Bad PR Week in Fort McMoney
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 11.10.07
It has not been a good week for the flacks in Calgary who stomp on little old ladies to keep the lid on news about Canada's environmental embarrassment, the Alberta tar sands.In Sydney, Australia, they call it " black gold with a black heart." In New York City, the Times headline reads "Study Finds Carcinogens in Water Near Alberta Oil Sands Projects.", about how the Athabasca River is poisoning the native people downstream at Fort Chipewyan. To top it all off, it gets the full Kolbert in the New Yorker, who describes the wild growth of this industry that has turned an area the size of Florida into a close approximation of Mordor: "For every barrel of synthetic crude that Suncor eventually produces, forty-five hundred pounds of tar sands have to be dug up and separated....It’s estimated that by 2012 tar-sands operations will consume two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, more than every house in Canada."
Read TreeHugger on how The Tar Sands are eating our dinner , they are Stupid to the Last Drop, and Andrew Nkiforuk on Canada's Highway to Hell
wow, I didn't know there was such thing as tar sands. it seems logical though that that sort of thing being disturbed would make a mess of the environment around it.
wow, I didn't know there was such thing as tar sands. it seems logical though that that sort of thing being disturbed would make a mess of the environment around it.
The crazy thing about the tar sands in Alberta is EVERYBODY knows its bad news. But everyone in this horrible province is more concerned about living in 10000 square foot homes and driving Ford F350's. You can't mention to anyone that the tar sands are consuming land at a alarming rate, poisoning our rivers, etc. because they honestly just look at you and say "But its good for our economy".
I'm so sick of hearing that the oil sands are good for our economy. I find it very hard to believe that a unsustainable practice that will make us gobs of money now, but will be useless 10 years from now is good for us. The Alberta government needs to step back and look at other methods of power production.
On a side note, the Alberta government is in the process of looking for a potential site for a nuclear power plant. The purpose of the power plant is to provide energy solely for the tar sands production. Fantastic! Dangerous, scary energy to power even scarier dangerous energy production. Somebody save me from this place we call Hellberta.
with a lot of the people being migrant workers in the tar sands you can guess that there is very little care to what is going on. Its not their backyard they are destroying, they are just there for the money then they're gone.
There is lots of propaganda that comes from shell and the other oil companies that would have you believe they they come in with agreement of everyone one around them take the oil out, replant the forest and leave. "win-win"
very ridiculous, hellberta will be a likeness to mordor very soon indeed.
well I don't know how much it would save if we didn't import oil cause it does take oil energy to ship it to America usa maybe we would be better to use coal
but we should use solar the best source of energy
Also, check out VBS.tv's documentary Toxic Alberta - available in segments on YouTube and at their own website to view for free (with commercial interruptions), and investigative journalist William Marsden's new book Stupid To The Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon To Canada (And Doesn't Seem To Care).
Yes, they are essentially knocking down forests and strip-mining an area THE SIZE OF FLORIDA.
The projected natural-gas use estimates are interesting, but also amusing, because natural gas is projected to go off a cliff well before we run out of oil. In any case, it boggles the mind to think that, ultimately, we're using MORE energy to get oil out of the bitumen than is contained in the oil. From burning this natural gas to make steam for the process, Fort McMurray is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada's greenhouse emissions.
The effect on the Athabasca River is devastating. Pretty much everything downstream is either dead, dying, or mutated. There are cancer clusters all around the area. The amount of toxic water currently held in tailings ponds would cover England. If they were to actually extract all the oil in the tar sands, it would use up the equivalent of TEN LAKE SUPERIORS.
Sorry for the all-caps, but people have to wake up to what a national, ecological, and humanitarian boondoggle this is. No political party -- even the eco-friendly NDP or Greens -- have advanced any policy or platform that advocates shutting down the tar sands operations.
I guess the only way to stop them is to make them uneconomical -- through demand destruction. This would require us to, in the short term, stop driving so damn much; and in the near to long term, switch our transportation infrastructure to electric light rail / high speed rail, and elsewhere, plug-in electric and hyper-efficient diesel. It also means lifestyle changes like putting an end to ridiculous, energy-wasting commuting, and rethinking urban design to create compact, livable, walkable cities instead of suburban gulags.
Cos if we don't, then we automatically get a new negotiating partner called REALITY. (copyright james kunstler).