They’re on their way.Photo: Shell

Over the past decade, Canada has become the world’s largest exploiter of tar sands, paying a high environmental cost to extract and convert its heavy oil, known as bitumen, into usable forms. The tar-sands boom has made Canada into the United States’ largest source of foreign oil — as well as a major target of environmentalists, who strongly oppose a pipeline that would carry tar-sands crude to U.S. refineries.

It’s unlikely that Utah will ever rival Alberta’s bitumen mines in terms of numbers or size. The state is thought to contain 12 to 19 billion barrels of tar-sands oil, compared to Alberta’s 174 billion. Still, thousands of acres of pristine wilderness are at risk, as is the environmental taboo that has so far kept one of the world’s dirtiest forms of energy production off of U.S. soil.

A new split over climate policy is brewing within the ranks of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a breakaway group of local chambers is getting ready to publicly split with the business lobby’s hardline stance against climate legislation. The new climate coalition, known as the Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy (CICE), will press Congress to take stronger action on climate and energy issues. It has already signed up about a dozen chambers and will officially launch later this year.

The U.S. Chamber is already working behind the scenes to discredit the new group. After it caught wind of the effort last month, it fired off a letter to local chamber leaders, discouraging them from joining CICE, which it claimed was “established by the Natural Resources Defense Council.” The letter, written by U.S. Chamber board member Winthrop Hallett, the president of Alabama’s Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce, states that the new group’s “indirect purpose appears to be undermining the U.S. Chamber’s and the business community’s leadership on” climate issues. 

The claim that CICE is little more than a front group for the NRDC is “outrageous” and “really just pissed me off,” says Steve Falk, the president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which has been organizing the independent climate coalition. Hallett’s letter, which has not been posted publicly but which Mother Jones has seen, does not explain the alleged connection between CICE and the NRDC. Hallett and a spokesman for the U.S. Chamber did not respond to requests for comment.

In a letter that Falk sent to local chamber leaders last week in response to the U.S. Chamber’s attack, he speculated that its claim of a NRDC link might be based on CICE’s connection with Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), a NRDC partner group that bills itself as “the independent business voice for the environment.” Falk and E2 cofounder Bob Epstein say that the group did help create CICE’s website but did not conceive of the idea for the group or craft its talking points.

In his letter to chamber leaders, Falk assured them that “no organizations other than local chambers of commerce have or will influence CICE’s principles.” The “core principles” published on CICE’s website call for America to “lead the clean energy race” and assert that “limiting carbon emissions will drive innovation.” Falk says the principles were crafted in partnership with other chambers and were based on language the San Francisco Chamber had originally developed in support of AB 32, California’s cap-and-trade law, which is scheduled to go into effect later this year.

Falk says the San Francisco Chamber began organizing the alternative climate coalition two months ago after he realized that lobbying for a climate bill on his own “is probably not the best way to impact national legislation.” Thousands of businesses have signed up to support carbon regulations through coalitions such as American Businesses for Clean Energy, but he noticed that no similar effort existed among local chambers of commerce. He worried that the chambers’ failure to go to bat on the issue could mean that companies in San Francisco and other progressive cities “will wake up one day and question the relevance of chambers of commerce.” Dozens of local chambers from cities across the country are seriously considering joining CICE, accordig to Falk. Last month, he decided to postpone CICE’s original August launch date after plans to limit carbon emissions stalled in the Senate. But the group’s existence leaked out late last week after a reporter from the Aspen Daily News attended a board meeting of the Aspen Chamber of Commerce, a CICE member.

Though the national Chamber of Commerce has said that it could support some form of climate bill, it has opposed aggressive efforts to limit carbon emissions and argued that any such action should be the result of a global treaty, not federal regulation. Over the past year, it has faced widening divisions over its policy. Since last August, when Chamber Vice President Bill Kovacs called for a “Scopes Monkey Trial” on climate science, more than a dozen major companies have dropped out of the Chamber or distanced themselves from its climate policy. Several local chambers have publicly opposed the national group’s climate stance; the San Francisco Chamber even lobbied against it in Washington.

