The largest refinery for tar sands in North America is just miles from down town Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan. Thomas Frank has written and spoken out for years about the British Petroleum (BP) refinery in East Chicago, Indiana, and faced retaliation for doing so. The BP refinery is fed by pipelines around Lake Michigan and is the source of the mountains of petroleum coke (pet coke) in SE Chicago that are spewing black dust over the area and fueling protests by local residents. Frank discuses the life- and planet-threatening developments at the center of U.S. energy policy, and resistance to it, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
Thomas Frank - www.thomasfrank.org Tar Sands Free Midwest - www.tarsandsfreemidwest.org Revolution Books, Chicago
Thomas Frank has lived in East Chicago for 17 years. He studied Urban Planning in graduate school and became a director of projects to clean up the Indiana Harbor Shipping Canal and Calumet River, considered to be the most polluted bodies of water in the country. Frank spoke out against the wide-scale corruption he found in projects to re-industrialize the southern shores of Lake Michigan, especially the BP refinery expansion. Standing largely alone in the BP-dominated towns, he was relieved of all public duties. Frank has spoken at conferences and universities in the Midwest and Alberta, Canada, working to connect communities who are on the front-lines fighting tar sands projects. Contact him if you are interested in joining the annual Labor Day bike tour he speaks of: info@thomasfrank.org For scale of the crisis http://www.tarsandsworld.com/
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