[R-G] Editorial: Reconsidering the tar sands

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6719
Editorial: Reconsidering the tar sands
Going by mainstream media coverage, the Athabasca tar sands in  
Alberta are like a 21st century Wild West: breathless reports speak  
about the “boom” economy, bushels of money being made, and about how  
everything is gigantic. But as the tar sands have become the  
centrepiece of a new energy corridor sending oil and gas to the U.S.,  
scant attention has been paid to the profound economic, ecological,  
and social costs that are at stake.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was to have included secure access to Iraqi  
oil as one of its spoils, but the destabilization of the Middle East  
has set oil prices spiraling upward, turning U.S. attention closer to  
home. As Naomi Klein succinctly put it in The Nation: “Baghdad burns,  
Calgary booms.” Despite the fact that its oil is much more expensive  
to extract, Canada has come to occupy a special place in U.S.  
strategy, as a dependent source fueling its industrial needs and war- 
based economy. According to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Canada is now  
a “pillar of sustainable North American energy and economic security.”

Only Cheney could call ecological blowout “sustainable.” The tar  
sands are the largest hydrocarbon deposit in the world – estimated to  
hold anywhere between 1.75 and 2.5-trillion barrels of heavy crude.  
This thick, gooey tar is mined, not pumped, and it creates an  
extremely dirty kind of synthetic oil that ravages the northern  
environment with its destructive production methods. The refining  
process requires an enormous amount of natural gas – if the Mackenzie  
pipeline is built to bring the gas to the tar sands from the Arctic  
south, hundreds of kilometres of permafrost and fragile ecosystems  
will be threatened with environmental devastation. Finally, the  
greenhouse emissions created by the extraction process almost single- 
handedly undermine Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto Protocol. But to  
promoters of the oil sands like Alberta’s ex-Premier Ralph Klein, the  
Kyoto Protocol is “the goofiest, most devastating thing that was ever  
conceived.”

High prices and the export needs of the U.S. have blinded the federal  
and Alberta provincial government to other social and political  
consequences. Public services, especially in Fort McMurray, have  
collapsed, and there are ominous moves toward using exploitative, non- 
unionized, and cheap foreign labour. The rights of indigenous nations  
like the Dene, over whose land the Mackenzie pipelines would cross,  
have not been taken into account. The Canadian government has sought  
to extinguish rather than respect their sovereignty. The government  
has collected meager royalties while foreign corporations reap  
ridiculously high profits, revenue which might otherwise have been  
used for important social programs.

Northerners, indigenous peoples, Albertans, and Canadians are paying  
a high cost to expedite U.S., access to Canada’s oil and gas, with no  
planning and almost no public debate. The government should be asking  
if the tar sands and its development are environmentally sustainable,  
or if our energy needs could be met by alternative sources. Rather  
than become an energy satellite of the U.S. empire, Canada needs to  
develop an independent, long-range energy policy that promotes a  
future free from oil dependency.