The U.S. Chamber has known about the new climate coalition since mid-July, when its West Coast representative obtained a copy of a membership solicitation from the group. Falk then sent the U.S. Chamber a copy of CICE’s principles and asked for feedback. The only official response he’s gotten to date is a copy of the letter from Winthrop Hallett, who chairs the U.S. Chamber’s Committee of 100, a top policy committee.

Falk ultimately hopes to attract 30 to 50 local chambers to CICE — enough to earn the group a prominent spot in the national climate debate. The way he sees it, there’s no conflict between advocating for a progressive climate policy and remaining staunchly pro-business. “I mean, we’re a chamber of commerce,” he says. “We don’t want government to mandate how business is run. But we know that there’s a whole new economy out there, a whole new economic development engine with a move to clean energy. We see it happening in San Francisco. We think that’s possible elsewhere.”

Want tickets to a Sacramento King’s game? Just drop a line to our good friends BP.Photo courtesy of Logan Sakai via flickrFor more than a decade, BP has operated a hush-hush phone line that California lawmakers can call to request box seats to NBA games and concerts at the Sacramento stadium named after its West Coast subsidiary.

In the past five years, BP has given state officials more than 1,200 complimentary tickets to the Arco Arena, hosting them in its corporate suite to see Sacramento Kings games, World Extreme Cagefighting matches, and Britney Spears and Lil Wayne concerts. Getting the tickets is as easy as calling the BP ticket request line, an exclusive, unpublished phone number that appears to exist for the sole purpose of granting freebies to lawmakers, regulators, and their staffs.

“You make a request, leave it on the voicemail, and at some date the tickets either magically appear or they don’t,” says a legislative consultant who gave me the ticket line’s number and spoke on condition of anonymity. “They don’t talk to you; you just see ‘em or you don’t.” The ticket line’s message was taken down sometime in the past week, shortly after I began my reporting. You can still listen to the original recording below.

BP has handed out far more tickets to California lawmakers than have other oil companies or other companies with stadium-naming rights. Although Arco began the ticket giveaways before it merged with BP in 2000, the tickets remain a convenient political tool for BP, which uses them to curry favor with politicians while still technically complying with a proclamation in its corporate code that it “will make no political contributions, whether in cash or in-kind, anywhere in the world.” (Free tickets aside, that claim is pretty shaky, as The Washington Post recently pointed out.)

In 2006, BP gave away 321 Arco Arena tickets, more than in any year since. That same year, California lawmakers were debating and voting on AB 32, the sweeping climate law that will go into effect later this year. BP has dedicated a significant chunk of its $600,000 California lobbying budget over the past year to weighing in on the implementation of the law, which includes a cap-and-trade system. BP’s California lobbyist, Ralph Moran, did not respond to requests for comment.

Some recipients of BP tickets are playing key roles in crafting the climate law’s landmark environmental policies. In 2008 and 2009, BP gave NBA tickets to Virgil Welch, a top policy advisor to the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state air-quality agency. It also gave Kings tickets to Dan Pellissier, then the deputy secretary for energy policy at the state environmental protection agency; Pellissier is now a deputy cabinet secretary advising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on energy and environmental policy.

This March, Schwarzenegger sent a letter to CARB urging it to embrace carbon offsets and to give polluting industries free emissions permits under AB 32′s cap-and-trade system—approaches opposed by environmental groups but backed by BP’s lobbyists. Rachel Arrezola, a spokeswoman for the governor, would not say whether Pellissier had helped the governor draft the letter. She responded to a question about his basketball tickets in a short email. “The Governor has a very strict no gift policy that he expects his staff to follow,” she wrote. “Before Mr. Pellissier joined the governor’s office, he attended a Kings game in February 2009 paid for by BP. He followed all [state ethics] rules regarding the gift.”

