Government says it’s ‘diffiult’ to reduce the emissions from Canada’s oil sands 4

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1. 

   drewdesouza Posted 9:52 am
   27 Nov 2008

   c'monI think the point of Keith's comment is that carbon capture is not a realistic endeavour when instead people should be worried about reducing their oil consumption in general.
   And also oilsands isn't not oil buried in sand. It's in a porous rock that requires a huge amount of water and heat to break up into a "sand" or bitumen.
   And further, in that link you provided, you were discussing carbon capute in a coal fired plant. Of course the stream would be quite concentrated coming out of a plant and namely its smoke stack. The problem is when you pump heated water and natural gas into the ground and use thousands of vehicles and machinery to work that bitumen for its oil it is by no means a concentrated stream. It's on the same line of trying to sequester CO2 from a super highway.
   I think the reality is that spending $2-billion on carbon caputre is the wrong way to go about things. There should be a concerted effort to reduce oil consumption and find alternative means of energy production and consumption.
   And lastly, the term "Athabasca" applies to the Athabasca river basin that the oilsands fall. Athabasca itself is 300 odd miles away from the sands.
   
   

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2. 

   katakanadian Posted 4:35 pm
   27 Nov 2008

   A couple correctionsActually, a lot of the tar is in sand. The tar can 'cement' it together into a crumbly material with lumps like rocks. I've been there and seen the Athabasca river's sandy/gravelly banks, flown over the tar sands strip mines, and been through the "Discovery Center". I don't know the situation for the deeper tar that is extracted in situ.
   Athabasca refers to a large region. Several toxic strip mine tailings ponds are located right beside the Athabasca River (and have leaked in several times). The world's largest freshwater delta is downstream where the River empties into the Lake. As far as I know there aren't any tar sands at the lake (but there is a decrepit old uranium mine site).

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3. 

   tlabadie Posted 9:29 pm
   28 Nov 2008

   Smokin' JoeCanadian naïveté? What are you smoking, Joseph? We were astute enough to stay out of Vietnam and Iraq.
   A very ungallant remark for the nation to which you'll be fleeing, um, emigrating, once runaway climate change burns the U.S. to a crisp.
   
   - The truth always sounds like what you already believe.

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4. 

   amazingdrx Posted 2:03 am
   29 Nov 2008

   Corporate citizensThey are similar everywhere they may roam.  They obey almost none of the laws regular citizens are obliged to obey.
   Their extra special immunity, obtained mainly by buying the allegiance of regulators and legislators, is then justified by mass media.
   If a regular canadian or US citizen dumped tar in a river on an ongoing basis what would happen?  Uh huh, you guessed it.  Huge fines backdated to the start of the pollution, thousands of dollars per day.  10s of thousands in legal bills to start with.  A possibility of losing the property and going to jail.
   Any ideas on how to fix this?  Maybe hold corporate officers personally responsible?  Take away the legal fiction that a corporation is a person, worthy of citizenship?
   Or just allow uranuium mining and tar sand tailings and GHG to contaminate the earth, water, and air with no consequences.  I think it's obvious which choice has been made in this case.
   And in the case of almost every interaction all around the planet between corporate wealth and power and government regulation.  Canada is no different in this respect.
   
   http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

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