Tar Sands 101
The Tar Sands "Gigaproject" is the largest industrial project in human history and likely also the most destructive. The tar sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production and is slated to become the single largest industrial contributor in North America to Climate Change.
The tar sands are already slated to be the cause of up to the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet behind the Amazon Rainforest Basin. Currently approved projects will see 3 million barrels of tar sands mock crude produced daily by 2018; for each barrel of oil up to as high as five barrels of water are used.
Human health in many communities has seriously taken a turn for the worse with many causes alleged to be from tar sands production. Tar sands production has led to many serious social issues throughout Alberta, from housing crises to the vast expansion of temporary foreign worker programs that racialize and exploit so-called non-citizens. Infrastructure from pipelines to refineries to super tanker oil traffic on the seas crosses the continent in all directions to allthree major oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.
The mock oil produced primarily is consumed in the United States and helps to subsidize continued wars of aggression against other oil producing nations such as Iraq, Venezuela and Iran.
To understand the tar sands in more depth, continue to our Tar Sands 101 reading list
The Pew Charitable Trusts want a kinder, gentler pipeline and tarsands
The pipeline dream lurking in Canada's wild
By Steve Kallick | December 10, 2007
ONE OF many ways to combat global warming is to replace our dirtiest, carbon-polluting fuels, especially coal and oil, with cleaner fuels like natural gas. So proponents of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, an 800-mile megaproject to tap into Canada's natural gas reserves, now say that's their plan. They want us to believe, somehow, that building this massive project through Canada's Boreal Forest wilderness will be good for the environment. Not surprisingly, a closer look at the facts suggests otherwise.
The real answer to climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground
Tuesday December 11, 2007
The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk
The real answer to climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground
All the talk in Bali about cutting carbon means nothing while ever more oil
and coal is being extracted and burned
By
George Monbiot
Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer! Incredible as it might seem, I have
stumbled across the single technology which will save us from runaway
climate change! From the goodness of my heart, I offer it to you for free.
No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this technology, a
The Pew goes to Bali to lobby for Boreal carbon credits at UN Climate Convention
The Pew front groups and Gang Green are in Bali this week to lobby for boreal forest carbon credits. Faced with the unpleasant reality that the boreal forest is now likely a net carbon producer due to forest fires and insect outbreaks, all caused by global warming, the Pew are now lobbying to get the carbon stored in peatlands over thousands of years counted as carbon credits in the post-2012 Kyoto Treaty. If successful, this would set the Kyoto carbon emissions baseline back from 1990 to the time of the ice age!
Please Join Us for a Forest Day Side-Event
Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) on "stemming" the tar sands
The NRDC, another heavily Pew-funded member of Gang Green, makes these radical demands about the tar sands, in their fact sheet posted on the web-site of the Pew front-group, the International Boreal Conservation Campaign:
"To immediately stem the development under way of tar sands projects in Canada’s Boreal forest, we should support conservation and environmentally sustainable development in the area, including:
- Interconnected network of protected areas and corridors to maintain the ecological integrity of
the Boreal forest and wildlife habitat.
Pew Boreal Front Group Makes Non-Statement About the Tar Sands
The International Boreal Conservation Campaign (www.interboreal.org) is another front group established by the Pew Charitable Trusts, much like the Canadian Boreal Initiative (www.borealcanada.ca). The Pew family built the original tar sands project, which became Suncor. Although the Pew family no longer owns Suncor, the family company Sunoco continues to refine much synthetic crude oil. This is their non-statement about the tar sands. Of course, no mention about a moratorium or a shut down. After all, Suncor is one of their partners in the Canadian Boreal Initiative.....
“The oilsands will get their gas no matter what. It‘s everyone else who needs to worry.‘‘
Dec 6, 2007 1:00:00 PM MST
TransCanada, Imperial led group to benefit from rumoured Mackenzie restructuring (TransCanada-Mackenzie)
CALGARY _ Analysts say a reworking of the Mackenzie Gas Project will be a boon for all involved, with pipeline operator TransCanada Corp. (TSX:TRP) likely to see major returns and the Imperial Oil-led consortium (TSX:IMO) of producers relieved of much of the cost burdens that have threatened to kill the entire energy project.
UP IN SMOKE: a decade of Canadian inaction
UP IN SMOKE
Scott Harris / scott@vueweekly.com
a decade of Canadian inaction
http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=7611
A decade after the international community agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, and five years since Parliament ratified the agreement, there isn’t a lot of good news about how Canada has done in living up to its international obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Rethinking the Implications of Climate Change and Peak Oil
Rethinking the Implications of Climate Change and Peak Oil
by Richard Heinberg
MuseLetter #187 / November 2007
Environmental and development NGOs are now fixated on climate change to
the exclusion of nearly every other topic. Discussions in and among
these organizations center on capping carbon emissions and trading
emissions rights, and doing this internationally in a way that will be
deemed equitable by the global South and acceptable to the industrial
Northern countries.
Most of these policy organizations are seeking ways of implementing
It's the Tar Sands, Stupid-- Canada home to global warming's new ground zero.
It's the Tar Sands, Stupid
PM Harper: Bali ballyhoo.
Canada home to global warming's new ground zero.
By Mitchell Anderson
Published: December 4, 2007
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TheTyee.ca
You can't practice abstinence while running a brothel. Yet politicians of almost all stripes talk simultaneously about developing the Alberta oil sands while getting serous about reducing carbon emissions. Sound like a crock? It is.
Royalties No Problem for Petro Can
Petrocan chief backs oil sands despite royalties
Overall viability won't be affected, says CEO Brenneman, but company's conventional oil and gas spending likely to be cut
DAVID EBNER AND NORVAL SCOTT
With files from Canadian Press
November 29, 2007
CALGARY, EDMONTON -- Higher petroleum royalties in Alberta will not hurt the "overall viability" of Petro-Canada oil sands projects, but some planned investment in conventional oil and gas in the province will be affected, chief executive officer Ron Brenneman said yesterday.