Such freebies are illegal at the national level; the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 prohibits federal lawmakers and their staffers from accepting tickets and other gifts from lobbyists or companies that hire lobbyists. But they’re completely legal in many states, including California. The BP ticket line’s three-minute recorded message included detailed instructions on how to accept tickets without violating limits on political gifts. “Before making your request,” it says, “please be aware that … all tickets provided to a reportable individual and their families or friends … will count towards a reportable individual’s annual gift limit.” California caps the value of a donor’s gifts to an individual government official and their relatives at $420 annually.

For most of the 20th century, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was known for its boardwalk, amusement park, and wide, sandy beaches, popular with daytrippers from Washington, D.C. “The bathing beach has a frontage of three miles,” boasted a tourist brochure from about 1900, “and is equal, if not superior, to any beach on the Atlantic Coast.”

Today, on a cloudless spring afternoon, the resort town’s sweeping view of Chesapeake Bay is no less stunning. But there’s no longer any beach in Chesapeake Beach. Where there once was sand, water now laps against a seven-foot-high wall of boulders protecting a strip of pricey homes marked with “No Trespassing” signs.

Surveying the armored shoreline, Jim Titus explains how the natural sinking of the shoreline and slow but steady sea-level rise, mostly due to climate change, have driven the bay’s water more than a foot higher over the past century. Reinforcing the eroding shore with a sea wall held the water back, but it also choked off the natural supply of sand that had replenished the beach. What sand remained gradually sank beneath the rising water.

Titus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s resident expert on sea-level rise, first happened upon Maryland’s disappearing beaches 15 years ago while looking for a place to windsurf. “Having the name ‘beach,’” he discovered, “is not a very good predictor of having a beach.” Since then, he’s kept an eye out for other beach towns that have lost their namesakes — Maryland’s Masons Beach and Tolchester Beach, North Carolina’s Pamlico Beach, and many more. (See a map of Maryland’s phantom beach towns here.) A 54-year old with a thick shock of hair and sturdy build, Titus could pass for a vacationer in his Panama hat, khakis, and polo shirt. But as he picks his way over the rocky shore, he’s anything but relaxed.

For nearly 30 years, Titus has been sounding the alarm about our rising oceans. Global warming is melting polar ice, adding to the volume of the oceans, as well as warming up seawater, causing it to expand. Most climatologists expect oceans around the world to rise between 1.5 and 5 feet this century. Some of the hardest-hit areas could be in our own backyard: Erosion and a shift in ocean currents could cause water to rise four feet or more along much of the East Coast. Titus, who contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Nobel Prize-winning reports, has done more than anyone to determine how those rising seas will affect us and what can be done about them.

Like his occasional collaborator, NASA climatologist James Hansen, Titus has decided to speak out. He’s crisscrossed the country to meet with state and local officials in coastal areas, urging them to start planning now for the slow-motion flood. Yet his warnings have mostly fallen on deaf ears. “We were often told by mid-level officials that their bosses did not want to plan for anything past the next election,” he says.

Neither, it seems, does the federal government. Over the past decade, Titus and a team of contractors combined reams of data to construct a remarkably detailed model of how sea-level rise will impact the eastern seaboard. It was the largest such study ever undertaken, and its findings were alarming: Over the next 90 years, 1,000 square miles of inhabited land on the East Coast could be flooded, and most of the wetlands between Massachusetts and Florida could be lost. The favorably peer-reviewed study was scheduled for publication in early 2008 as part of a Bush Administration report on sea-level rise, but it never saw the light of day-an omission criticized by the EPA’s own scientific advisory committee. Titus has urged the more science-friendly Obama administration to publish his work, but so far, it hasn’t-and won’t say why.

So Titus recently launched a personal website, risingsea.net, to publish his work. “I decided to do my best to prevent the taxpayer investment from being wasted,” he says. The site includes “When the North Pole Melts,” a prescient holiday ditty recorded by his musical alter ego, Captain Sea Level, in the late ’80s.

