BP Harborne
Earlier today we visited the BP garages in Harborne and Halesowen taking our NO TAR SANDS banner made out of messages from people across Birmingham and the Black Country expressing their anger and disappointment that BP are considering investing in the Canadian Tar Sands. The Tar Sands are the biggest industrial project on the planet and one of the dirtiest most destructive types of fuel (3-5 times more C02 per barrel than conventional oil). Just below the surface of the Boreal forest in north Alberta, Canada, is a tar / bitumen muddy substance. As conventional oil sources run out instead of switching to more sustainable sources of energy, oil companies are looking for more unconventional sources of oil. So this mixture of Tar and sand is being extracted from the ground, refined and turned into oil.
There are so many problems with the Tar Sands that it’s hard to know where to start or which bits to talk about, you could write a dissertation on the subject (don’t worry I wont). The Canadian Boreal forest is one of the biggest forests in the world (an area bigger than England) and the potential oil from them makes it the second biggest oil reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia. It’s also hugely energy intensive taking 3-4 barrels of water to get 1 barrel of oil. Large amounts of this ancient forest are being destroyed to get at the tar sands and result in massive toxic waste ponds which are leaking into the nearby athabasca river. As well as the ecological / environment problems there are also human rights issues as well. The local First Nation Canadians have seen their forest destroyed and since work began have seen massive increases in rare cases of cancer. Overall this is a massive ecological disaster that could dwarf the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
We’ve spent the past month going to different locations around Birmingham and the Black Country getting people to write their messages on our banner. Today we took those messages to not one but two BP petrol stations. First we went to the BP garage in Harborne where we handed the forecourt manager a letter about what we were doing and why we were doing it, with instructions to forward our message onto BP HQ. Whilst we were there we took the opportunity to hand out some leaflets to passers by who seemed quite receptive to what we had to say.
After we’d been there a while we decided we should head over to Halesowen, which also has a BP petrol station. We handed the manager the letter but since this one is located on a main road we couldn’t hand out any leaflets. Watch out for us over the next few weeks as we could be coming to a BP petrol station near you.
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