Everything You Didn't Really Want to Know About Tar Sands
Do you ever think about the spot between the wall and the back of the stove? You know, the place where stray bits of dinner, splashes of marinara sauce and inexplicable assorted chicken parts gather to create a nasty, smelly, horrible part of your kitchen — your otherwise glorious, sparkling (OK, not so sparkling but in the right light it looks just lovely), bejewelled food preparation space, the place where you pack the kid's lunch, where you sit and read the paper and listen
to the radio and otherwise chill? You just don't spend too much time digging around in that space between the wall and the stove, because it's too unpleasant to think about, really, and who wants to think about unpleasant things?
From what I gather, the tar sands are the environmental equivalent of that space behind the stove — only they also happen to be worth hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, which means that while I don't want to spend much time looking around up there, the rest of the world, particularly the United States, can't get enough of the view.
That's the thrust off Tar Sands: The Selling of Alberta, a documentary that airs on CBC Television's Doc Zone Thursday March 13, at 9pm. The doc, directed by Edmonton's Tom Radford and produced by Peter Raymont, is a close look at what's hiding behind the stove in the province of Alberta: an area the size of Florida that contains, by some estimates, 364 billion barrels of oil within its sand.
"This is the end of the game," says investigative journalist and environmental activist Andrew Nikiforuk, in the doc. "This is the last great source of oil on the planet. And know what? It's really dirty, really expensive, and it comes with a huge environmental footprint. It takes approximately the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to produce two barrels of oil in Fort McMurray. No civilization can survive long with that kind of ratio."
I've only seen a few select snippets of the film, and also heard an interview the director Tom Radford did with Anna-Marie Tremont on The Current this morning. Radford talked about how we're mortgaging Canada's sovereignty up there, particularly in two ways: 1. NAFTA locks in a certain amount of delivery of oil to the U.S., which shuts out even other regions of Canada, such as Ontario from ever receiving much of it. (I know, I know. Insert Ralph Klein quote here); and 2. Getting in is so damn expensive, only the largest oil exploration companies can possibly participate. For example, to obtain one lease on a piece of the oil sands costs one company around $2 billion, with an additional $15 billion required to actually do the digging, and rinsing and spitting, or whatever it is they do to get the oil separated from the sand. When you're starting with a nut of $17 billion, that basically eliminates just about everyone from the game — except the very largest exploration companies, such as Norway's national oil company, who bought in, or others of similiar financial girth (Insert gratuitous American slam here).
As a result, we're basically just signing off on the rest of the world recovering that oil, rather than say developing the tar sands more slowly and retaining control of them in the process.
Another disturbing aspect is that Peter Lougheed thinks the way we're developing those tar sands stinks, and I trust Peter Lougheed more than I trust the guys who run the ship now. He created the Heritage Fund — which, according to Radford, is more or less the same size it was 23 years ago, when Lougheed left office.
"People have to remember," Lougheed says, "that the oil sands are owned by the people (of Alberta and Canada); they're not owned by the oil companies."
The problem, as we all know, with not looking back there is that sooner or later, whatever is back there starts to smell like hell. Is that how long we're going to wait before we start to ask some questions about what's going on in Fort Mac?
http://communities.canada.com/calgaryherald/blogs/bladerunner/archive/20...
