In the Nov. 12 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert published an article (unavailable online; abstract here) typical of her style: spare, restrained, vivid, cogent, devastating. The topic was Canada's tar sands, now being profitably exploited by the major oil companies: Shell, Conoco-Phillips, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.
And they've only just begun. According to Kolbert, the oil majors intend to invest more than $75 billion over the next five years in building infrastructure to transform a little bit of Canada into fuel for our cars.
"Thanks in large part to what's happening in the tar sands," Kolbert reports, "Canada has become America's No. 1 source of imported oil; the country supplies the United States with more petroleum than all of the nations of the Persian Gulf combined."
Petroleum derived from tar sands emits 15 to 40 percent more total greenhouse gas per barrel than the conventional stuff. To show what extracting it does to landscapes, the New Yorker ran an aerial photo of a used-up area in Alberta, home to the tar sands. It's as if some malign giant tried mightily to skin a vast swath of the earth with a dull blade.
Toward the end of the article, Kolbert delivers what I found to be a chilling denouement. She quotes a Canadian politician: "There is no environmental minister on earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big."
This, mind you, in a country that signed the Kyoto pact.
I don't understand how a Kyoto-signing nation can allow such insanity. And if Kyoto can't stop such a clear environmental calamity, what good is it? Maybe someone with more knowledge of global climate politics can solve these riddles for me.
But the quote reminds me of something I heard recently from a political-ecology scholar who studies Brazil. We were talking about the bad business around biofuels now underway in that nation: the ripping into rainforest and savanna, often on indigenous lands, to plant soy for industrial biodiesel production; the near-slave working conditions that prevail in the nation's booming -- and expanding -- monocropped sugarcane fields.
I asked him how President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, the former labor organizer and darling of the left, could tolerate such chicanery in the name of environmentalism.
"Lula doesn't understand agriculture, really," the professor told me." And besides, no politician could stop the biofuel push. There's just too much money at stake."
City preps and countries posture ahead of Copenhagen talks
The tar sands blow
Oil: enough energy to melt glaciers!
Comments
View as Flat
Jon Rynn Posted 6:10 am
26 Nov 2007
Just to add to the misery, until recently Shell was going to increase pollution in the Great Lakes in order to accommodate the crud that comes from the Canadian tar sands. They claim they won't now, but people will have to stay vigilant. Tar sands are in the "too-awful-to-contemplate" category of oil sources that peak oil may tilt the economy toward, including coal-to-liquids, oil shale, and other kinds of goop.
Permalink
TheGreenMiles Posted 6:34 am
26 Nov 2007
Are you at least glad that Bush now refers to our "addiction to foreign oil"?
I don't like the addiction metaphor, because it carries with it a sense of powerlessness. But there are some aspects of the metaphor that are accurate in ways that Bush doesn't intend. The spiral of increasingly self-destructive behavior - spending more and more for supplies of a substance that is harder and harder to get - is just bizarre. I caused a stir in Alberta, Canada, recently when someone asked me about the advisability of trying to extract oil by processing the tar sands they have up there. I said, "Well, junkies find veins in their toes" [laughs]. The then-premier of Alberta lost it - and hasn't recovered since.
Join the discussion on global warming, recycling, and organic beer at The Green Miles!
Permalink
justlou Posted 8:13 am
26 Nov 2007
We are all a part of that "malign giant".
So why the big fight over ANWR and now the look the other way response to tar sands?
Permalink
Sam Wells Posted 8:48 am
26 Nov 2007
Have you folks ever seen a lignite mine right here in the US? A copper mine? A Powder River coal mine? An Appalachian mountain with its top blown off? Ever see a refinery complex that is more than five miles long?
The moral hubris is shocking in the extreme, how some folks can be "holier than thou" without admitting that we in the US are the ones who are worst of all.
Onward through the fog
Permalink
In the belly Posted 9:08 am
26 Nov 2007
Tar sand development really sucks. It shouldn't be immune from condemnation because it is in Canada.
Besides, I think there is a pretty clearly implied criticism of the US, since in effect we are (again) exporting our CO2 emissions. And since much of the direction for the Canadian tar sand activities come from corporate headquarters in--you guessed it--Houston.
Permalink
Martha Hagood Posted 9:32 am
26 Nov 2007
Permalink
Sam Wells Posted 11:00 am
26 Nov 2007
Canada has been ripping up thousands of acres of trees and ground and until recently, we loved it. They provided a steady source of building materials and strategic metals as well as being a major hydrocarbon trader, especially in natural gas.
Having an opinion about something is cool but when you get on your high horse to berate people without any hope of doing any good, you are basically ineffectual and wasting your time. You can't stop the trade, slap a tax on it, or anything - it must be very frustrating.
My philosophy is to fix what we have at home and lead by example. If you don't care to join that cause, so be it. Like Don Quixote, I'm sure there are many windmills you can try to subdue.
Onward through the fog
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 2:01 pm
26 Nov 2007
This is what the Cheney energy plan is. a transition from liquid oil guzzling to nuclear refined tar sands, coal, and eventually fuel farmed liquid fuel.
No renewables, no plugin hybrids, just gas guzzling as far as the corporatist bottomliners can see. Of course they only see one financial quarter at a time.
Why all the diversion tactics, like clean coal and the hydrogen economy? To pretend they are pursuing a "practical" research program, as opposed to wind, solar, biogas, wave power, and a distributed smart grid. Paint us as the impractical dreamers, while they pursue fossil fuel empire. Reframe our issue, frame us as kooks.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
Permalink
In the belly Posted 8:52 pm
26 Nov 2007
I see that Grist recognises Canada for recent acts of forest preservation. May I join in that approval, given their sovereign nation status?
I welcome other nations disapproval of the US, given our sorry record (speaking in generalities, of course, certain states and municipalities excepted), hoping that embarrassment will eventually contribute to change.
Doing what I can to change attitudes, from within...
Permalink
archstanton Posted 4:12 am
06 Dec 2007
Permalink