It was big news in Canada when, in 2008, the country slipped from the top-ten list of the world's most peaceful countries (all the way to eleventh). By this year, it was back in eighth, 74 places above the U.S. and, when liberals in the U.S. feel despairing, what dominates their fantasy life but "moving to Canada?"
And yet, today, you could make an argument that Canada has actually become one of the earth's more irresponsible nations -- namely, when it comes to the environment. Indeed, you could argue that the world would be better off if the government in Ottawa was replaced by, say, the one in Brasilia, which has made a far better show of attending to the planet's welfare. It's a tale of physics, chemistry, and most of all economics, and it all starts in the western province of Alberta.
The Province's Tar Sands cover an area larger than the United Kingdom and contain most of the world's supply of bitumen, a particularly sticky form of petroleum that must be heated or diluted before it can be pumped. Because it's so unwieldy, it's only been in recent years that large-scale development of the tar sands have taken place. The steep rise in global oil prices has set off a boom in the region, with all that naturally follows (prostitutes have reported incomes as high as $15,000 a week).
But this is a boom unlike others. It's the first huge oil play of the global-warming era, the first time we've dangerously stepped onto new turf, even though we understand the stakes.
NASA's James Hansen, the earth's premier climatologist, has laid out these stakes with some precision. His team found in 2008 that, if the atmospheric concentration of CO2 exceeds 350 parts per million, we won't be able to have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization exists and to which life on earth is adapted." We're at 390 parts per million right now, and, what do you know, the Arctic is melting rapidly, the atmosphere is getting steadily wetter, and the oceans are turning sharply more acid. Follow Hansen's math a little further: If we wean ourselves from fossil fuels by 2030, then the earth's CO2 levels will begin to fall, and, by century's end, we'll be back near 350. Damage will be done in the meantime, but perhaps survivable damage. And, conveniently, the world's supply of "conventional," easy-to-get-at oil is starting to dwindle: The deposits in places like Saudi Arabia, which were built long before anyone had heard of climate change, are nearing the autumn of their lives. We could, in other words, use this moment of declining oil supply as a spur to make the leap toward renewable energy -- a gut-wrenching leap, but one that, if we landed successfully, would put us in a new world.
But two things could prolong our addiction to the point where irrevocable damage is assured: coal and unconventional oil. If we keep burning these substances, then the atmospheric level of CO2 will continue to rise steadily. Which brings us back to Alberta, currently gearing up to develop more of that unconventional oil. The province's oil minister, Ron Liepert, recently told the Financial Times that Alberta was going "full speed ahead" in an effort to double production by the end of the century; indeed, he said, technological progress might allow the province to find new ways to extract oil from other formations, further increasing production and moving Canada into the top tier of the world's oil producers, alongside Saudi Arabia and Russia. Liepert said his government was "proceeding all out" to find new markets for the oil, and that he was hopeful not only of building a huge new pipeline to the U.S, but also of selling to China, which he said would "take every drop" of the tar sands oil.
The problem? If you could somehow burn all the oil in Alberta overnight (which, thank God, you can't) Hansen's team calculates it would raise the planet's concentration of CO2 by 200 parts per million -- that is, our current 390 parts per million would become almost 600 parts per million, a level not seen since the Miocene Era, about 25 million years ago. But, forgetting the overnight scenario, even just bringing the tar sands steadily online -- adding a big new stream of carbon to the atmosphere -- would make the already hugely difficult job of phasing out emissions essentially impossible. As Hansen wrote in early June in a letter to fellow scientists, "if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over." The game, in this case, being the planet.
Several thousand miles away south of Alberta, in the Amazon rainforest, things are different. In some sense, the world "discovered" the Amazon as a precious planetary resource at roughly the same time Canada discovered the commercial potential of the tar sands. When the first Rio summit on the environment was held in 1992, the Amazon was one of the stars: It was, one speaker after another insisted, the "lungs of the planet." "Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us," a young Senator named Al Gore said in those years. That didn't sit easily with Brazil, which is, after all, a very poor country, with a per capita income of under $3,000; its leaders, one after another, have declared, as one would expect, that the Amazon is theirs.
They have also, however, done fairly remarkable things to keep the forest intact. Consider the State of Acre, a fairly good analogue with Alberta: It has set up a remarkable system of controls on forest clearing, using remote sensing satellites to track down violators. It provides subsidies and tax incentives for forest protection; it's joined together with California to provide carbon credits for those who leave trees alone. None of this was easy -- Acre was the state where rubber tapper Chico Mendes was murdered in the early days of the fight over the Amazon. But, after three decades of hard work, Acre -- in the words of Stephen Kretzmann from the Environmental Defense Fund -- is "a good example of what's most needed in the world: vision, pragmatism, and the conviction and persistence to make change even when it seems impossibly difficult and distant."
