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The US, Canada and Tar Sands: Pollution Without Borders
The government is busy stemming the flow of immigration from Mexico, but it's welcoming a different kind of flood from the north. The State Department just approved a project to pipe some of the world's dirtiest oil from Canada into America's fuel-hungry economy.
Under the permit, according to the State Department, the Alberta Clipper Pipeline system "will carry up to 450,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin in Canada to refineries in the U.S.," channeling the black gold across the northern Midwest.
The oil, to be dredged up from tar sands development, is some pretty heavy stuff. According to a statement released today by Earth Justice, the Minnesota-based Indigenous Environmental Network and other groups:
Tar
sands development in Alberta is creating an environmental catastrophe,
with toxic tailings ponds so large they can be seen from space and
plans to strip away the forests and peat lands in an area the size of
Florida. In addition, greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands
production are three times that of conventional crude oil and tar sands
oil contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, six times more nitrogen
and five times more lead than conventional oil. These toxins are
released into the U.S. air and water when the crude oil is processed
into fuels by refineries.
Though it insists that the administration wants to move the country away from fossil-fuel dependency, the State Department defends the plan as a boon to America's strategic interests and a source of desperately needed jobs:
Approval of the permit sends a positive economic signal, in a difficult economic period, about the future reliability and availability of a portion of United States' energy imports, and in the immediate term, this shovel-ready project will provide construction jobs for workers in the United States.
The perversity of promoting economic development through environmental destruction is not lost on the communities that suffer deeply from both poverty and pollution. Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Canada are protesting the pending incursion on forests and native lands.
Marty Cobenais of the Indigenous Environmental Network stated, "The voices and rights of the Leech Lake Band members are not being listened to by the Obama Administration."
Tribal activists are pushing for a referendum process that could help derail the project, but given the government's track record on honoring tribal rights, don't expect a major policy shift.
Native communities in Canada, too, are outraged that their lands are being exploited without adequate compensation to the impacted communities.
As for the purported economic benefits of tar sands extraction, the Canada-based environmental group Polaris Institute says that in Alberta, the oil industry has contributed to economic volatility and increased inequality, thanks to an unfair royalty structure that ends up starving low-income communities. And despite the promise of jobs, Polaris argues, "cheap labour practices allow oil companies operating in the tar sands to cut their labour costs by hiring non-unionized workers and workers from other countries." As U.S. officials push forward their "shovel ready" construction projects, Alberta provides a cautionary tale for what can happen when sustainable development goals are traded for short-term gains.
Though the tar sands project is rolling ahead, native-led grassroots environmental activism does not go unnoticed by corporate interests. An alarmist report from the Canadian Defense Security and Foreign Affairs Institute paints nonviolent First Nations protesters as a potential terrorist threat--that is, to the oil industry.
In reality, the most lethal threats are those that the political establishment accepts as the cost of doing business. The toxic cross-border exchange endorsed by the State Department reveals who controls the continent's resources and artificial boundaries--and how easily those forces can violate the sovereignty of nature and its original inhabitants.
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11 Comments so far
Show AllThis is a good article. This is a perfect esample of why we I do not have faith that we are going to change our habits and take climate change for real. It seems to me that on one hand we get platitudes about going green and then on the other, we sneak off to get our fix on the sly so we don't go into withdrawl. God for bid if we couldn't run this country's engine. How far are we going to go before we understand that the expectation of living this lifestyle is killing us and everyone and everything around us?
"The State Department defends the plan as a boon to America's strategic interests".....there, in a nutshell, is the heart of the matter. It is why we are in Iraq. It is why we are in Afpaq. It is why we are moving into South America. It is called "Full Spectrum Dominance". As H. Kissinger put it, "Control the oil and you control the nations." The lies, deception, and hypocricy coming out of our "government" are creating a sort of national cognitive disonance from which we all suffer. We are up against a goliath, a behemoth, a blundering global thug.....King Kong tearing up the jungle.
The Anthropocene era will be remembered as a breif period of fearsome suicidal insanity. A tale of warning told around campfires by the elders in some dim, desperate future.