Titus gazes at Chesapeake Beach’s jagged shoreline, where two children scramble over the barrier of large grey boulders known as a revetment. “The children of 21st Century Chesapeake Beach, what do they do?” he asks. “They play on revetments.” A generation ago, these kids might have been skipping through the waves. A generation from now, many of the rocks they’re playing on will almost certainly be underwater.

At I Trust My Legs, an illegal mining camp along a gray stream in the West African nation of Ghana, trespassers have bored vertical shafts deep into the ground. On a recent morning, Maxwell Adzoka strapped a lamp to his head, pressed his bare back and shoeless feet against the slick clay walls of one of these shafts, and climbed down, his yellow bulb disappearing into the darkness. When he reemerged, he was bearing thick stones rippled with gold, enough to buy meat, palm wine, and clothes for his eight children. It was a lucky day for Adzoka, and not only because of his find: He could just as easily have died from a collapsed tunnel, mercury poisoning, or a rifle shot.

Maxwell Adzoka descends.

Across Africa, in countries with rich mineral reserves and barren economies, thousands of the unemployed dig for fortunes on land controlled by large mining companies. Operating illegally and unregulated, these miners use primitive extraction techniques not seen in the United States since the California gold rush a century ago. With dynamite, pickaxes, mercury, and the strength of their arms, they earn a living at great threat to their health and environment.

Located on West Africa’s Gold Coast, Ghana earns the majority of its foreign exchange from gold, most of it extracted by multinational corporations. The government says these companies funnel money into public coffers and minimize environmental impacts, but disaffected villagers say the firms have ravaged their lands and given little in return. As an alternative, many locals support the illegal miners, known as galamsey, despite the threats posed by their toxic methods. Concentrated in Ghana’s heavily excavated southwestern rainforests, the galamsey comprise one of the largest groups of illegal miners on the continent.

The Gold Standard

Small-scale mining was a respected tradition in Ghana for centuries, but became a persecuted profession after the British colonized the region in the early 19th century and banned the practice. Ghana’s independent government legalized small-scale mining in 1989, but the government grants few mining concessions to peasants, forcing most people to mine illicitly.

Adzoka bristles over his lack of a legal place to dig, recalling how his ancestors mined freely. “They were working in peace, they were not having any problems,” he said, gazing toward the trenches of I Trust My Legs from his stoop below a tree. “But now, we are being harassed.”

Adzoka and other galamsey at I Trust My Legs.

Established 11 years ago, I Trust My Legs earned its name in 2000, when miners ran from a police raid. Now the 3,000 galamsey here rely on a committee that bribes the police to turn a blind eye to their illegal mining activity. Amid piles of silt and the drone of rusty water pumps, they hammer rocks in unstable tunnels that are buttressed here and there with boards. If the mining company that controls this land decides to return, another raid could force the galamsey away.

Since mining began at I Trust My Legs, Adzoka estimates that 10 workers have died here. Collapsing mine shafts during the rainy season have killed the most, but over the long run, many more could die from mercury exposure. Miners inhale mercury vapors when they heat the element in boiling pots to purify gold. Discarded into streams, mercury also builds up in the fish widely consumed by villagers. In humans, mercury exposure can cause kidney problems, arthritis, memory loss, miscarriages, and psychotic reactions.

This miner has struck gold.

Adzoka has mined with mercury for 20 years and he fears he will soon feel its effects. Nevertheless, he still handles it with his bare hands. “Even though it is dangerous and poisonous,” he said, “there is nothing I can do about it.”

At 53, Adzoka sports the well-toned arms and legs of a man in his 20s. In a country where the average life expectancy is 57, he has already outlived many in less hazardous lines of work. The only signs of his age are his receding hairline and a round belly that overhangs the band of his muddy shorts. He eats well, thanks largely to the gold he digs from the ground.

