Crude awakening
Why are environmentalists asleep at the tar sands wheel?
BY Dru Oja Jay
Alberta’s tar sands are on pace to become the largest industrial project in human history. The development will arguably become the single most environmentally destructive undertaking in Canadian history. The response from environmental groups and progressives has been meek.
Stéphane Dion told The New York Times in 2005 that, “There is no environmental minister on Earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big.”
The NDP has proposed a moratorium on new development, while the Sierra Club is urging policy-makers and industry to establish enforceable environmental standards. If there was more time, these policies would theoretically lay the groundwork for a transition to a sustainable economy in Alberta. To date, however, these measures have had no discernible effect on the pace of growth. They are unlikely to have such an effect. Even if it is achieved, a moratorium would allow the currently approved projects to continue for years.
The tar sands of northern Alberta and Saskatchewan contain upward to 300 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Trouble is, that oil is actually tar, stored in tar sand‚ a substance slightly more brittle than asphalt. To get the tar out of the sand to produce oil requires massive amounts of water, energy, labour, land and money.
The water comes mainly from the mighty Athabasca River, whose waters flow all the way to the Arctic. The water level of the river, which is becoming too polluted to fish, has dropped since extraction began, and studies show a downward trend in water flow since 1990. The water ends up in vast, toxic “tailing ponds,” where waste from the extraction process is stored. The largest dam ever built (by volume of materials) now encloses one of Syncrude’s tailing ponds.
Emissions from natural gas that is burned in order to separate tar from sand will make it impossible for Canada to meet its obligations under the Kyoto treaty. The pipelines needed to bring in enough gas to fuel tar sands expansion threaten wilderness and the integrity of unceded native land in the Mackenzie Valley, B.C.’s northern interior and central coast, and Alberta.
Newfoundland, an area rich with the bitter knowledge of overfishing and genocidal land theft, is now exploited for the chief by-product of its past corporate excesses: unemployed human beings. Thousands are flown to the tar sands from Canada’s economically depressed areas, but even they are getting too expensive. Deals are signed to bring in labourers from the Philippines and China. They live in an extremely precarious situation; they have no rights to immigration services, and those who leave their jobs or are fired often end up working illegally.
Stopping tar sands mining now is the only way that a democratic decision can be made about Canada’s future, and it’s the only way that the sustainable policies will have a chance of being implemented.
To date, groups like the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), Canadian Boreal Initiative (CBI), the Pembina Institute, Sierra Club and others have waited for public opinion rather than seeking to drive it. For example, it was only after Peter Lougheed, the arch conservative former premier of Alberta, demanded a moratorium on tar sands development that some of those groups echoed it.
Some groups explain that they are being careful not to alienate oil-dependent Albertans. Observers such as Petr Cizek, writing for Canadian Dimension, point to millions in oil money from the Pew Foundation channelled through CBI and Ducks Unlimited, that ends up funding the work of environmental groups as a likely explanation for their collectively conservative response.
The scale of the tar sands is unprecedented. The project will set major, arguably irreversible, global precedents for what effects are acceptable in keeping a dead-end, oil-based economy from facing its own contradictions. The only way to subject these policies to informed democratic decision-making is to put all tar sands development on hold. And the first step to accomplishing such a feat is to say it out loud.
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http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2007/11/pol_crude.php
