Pembrokeshire Friends of the Earth - News

A Visit from the US Gulf Coast  15th April 2013

Bryan Parras is an environmental justice activist from the US Gulf Coast. He recently came to London with 2 others to attend the BP AGM. They were there to hold BP to account for the devastating impact of the deep water horizon spill.
During his visit he also joined UK Tar Sands Network at a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline directed at US Secretary of State John Kerry who was attending a meeting of the G8. He then travelled to Pembrokeshire with Emily Coats of the UK Tar Sands Network. We meet him first at Bloomfields where Bryan gave a fascinating account of the small, largely latino, Community of Manchester, Houston Texas.
This forgotten community is surrounded on all sides by heavy industry(see map). Looking at the pictures it is hard to imagine the smell, the noise, the level of polution and the impact this must have on the health of this small community.
Yet with the completiton of the Keystone XL pipeline it is set to get worse. Valero's gulf refineries are one of the main destinations of the tar sands bitumen this pipeline will transport. This corrosive, toxic and most highly CO2 intensive product would be refined into diesel right next door to Manchester. It is this diesel which we believe Valero will import into the UK via Pembroke. Here it may be refined into petrol which can end back in the US, or the petrol pumps of the UK and Europe.
The fight faced by Manchester reminded us of our fight againt orimulsion, a fuel with very simular properties to tar sands oil.
Manchester needs to move but so far all Valero has offered is the buy part of the area which would allow them to expand. They offered to buy the land but not the houses on it! In an interview for Bridge the Gulf Yudith Nieto and Emmanuel Guajargo talk more about Manchester and their protests.
This community like many others up and down the US is fighting the pipeline which threatens its health and wellbeing and that of our planet.
As Emily Coats points out  in her account Watchout Valero "Few things put the wind up a corporation more than when its critics start to unite. Making every issue seem isolated and insignificant is a perpetual tactic to divide and conquer dissenting voices – so showing that each case is symptomatic of a wider problem is a powerful way to disarm them."
We thank Bryan for coming to visit us and hope he enjoyed his tour around Pembrokeshire despite the rain and wind!