, for first semester I was having trouble deciding where to get involved in campus organizing. At first, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to get involved in at Berkeley. I mean, Berkeley kind of is a mecca of organizing. :) But then, it seemed like there was nothing I wanted to really get behind and organize around.

I got involved in some fun things: I set up a new ReUse station (a place where you can leave things you don’t want and take what you need, so that things are reused and kept out of the waste stream), I went to the California Student Sustainability Convergence, I tried to get involved in the Sustainability Team, and I was the House Dumpster Diver for my co-op! But I still hadn’t found something that I really wanted to get behind.

But this semester, two things happened. One, a friend of mine, Gabe, planned a direct action targeting Bank of America for being the #1 investor in mountaintop removal coal mining. I helped organize that and I was really stoked to be taking action and to be organizing again!

Also, the Berkeley student government just passed a bill to divest from fossil fuels! That would mean pulling $3-4 million of investments out of the fossil fuel industry! It was awesome to see that we could be a campus that could help lead the way for others. Our next step? Getting the UC Board of Regents to make sure that the UC’s $75 billion endowment is divested from fossil fuels. From that, I heard about Fossil Free Cal, a group that has just started out of that, to push the UC Regents to divest. 

At first, I thought it was funny that Anna and I are both getting involved in divesment on our campuses at the same time. But then I realized, it’s because it’s part of a national movement to get universities divested from fossil fuels. Now here was a cause worth getting behind!

So today, let’s March forth on climate justice!

.

Want to take action for climate justice?

Just attended the Students as Catalysts for Large Landscape Conservation Conference at Colby College. This is a video I made that was selected to show as a part of the speaker series.