...the Time article did mention some of the environmental objections to the project.  I think they were just takin' an in-depth look into both it's potential and it's drawbacks.

I don't think it was meant to be any kinda endorsement.

A safe way to harvest tar sands and sour oil and coal?  Convert it to natural gas underground, with natural bacteria.

Underground gas farms.  Much cleaner than other fossil fuels, in the collection and use.

But with rising oil prices tar sand and coal conversion to liquid fuel have become profitable.  But the very rise in fossil fuel costs (and water shortage) is robbing profit from these operations.  What to do?

Use wind power to separate the oil from the sand or coal with microwave plasma torch drilling.  Instead exxonmob is talking nuclear powered tar sand mining and refining.  So add radiation to the mix of toxins and GHG.

Another exxonmob president will not be good for anything.  McCain, he's the exxonmob candidate.

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Expansion of the tar sands projects is truly a crime against humanity.

I'm taking time off work in August to join a protest in Alberta organized by the Sierra Youth Coalition. Remember Al Gore saying he wanted to see people making more direct protests? We gotta do this.

BP also has a major investment in Canadian tar sands.  Beyond Petroleum!

A safe way to harvest tar sands and sour oil and coal?  Convert it to natural gas underground, with natural bacteria.

Apart from the scary geoengineering scenario this invokes, please let's stop using "harvest" as a euphemism for everything we want to take, steal, kill or extract. Harvest comes after the dedicated work of preparing, planting, tending and protecting. It's part of the cycle of feeding the earth and being fed by it in return. Vacuuming fish from the oceans is not harvesting, pushing over mountains to sift out anthracite is not harvesting, and sucking bitumen from below the boreal forest will never be harvesting either. Debasing the language like this shows contempt and disrespect for those who truly tend the earth and thereby earn the right to bring the harvest home.

Let's not do it.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Oooh SpaSh, Amazing is a friend of mine, so I receive the sting of your rebuke if anything even more strongly than he will.  But your point about the metaphor, that it is unhappy and even dangerous, trailing a history of sorry abuse, is clear; and surely he will get it at once.

Your other point, about geo-engineering, is of course over my head.  Well, that is, in principle geo-engineering proposals are scary; but whether what Amazing was describing amounts to geo-engineering is unclear.

As for bipolar Canadians: Yes indeed, the Canadians are on the whole remarkably enlightened, true world-leaders, in some regards.  E.g., my husband and I were married in Montreal in July of 2005; and two other guys in our neighborhood tied the knot later the same summer in Vancouver.  But then on the other hand, when it comes to other kinds of issues, they seem helplessly shackled by their extraction industries, whether those industries are involved in mowing down forests, scooping up tar sands, bashing baby seals, directing polar bear hunts, securing the Northwest Passage, or sitting pretty on the (occasionally) sunny shores of the Arctic Ocean.  Truly an enigma.

As for bipolar editors of Time Magazine: Tasermons Partner may be right, to suggest that Time was fair to those expressing environmental reservations regarding petroleum extraction from tar sands.  One wonders, though, why that should be considered journalistic objectivity, to present as a serious argument in a debate the thrill of an eight-year-old boy, at the spectacle of humongous trucks tearing apart a whole chunk of the world.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Congratulations Canis!  New York is finally doing the right thing, now let's hope the rest of the nation follows.

Well space we might need the natural gas from underground fossil fuel deposits, but probably not.  It would be better for the GHG balance to use natural gas coming from these sources already than simply let it leak into the atmosphere.

In the case of the tar sands where the extraction is deadly to the environment in terms of GHG and water use and toxic contamination, gas farms would certainly be prefferable.  The same with coal mines.  

Point taken about the term "harvest".  But in this case it fits, these gas "farms" would cultivate natural bacteria in the coal seam or tar sand deposit.  As far as constituting geo-engineering, it's hard to tell.  It would depend on how big the farms were.  

But I could see where it could be a disaster on a massive scale put into the hands of the same operators, the exxonmob.  Just about anything could be, given this level of evil.  The tar sand devestation is a prominent feature in space photos now.  I guess it already classifies as geo-engineering.

Renewables and conservation would be enough to supply human energy needs without fossil fuel with a favorable climate like we now have.  But if a volcanic, meteor, or nuclear event brought on a "nuclear" winter, in which several years without a summer occur, the solar energy component will not be there.  These fossil deposits could be a safety backup fuel source, converted to natural gas, to get humanity past a catastrophe.

Geo-engineering, can it be done safely?  I think it could in the case of wind/wave powered pumping of ocean water into the arctic and tropical air.  In winter this could cause a lot more ice to form in the polar regions.  In the tropics it could promote solar reflective cloud formation and rainfall in desert regions, greening large areas.  The solar reflection, from ice and clouds, and the added rainfall greening deserts would help with the GHG climate problem.

As a rule though, I think geo-engineering is foolish diversion from real climate and energy solutions.

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