"One place where all our worries come together is in northeastern Alberta, Canada. There, in an area the size of Florida, is a massive deposit of oil mixed with sand. It's the second largest oil reserve after Saudi Arabia, and work has begun to extract it. Processing these so-called tar sands is a nasty business that involves large amounts of water and natural gas. It's hard to imagine a worse situation."
- The William & Hewlett Foundation
Background
The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation are billion-dollar American foundations based in San Francisco. Both the Moore Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation have clear agendas to "reform" resource-based industries in Canada, particularly the oil and gas industry, the mining industry and the salmon farming industry. The Moore Foundation funded an "antifarming campaign" to shift consumer and retailer demand away from farmed salmon and has granted $13 Million for campaigns to "reform" the salmon farming industry, including funds for its "immobilization." The Moore Foundation has also granted $2.1 million for the "reform" of the B.C. mining industry ($710,000 and $1.3 million).
The Hewlett Foundation has described the Alberta oil industry as "nasty business." "Its hard to imagine a worse situation," the Hewlett Foundation has said about the Alberta oil industry.
In 2004, the Moore Foundation paid Tides Canada $70,000 "to develop a strategic plan to address the oil and gas industry in British Columbia."
The question is, what did that "strategic plan involve? Did it involve, for instance, the channeling of tens of millions of dollars through Tides Canada and Ducks Unlimited to a large number of small environmental groups, First Nations, scientists and P.R. firms? Since 2003, the Hewlett Foundation has granted a total of $25.7 million for various projects to tackle the energy sector in Canada, including the Boreal Forest Initiative which is heavily funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts - and co-ordinated by Ducks Unlimited?
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