Brazil as a whole has made remarkable progress: Between 2006 and 2010, the country reduced Amazon deforestation by two-thirds from the previous decade, reducing about one billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution; the annual damage is measured in Rhode Islands now, not Germanys. It still has huge problems -- in fact, there seems to be a surge of deforestation underway this year, and big agricultural interests are currently pressing to weaken the nation's forestry's law. Much hangs in the balance. But President Dilma Roussef is pledging to reduce deforestation by another 80 percent, and to cut the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent. And Brazil's voters may give her reason to keep those promises: They gave nearly one-fifth of their votes in the last election to Green Party candidate Marina Silva, the former rubber tapper responsible for much of the pathbreaking work in Acre.
Shouldn't Canada feel the same kind of responsibility to keep carbon safely in the ground that Brazil feels to keep its trees rooted? Absolutely. And another important question: Would the world stand by, as it has more or less done as Canada has accessed its tar lands, if Brazil's president promised to find new markets so that "every splinter" of wood her country produced could be sold? It's hard to imagine so.
Exploiting the tar sands is a crime, pure and simple -- and, given the stakes, it is one of the most staggering the world has ever seen. Not surprisingly, given geography and history, Canada has an accomplice in this crime. Most of the petroleum it produces gets sold in the U.S., still the largest market for oil in the world. Early in the Obama administration, the president approved a pipeline to the Midwest that expanded this trade. This year, the U.S. stands poised to open a much larger spigot, the so-called Keystone XL pipeline, which will carry the heavy Canadian bitumen to Texas refineries.
How crucial is the new pipeline project to the tar sands' future? A couple of weeks ago Canadian oilmen gave the verdict to the Globe and Mail. "Unless we get increased [market] access, like with Keystone XL, we're going to be stuck," said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary. And here's the quotable Liepert once more: "If there was something that kept me up at night, it would be the fear that before too long we're going to be landlocked in bitumen," he said. "We're not going to be an energy superpower if we can't get the oil out of Alberta." That is to say, there's no use planning this particular bank robbery if there isn't someone to drive the getaway car.
On the face of it, one would suspect Obama to say "no" to a new pipeline for Canadian oil: He ran, of course, as a staunch foe of global warming and, on the eve of his nomination, promised that, in his administration, the "rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet begin to heal." And since even the backers of the Keystone pipeline acknowledge it wouldn't cut gas prices (and, indeed, would probably cause them to rise), there's scant political reason to open the gates. But, of course, there's an awful lot of money to be made, and that money exerts incredible political pressure: Transcanada Pipeline, for instance, the main builder of the project, has hired Hillary Clinton's former deputy campaign director as its chief lobbyist, and the secretary of state has said she's "inclined" to approve the project.
Like any other vast expenditure of money, the Keystone pipeline would create jobs (though, by undercutting the emerging renewables industry, it would cost them, too), and it would make us less dependent on foreign oil, if you don't count Canada as foreign. None of that, however, gets around the essential point: to prevent the planet from overheating, you need to keep carbon in the ground. (You also need to keep coal in the ground; Obama offered a dreadful premonition of this decision earlier this year, when he opened federal land in Wyoming to coal-mining -- there's less carbon in the Powder River Basin than in the tar sands, but that one sale was the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants).
Which brings us back to the Amazon, and the double standard we are seeing when it comes to environmental politics. Let's say that President Obama was being asked to sign a certificate allowing a pipeline to carry an endless stream of logs from the Amazon. That, too, would create jobs -- but he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it because the world understands how crucial the rainforest is to its future, and because we seem to demand more from Brazil than from Canada (or the U.S., for that matter). Someday, perhaps the world will similarly stop thinking about the oil sands as a source of power and money and instead come to terms with its well-defined dangers. The question is whether we'll reach that conclusion before we pour the carbon into the air, or after.
An original version of this piece was first posted on The New Republic.
Follow Bill McKibben on Twitter: www.twitter.com/billmckibben
Frances Beinecke: Wake-Up Call From Yellowstone: Keystone XL Must Be Shelved
Stop the Tar Sands | Greenpeace International
Canadian Oil Sands — National Geographic Magazine
Oil Sands Project in Canada Will Go On if Pipeline Is Blocked ...
