Editorial: Reconsidering the tar sands
McGill Daily
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.
