I Hope Obama Jumps the Right Way on Canada's Tar Sands

One story, two contradictory reports.

The first, on Bloomberg news,
suggests that ahead of a meeting with Canada's prime minister, Barack
Obama believes the US's northern neighbour can green its tar sands,
becoming compatible with his clean energy revolution.

The second, in Nature,
suggests that his environmental measures will destroy tar sands
production - which mostly supplies the US - by making it prohibitively
expensive to sell south of the border.

I think you can probably
guess which outcome I'm hoping for. For the sake of argument, let's
accept the following improbable propositions:

1
That the Albertan tar sands operation can adopt universal carbon
capture and storage, cutting the emissions from processing the fuel by
80-90%.

2 That this can be done so cheaply that tar production remains economically viable.

3 That it can happen quickly enough to help prevent global climate breakdown.

This
still leaves us with two intractable problems. The first is that even
if the extraction and processing of tar sands produces scarcely more
carbon than the production of ordinary petroleum, the stuff will still
be burnt in cars, and there's no foreseeable carbon capture and storage
technology which can deal with that. We will have a chance of
preventing full-scale climate breakdown only if we reduce the amount of
fossil fuel we take out of the ground.

The second is that carbon pollution is just one of the impacts of tar sands production. The strip-mining
destroys vast tracts of forest and wetland. The processing poisons
great volumes of water, which sit in ever-growing toxic lagoons, or are
flushed down the rivers, at potential hazard to both wildlife and human
health. You have only to see some pictures of these operations to
recognise that there can be no such thing as clean tar sands, just as -
when all the impacts are taken into account - there is no such thing as
clean coal.

Alberta's
oil production ensures that Canada is trashing its own environment, and
is further from meeting its Kyoto commitments than any other country
that has ratified the treaty. Its government has no intention of
closing the Alberta tar patch. Let's hope Obama jumps the right way
when he meets Canadian PM Stephen Harper today, and ensures that this
industry becomes impossible to sustain.