Q. What is Canada's contribution to global GHG production ?
Q. What are the OilSands contribution to Canada's GHG contribution ?
Q. What is the U.S. contribution to global GHG ?
Q. What is China's contribution to global GHG ?
Q. What is OPEC's contribution to global GHG ?
Globally , the reality is that China's Taiching coal fired electrical generating plant produces more GHG than the entire OilSands AND they bring a new coal fired plant online every four weeks.
As for the remarks about the natives suffering - horse feathers !
Fort McKay is a town on the Athabasca River in between the OilSands and Fort Chipewan . The people of Fort Chip has cases of cancer and blame the OilSands to the south but no one looks to the closed uranium mine at the north end of Athabasca lake whose tailings ponds have leeched into the lake for 50 years. Meanwhile Fort McKay which is half as close to the OilSands has less than half the health complaints. One thing Fort Mckay does have that the others don't have is 0% unemployment . Does your town have 0% unemployment ? The OilSands is the single largest employer of natives in North America with almost 2 billion dollars going through native partnerships.
To put things in perspective, if all the oil in the Alberta tar sands was burned, it would add 200 ppm of CO2 to the current level of 390 ppm. That's enormous.
The oil sands production has been clearly and directly linked to the huge increase in cancer rates in the area.
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/witness/2011/06/20116227153978324.html
The sad fact is the world is so addicted to oil that if the United States does not purchase it China certainly will regardless of the Global Warming issue.
Contact your elected official to tell them you are opposed to this project and why.
If you can be in Washington to be seen and heard at the end of August! Remember Peace and Trurth will prevail.
http://www.desmogblog.com/top-10-facts-canada-alberta-oil-sands-information
These same people get so upset at the threat of extinction certain species of animals, however, claim that so-called 'evolution' is always coming up with new species.
Yes we should clean up pollution, however, by no means should mankind stop using the resources available to us, to not only modernize and increase our population, but to one day discover the stars.
Okay, the tar sands and what needs to be done to them to get oil out are horrible, but lets not compare records with Brazil because they are just as screwed up as we are.
I support vigorously pursuing sustainable energy options til they can be made economical and practical.
This means while we are waiting :
1) The prudent development and use of economical fossil fuels, including Oil Sands while minimizing environmental impact.
2) Accelerated investment into large scale energy alternatives including: Wind, Tide, Solar, Thorium Nuclear Cycle Power, Nuclear Fusion, Hydrogen , Bio-Fuel, etc.
I include nuclear options because a reliable base-load generation capability is essential to sustain and grow our technological civilization.
Until we populate deserts, oceans or space with reasonably economical Solar power units, solve power transmission and storage issues, nuclear will be needed.
Uranium/Plutonium based nuclear should be replaced with Thorium asap.
Thorium based nuclear plants are inherently safer and can actually 'burn' Uranium, Plutonium, and most other long lived radioactive isotopes.
3) Invest in improving power grids and underlying technologies.
Nano technology, high temperature superconductors,Smart Grid Technologies, etc.
4) Invest in advanced high density portable power technologies like fuel cells, advanced batteries, etc.
These will be needed for vehicles and many other machines.
5) Meaningfully increase oversight and regulation on oil and gas development and production.
Deep water drilling and natural gas fracking can be dangerous and require robust risk management and oversight.
The Oil Sands, Nuclear, Natural Gas and Nuclear Fission will be used for another century, unless we kill global economic development.
But we must do as little harm as we can while pursuing the cleaner and sustainable options.
This seems to indicates that exposure to the atmosphere creates CO2, rather than burning it. If the US buys and burns oil from the alberta oilsands, and stops buying and burning oil from Saudi Arabia, is that really an increase? That's the issue I have with this logic.
http://www.desmogblog.com/top-10-facts-canada-alberta-oil-sands-information
I'm cautious about including fuel for getting vehicles to the site and getting product to market. Doesn't shipping barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia take fuel? If not, I pity the crew that rows that ship over the Atlantic. :( I'm not saying those costs shouldn't be included, but are they also included when tallying overseas oil?
The current sources of oil all have huge humanitarian and enviromental costs, from propping up fascist dictators and human rights abuses, financing and fueling wars, and wiping out marine environments.
Between the Gulf War leaking 6,000,000 US barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf, 5,000,000 barrels of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, and tragic "accidents" like Exxon Valdez, we've got the worst of both worlds; oil is creating CO2 AND destroying our oceans.
