Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister is in New York today trying to convince lawmakers that the tar sands are okay, and that the Keystone XL pipeline should go ahead.

At the same time, Canada’s environment minister is in London trying to convince politicians there that tar sands crude is the same as regular sweet crude, and should not be subject to a polluter tax.

Dave Pollard, author of The Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work on his blog “how to save the world” has what he calls Preparing for Collapse: The New Political Map. It is an interesting taxonomy of the varieties of political animals roaming around in this pre-collapse epoch.

While clean up continues on the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas, another oil pipeline burst was detected over the weekend – this time in Houston, Texas.

The Helmholtz Association of Research Centres, a major German scientific body with more than 30,000 researchers and US$4.4 billion in annual funding, has dropped out of a joint Alberta tar sands project over fears that the project was damaging the institution’s reputation.

The climate change site, DeSmogBlog has found that Environmental Resources Management, the consulting firm behind the Keystone XL Pipeline environmental impact assessment, has been at the center of controversial pipeline projects in the past.

Activists working against the 2002 planned construction of British Petroleum’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Turkey, singled out Environmental Resources Management (ERM) for what they saw as ERM “grooming” the BP pipeline for construction. Like the Keystone XL pipeline assessment, ERM’s assessment of the Turkish pipeline was seen as flawed and drafted in a way that gave all but the green light for the pipeline to be constructed.

Tom Borelli, a former science director at Philip Morris who fought claims that secondhand tobacco causes lung cancer and respiratory illness in children, is now touted on Fox News as an expert on the cleanliness of the coal industry. Borelli was busy this election season fighting Obama’s “war on coal” on behalf of his new employer, FreedomWorks.

Borelli has a long history of attacking the EPA on behalf of Big Tobacco. Serving in his role as Philip Morris’ Director of Corporate Scientific Affairs, Borelli appeared in a notorious 1992 film produced by Philip Morris attacking the Environmental Protection Agency for declaring secondhand tobacco smoke a known cancer causing agent.

F*ck You, Science!

Luckily, women’s human rights advocates are in Rio. We are working hard to ensure that the gains of the past 20 years are upheld. We will make the point, again and again, and as long as it takes, that the human rights and health of half the world’s population are not only vital to achieving sustainable development, but that there is no other way to realize that goal.

Ernst & Young estimates in a new publication [pdf] that half of all shareholder proposals in 2011 will deal with environmental and social issues, and support for these proposals is growing. In fact, “83 percent of investors now believe environmental and social factors can have a significant impact on shareholder value over the long term.”

Wendell Berry is a farmer and author who writes on issues of agriculture, the environment, and sustainability. In his 1997 essay “Energy in Agriculture,” he blames the rise of fossil fuels for the damaging shift from family farms to industrial agriculture. He then connects this transformation in agricultural practices to the all-conmsuming oil addiction that is slowly bringing America to her knees – calling it theft from future generations.