Adzoka grows palm trees, cassava, and pineapple on his two acres of land, earning an income on par with the national average of $340 a year. He and his family could survive on farming alone, he said, but the extra $150 a month he earns from mining helps pay for medicine, school supplies, and a well-rounded diet.

Chief Nana Kofi Dei II.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A few miles down a potholed road from where I talked with Adzoka, the chief of the village of Dumasi, Nana Kofi Dei II, sat on a throne in his humbly furnished living room. He wore rings on six fingers, a bracelet, a thick arm band, an ankle band, two long necklaces with pendants, and a crown — all made of ornately cast gold. Normally, he keeps this finery locked in a closet and brings it out only for ceremonies. To sell it would dishonor the 10 generations of his ancestors who wore it and erase one of the few remaining signs that villagers in this mud-hut town once controlled the precious minerals beneath their feet.

Until a few years ago, locals still mined gold at Dumasi. The village brimmed with more than 3,000 galamsey who had fled from government clampdowns on camps elsewhere. These miners flocked to the village, lining the one paved street with impromptu houses and dotting the surrounding hills with deep shafts sunk for gold. Mercury flowed from these sites into Dumasi’s three streams — and into the villagers. A study completed by the U.N. Industrial Development Organization recently found that the majority of villagers sampled — including non-miners — carried unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies. The concentrations found in fish were up to three times higher than levels deemed safe by the U.S. EPA.

A large mining company, now owned by Canadians and known as Bogoso Gold Limited, came here in 1990 with plans to mine the hills using modern techniques — and no mercury. It seemed to Dei like a good proposition. “We thought the company would give some relief [from poverty and environmental problems],” he said, “not that it would make the situation worse.” Dei also hoped Bogoso Gold would hire villagers for well-paying mining jobs. But he soon realized the company required relatively few people to operate its heavy machinery, and wanted employees with more education than anyone living in the village had received.

Meanwhile, the thousands of galamsey who once worked here were gradually forced to leave. One of them was Adzoka. When the police raided the camp, firing their guns into the night, he fled through the forest and badly cut his face. Others fared much worse. “To escape, some people jumped into the mine pits,” he said, “and that was the end.” After the galamsey left and Bogoso Gold took over, only 2,500 villagers remained, down from a peak population of 6,000. Daily sales at Dei’s small pharmacy — once a respectable $20 — plummeted to less than $3. Farmers and other vendors also suffered. “Now children are not in school because their parents are not employed,” Dei said.

Devastation wrought by Bogoso Gold near Dumasi.

Once Bogoso Gold began mining, it bulldozed the trees and topsoil from hills, removed entire slopes, destroyed the village’s three streams, and polluted its groundwater. The company currently hauls drinking water in with tanker trucks. Until the mining ended about two years ago, it took place 24 hours a day, sometimes less than one city block from where people lived. Dei Nkrumah, a farmer, said blasting from the mine site once sent a stone sailing into the air and through the tin roof of his kitchen. “If somebody was in the house at the time the stone came through, he could have died,” Nkrumah said, staring up at the tennis ball-sized puncture. “It was dangerous.”

The General Manager for Bogoso Gold, Peter Claringbull, declined to comment for this story.

Bogoso Gold built Dumasi a school and community center and provided it with poles and cables for electricity. To some extent, the company will be required to restore the land it has mined near the village with grass and trees. Despite these improvements, Dei said he preferred life with the galamsey. “There was no disruption of our land, because we had the galamsey, but still enough land for farming,” he said. “We wish the mining companies had not come.”

In the Mine’s Eye

A short walk from I Trust My Legs, the village of Nakabah swells with the galamsey who left Dumasi. The chief there, Nana Kobinai Andoh, takes a moment to converse with other elders when asked which he prefers, galamsey or mining companies.