Look at the list of countries that supply oil to the world; Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Chad, Cameroon, Libya... non-democratic, human rights abusers as they rule their kingdoms with an iron fist. The Persian Gulf was never cleaned up because the bordering countries don't tend to worry about insignificant issues like the environment.
In comparison, Canadian oil sands are a better alternative where they can at least be monitored. The best alternative is moving away from fossil fuels altogether, and that would be my first choice, but the world isn't going to sit and hold its breath until that day comes.
The "science" is as unsettled as the weather.
When you have the , soon to be largest, oil source on the planet, rest assured that it will be developed, no matter what the whining environmentalists say, or do.
Message to Oil Companies: Stop Funding Science Denial
All we know is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We also knoiw that the biggest greenhouse gas effect on the earth is water vapour (clouds) - it represents some 95% of the total greenhouse effect... the effect of CO2 is miniscule and, with negative feedbacks, may even be prmoting global cooling - the computer models so loved by Hansen et al aren't good enough yet to model the feedback effects (but yet they can predict the global temperature 100 years out - NOT).
We also know (scientifically) that CO2 is plant food and increasing its concentration in the air has had a marvelous effect on all the plants, trees, food crops, algae, moss, etc. in the world. Who is to say what the "right" level of CO2 is.. more is probably better as far as humans are concerned - up to at least 2,000 ppm.
So let's drill baby drill and stop genuflecting at the green altar of Gaia.
Neither do I, really, since it was so fleet, but with quotes like "Exploiting the tar sands is a crime, pure and simple -- and, given the stakes, it is one of the most staggering the world has ever seen," it's hard to take the author seriously. Suggesting that normal commercial extraction of a vaulable worldwide commodity is on the par with genocide (what else can be possibly be referring to by saying those words?) is a prime example of villifying your opponents.
Also note that Mr. McKibben provides no alternative for a world that consumes fossil fuels. Nowhere does he identify the vast trillions of extra dollars the world would have to pony up to attempt to come up with to use alternative energies, nor does he identify the various downsides of those forms of energy (lost GDP, inventions foregone, new metals requiring vast new mines and poisoning local areas, etc.).
It's simply impossible to take such an argument seriously; not only does he implicitly compare his opponents to Hitler, he fails to even mention any alternative. A real piece of work here.
Harper has dragged his heels over the global warming issue, and just recently blocked asbestos from being added to the list of hazardous materials for products. Harper and his government are planning to go full steam ahead in ripping up Alberta to get at the tar sands, and Canadians seem to be, on the whole, ok with this.
So feel free to criticize Canada on this. Pour it on. Tell your friends to do the same, and have them tell their friends. Maybe if people are shamed enough in this country, maybe they'll wake up.
And these Global Warming advocates were appalled to the point where even Mark Lynas wrote "Well, if the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier’. " THAT'S SAYING SOMETHING:
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/06/questions-the-ipcc-must-now-urgently-answer/
http://www.thegwpf.org/best-of-blogs/3211-new-ipcc-error-renewables-report-conclusion-was-dictated-by-greenpeace.html
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/3250-the-economists-take-on-the-ipcc-and-greenpeace.html
Message to Oil Companies: Please Stop Funding Science Denial.
There's some issues here, definitely. Greenpeace should be criticized for this, and I in fact wrote to my local office. The science of environmentalism is strong enough without ideology trying to shape the results. But let's be realistic - every side of the environmental issue has pushed their agenda, because so much is at stake. But nobody warps the facts like the oil industry - anything green organizations do pales in comparison.
The issue, though, was the Tar Sands. Even if you don't believe that the emissions issue is a problem, the environmental damage this project will do is almost beyond comprehension, Just the issues of the pollution in the water table and the deforestation are enough to give reasonable people pause. The IPCC report does nothing to negate that.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the concept of trying to have clean, renewable energy. Even if the timescale in the IPCC report is wrong, the goal is still the same. A lot of oil advocates say that there will never be a replacement for oil. We better hope that's not true, because one day, it will run out.
Canadians have nothing to be ashamed of, except the spread of misinformation by US funded foundations, who supply millions of dollars to Canadian environmental groups, to further their interests.
This is why Canada's tar sands will be mined and processed. Given the choice of $5.00 gas in America and $3.00 gas America will choose the latter. Alberta is like Alaska; energy companies provide jobs for rubes and therefore Canada will not stand in the way of providing jobs. The planet will have to take another hit.