The peat bogs being torn up are one of the best sinks of Greenhouse gases. The PROCESS itself is "dirty" just as the process of Mountaintop mining for Coal is.
Again the Corporations get a free ride here on the back of nature. The increased costs of health care due to pollution and of Climate change, the contamination of water (which will become scarcer in Alberta as warming occurs) are NOT charged to the Corporations.
They are costs that will be borne by the future taxpayer.
To top this off as a response to the economic downturn, with Corporations threatening to halt development and go Elsewhere, Alberta offerred them up more in the way of Tax breaks with ever more reduced Royalty payments.
They claim that by not doing so the Alberta economy will shut down. This canard is easily disproved by pointing to Norway a country which has no problems bringing in Investment with a MUCH higher Royalty regimen.
Now part of the reason it WORKS in Norway is due to STATOIL a NATIONALIZED oil company.
Libertarians and folk opposed to any form of Socialism take note.
What's the matter with Canada? Hemp for oil is legal to grow and cultivate, no?
Share the energy, share the waste. For once Canada is getting a fair deal from our greedy neighbours to the south. I'm joking, of course. There are no winners here except the oil companies that make the profit while citizens in both countires get stuck with the sludge. The tar sands are hideous, and for better or worse, some people are getting sick of the rapacious extraction of natural resources up here. Pipelines are being sabotaged and threats of further violence are being mailed into local newspapers.
All the talk about greening up is nonsense. Companies can produce as much waste as they want. I read an article in the local paper this morning about Alberta requiring CO2 emitter like coal to reduce emissions by 2% a year for 4 years. This can be done by actual reductions, or by purchasing offsets or by paying $15 a tonne. The reality of this quickly becomes that they don't really have to reduce at all, they can just spend a little money (a lot of money, really, like $1 million for 60,000 tonnes) and then raise the rates, squeezing it out of people who are already strapped for cash. We get destroyed environments, a loss of resouces that once belonged to the commons, and higher rates as the kicker. With these conditions it's only a matter of time before more people start taking matters into their own hands. No one trusts politicians (doesn't stop them voting consistently for the parties that let them down, BC is a prime example right now) , no one trusts corporations (of course they keep investing), and no one trusts the agencies that are meant to regulate and enforce. Welcome to the end of the world!
The tar sands projects are the worst possible way to get oil. But even if it was ordinary crude oil, we shouldn't be mining it--it is just postponing the inevitable.
This not merely postponing the inevitable. It is setting up the crash to be all that more catastrophic, just like the Wall Street and real estate bubbles. And, if we listen to Naomi Klein, there is a good chance that is exactly what the hidden powers want.
I think the only hope for the planet is for individuals to bypass the corporate supply of energy by installing residential scale windmills and solar panels.
Unfortunately, such systems are still in the early stages of development--expensive and best suited for new construction.
I was under the impression that the tar sands were only viable when oil prices were high. But oil prices came down and we still have this atrocity.
There a bit of misunderstanding here when it comes to the "Profitability" of the tar sands.
The CONSTRUCTION costs are extremely high but once those costs are paid for then the plants can be profitable at a much lower price for oil.
As example the older plants that already have infrastructure in place (Suncor and Syncrude) can turn a good profit when oil drops down to 20 bucks.
Now with NEW plants and expansions the costs go up but the Government of Alberta is all too willing to subsidize these costs with tax breaks and incentives. IE pay no Royalties on the resource for XXX years.
How very naive of me to think that the development might stop with lower prices.
In Alaska, a percentage of the oil wealth is passed along to the residents, making it a very right wing state state with a 'drill baby drill' mentality. The Alaskan natives (generally speaking) are not noticeably more environmental than the rest of the state. This article implies that indigenous Canadians are much more ecologically aware.
I am curious how Canadian citizens in general feel about the tar sands development.
At one point I heard they were going to build a nuclear power station near the oil sands to provide electricity for the extraction/refining operations.
The power system is out of control.
That's the political power system.