“The galamsey mining helps the community most because a lot of people can go and do it,” he says from his chair in a courtyard between two turquoise huts. “Formerly, burglary used to be common here,” he added, “but it is no more because people are employed [at I Trust My Legs].”

Yet the galamsey still technically commit theft, because the concession at I Trust My Legs is owned by Bogoso Gold. Andoh said he thought the company might soon return to the area, and he planned to ask it and the government to officially give part of the concession to the galamsey, as a compromise. But that is unlikely, government officials said, because mining companies refuse to give up valuable goldfields.

The creek that runs through I Trust My Legs.

Another obstacle is the location of I Trust My Legs in one of the most dangerous places imaginable for galamsey mining. The ground under the camp is laced with sulfide ores, according to Michael Sandoh Ali, district officer for the western region at the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency. When dug up and exposed to oxygen, these ores generate sulfuric acid, which further dissolves harmful heavy metals such as iron, copper, lead, and mercury, sending them into streams and groundwater. Decades ago, a company mined at I Trust My Legs, then capped the sulfides with earth and topsoil. The galamsey have reopened the wound. As the owner of this concession area, Bogoso Gold is liable for the environmental harm caused by the galamsey. “The area has been rehabilitated and it has done well,” Ali said. “But the galamsey came in and started working there. It’s unfair.”

Despite the problem, Ali said there is little he can do to solve it. “If I go and tell the police force that the devastation is too serious, that you have to get these people out of the place, then these people are given information that the police are coming,” he said. “They just don’t go to work the next day. You can never, ever track them down.” Even if he could round up the miners, Ali added, local communities wouldn’t stand for a clampdown on the galamsey. “It is part of the culture of the Ghanian.”

A Canary in a Gold Mine

The government of Ghanaian President John Kufuor announced a pragmatic plan to deal with galamsey mining last year, in which it pledged to give land to galamsey miners if they formed collective associations. According to the Wassai Association of Communities Affected by Mining, a Ghanaian environmental group that supported the plan, around 60 galamsey collectives have been formed, but the government still hasn’t followed through on its pledge.

Bogoso Gold trucks in water because wells have been poisoned.

If the government gave the galamsey legal places to mine, communities might support a crackdown on illegal exploitation, said George Awudi, mining coordinator for Friends of the Earth in Ghana. Awudi said he would prefer well-regulated, small-scale mining to strip-mining by large companies. “If proper equipment was provided for them and proper training was done, then the mercury pollution could be controlled,” he said.

Ahmed Nantoqmah, media relations manager for the Chamber of Mines, an industry group, countered that the government gives preference to large mining companies for good reason. “If you give a mining concession to the natives, they might mismanage,” he said. “If you give it to a large company, it can do it better.”

Unlike small miners, the mining companies pay 3 percent of their gross earnings to the government. Part of this money goes into a fund for environmental restoration and a portion goes to local chiefs. The remaining 80 percent funds government programs nationwide.

The signs of mining company programs were hard to miss on the road to I Trust My Legs. Hundreds of children in orange school uniforms clogged the road, going home after a day at the Prestea Goldfields School, where classes are subsidized by the mining company. Yet absent from this crowd were the seven children of Grace Ofori, who was on her way to the galamsey camp to sell boiled yams. She couldn’t afford to pay her children’s school fees, she said, but as long as she could sell to the galamsey here, she would at least be able to get by.

“It won’t be easy if they leave because I don’t have any skills,” she said, as her children hovered around her in torn T-shirts. “So it will mean I cannot feed my family.”

Before Adzoka descended his shaft again on the afternoon I spoke with him, he said the galamsey camp would remain in existence for as long as the bribing arrangement lasted with the police. But, he added, the arrangement was not to be trusted, as shown by the last raid — the one that gave the camp its name. He laughed when asked if the name still rang true for him. “Yes,” he said, “because I can run.”

Editor’s note: Locals report that Adzoka disappeared from I Trust My Legs after this story was reported. His whereabouts are unknown.

All photos by Josh Harkinson.