Before Canada, A Must-Read Book on Tar Sands for Obama

An area of pristine boreal forest in Canada -- equivalent in size to Ireland -- has been given over recent decades to oil companies for development of the tar sands deposits there. It will be the priority item up for discussion when Prime Minister Harper meets with Barack Obama on his visit to Canada shortly after being sworn in on Tuesday.

Required reading for the President in preparation for his first foreign trip is the book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk which was published to wide acclaim in Canada in the fall, and is slated for release in the US in March. It details the impact that the $200 billion of oil money that has poured into the region has had, creating the world's largest energy project and one of its dirtiest and most dangerous.

In anticipation of Obama's visit, Prime Minister Harper told the press:

To be frank on the oil sands, we've got to do a better job environmentally.

Read Nikiforuk's book and you will see why Harper's comment has already won the award for Biggest Understatement of 2009. Nikiforuk reports that the Energy Resources Conservation Board, responsible for regulating oil and gas development in Alberta, the province where the tar sands lie, functions largely as a rubber stamp group.

Curiously, the agency has only two mobile air monitors to investigate leaks from 244 sour-gas plants, 573 sweet-gas plants, 12,243 gas batteries, and about 250,000 miles of pipelines. In any given year, the board approves more than 95% of the 60,000 applications submitted by industry.....

...there is no denying that the world's biggest energy project has spawned one of the world's most fantastic concentrations of toxic waste, producing enough sludge every day (400 million gallons) to fill 720 Olympic pools....

The result is an environmental disaster area destroying Canada's largest river basin. The tar sands are also the prime reason why Canada is projected to increase global warming emissions 24% by 2020. That puts Prime Minister Harper on a collision course with President Obama who on November 18th -- two weeks after his election, declared:

Stopping climate change won't be easy. It won't happen overnight. But I promise you this: When I am President, any governor who's willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that's willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that's willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America.

Obama did not say what a nation committed to making climate change worse would find in the White House.

But things are not so simple in politics. When he spoke to the press about the tar sands, in the same breath, Harper also said:

At the same time, the development of these things is pretty important, in our judgment, to North American energy security.

That comment gets the award for Second Biggest Understatement of 2009. The oil that flows from the tar sands makes Canada the #1 foreign supplier of oil to the US. Nikiforuk reports:

By 2002, Canada had officially replaced Saudi Arabia and Mexico as America's number-one oil source, and event of revolutionary significance. Canada currently accounts for 18% of US oil imports (that's 12% of American consumption), and the continuing development of the tar sands will double or triple those figures.

The tar sands issue is one of many "ground zero" locations that Obama must navigate with courage if he is to deliver on his promise to lead the world to global warming solutions. Canada is betting its economic future on tar sands development. Tar sands are the key to the endless fossil future being envisaged by the oil juggernauts and the lynchpin of the national energy security strategy put in place by Dick Cheney.

It's not anything can be turned off entirely, but it can be limited, and unless Obama takes a stand to do so, the US itself will fall like just another domino to the consequences of an insatiable addiction to oil: there will be no stopping tar sands development in Utah which has 60 billion barrels of the stuff that, according to Nikiforuk, are

.....deeper, thinner, and therefore uglier, than Alberta's resource. To date, appalling costs and extreme water issues have kept Americans from ripping up 2.4 million acres of western landscape. But that may soon change.

Nikiforuk published his words before Obama's election; perhaps now his book will inform the President on the dire necessity of safeguarding the future of this continent from the tar age we're headed towards.

This upcoming trip to Canada will set the tone for climate and energy policy and provide a window on what to expect in the years ahead. Stay tuned.

See Also

Canada's Tar Sands, America's Problem

Tar Sands: If You Have Tears, Prepare To Shed Them Now

A Tale of Two Disasters: Coal Ash and Tar Sands Tailings

Alberta Tar Sands to Poison U.S. Great Lakes Region, Too

Comments

[TomNeufeld]

Inaccuracies in ‘Tar Sands’ book - Andrew Nikiforuk’s book ‘Tar Sands’contains a number of incorrect statements about the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB). For the benefit of readers and reporters who may use the book mistakenly believing it to be a factual source of information, the ERCB has been forced to correct the public record about a number of statements in Mr. Nikiforuk’s book. For more information cut and paste link below
Tom Neufeld, ERCB Communications Manager

http://www.ercb.ca/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_0_304_264_0_43/http%3B/ercbContent/publishedcontent/publish/ercb_home/news/news_releases/2008/nr2008_285.aspx

[SamEllison]

Just say no to tar sands!

[wendynyc]

Thanks for posting this. We all need to work together to ensure that we meet our energy needs by using clean renewable energy.

Sarah Palin was citing this very tar sand project in Canada as something we could expect more of as an alternative to Middle East Oil - d a m n the environment - would be her take on it!