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Let's be friendsIn addition to the unprecedented havoc that tar sands exploitation wreaks upon the natural environment and its human inhabitants, it also adds to the risk of catastrophic climate change. By digging up and processing Alberta’s tar sands, Canada is creating a new greenhouse-gas crisis point, described by Canadian organisation Environmental Defence as “ground zero for global warming.”
Ground zero for climate change
Raw tar sands must be put through a succession of refining processes to purify it into bitumen and then further to create crude oil. All this uses a lot of water (3-4 times that of ‘conventional’ oil [18,24] and a lot of energy, with producing a barrel of oil from tar sands creating around three times more emissions than the same barrel of conventional oil[25] – and this doesn’t take into account the emissions from its final use. The tar sands are so carbon intensive that the Athabasca operations are the largest single industrial emitter of CO2 on the planet, representing a staggering 0.1% of total global emissions [5]. They account for half of Canada’s emissions growth in recent years[3] and will hugely hamper the efforts of Canadians to reduce their emissions to meet their Kyoto obligations.
Image © Jiri Rezac / WWF-UK
The effects of these greenhouse gas emissions are specific, measurable, and well under-way. Oxfam[4] estimates that by over an extra 125 million people will be affected by climate disasters by 2012 compared to 2007. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that without a drastic reduction in global emissions, the 21st century will be one of sea-level rise, extreme weather, advancing deserts, failing crops and mass extinction[18].
Addiction to oil
Tar sands is the world’s new oil frontier and its exploitation is at the core of maintaining a global economy dependent on oil. Without it, rich countries would be forced to succumb to the inevitability of dwindling oil supplies and take real action to create sustainable, healthy alternative energy sources. The mining of tar sands is reckless and destructive activity of the big oil companies. The price of their exploitation of tar sands will be very high and a huge liability for future generations.
Importance of forests
Tar sands hits the climate with a triple-whammy: unlocking carbon stored underground, burning fossil-fuels for processing, and cutting down carbon-storing forest. Boreal forest is one of the largest carbon stores on the earth and Canada is home to half of all the world’s boreal forest, giving rise to its description as a “life support system for the planet.”[24]. Millions of local and indigenous people rely on the reservoir of fresh water, and the forest is also home to large populations of caribou (reindeer), moose, bears, wolves, and some five million migratory birds[6]. Tars sands exploitation is degrading this global asset by polluting it, carving it up, and removing large potions of it.
Most companies admit it is impossible to artificially return boreal forest to the same condition as they found it; instead reclaimed land will have much lower levels of carbon density and biodiversity than previously existed.
James Leaton, Worldwide Fund for Nature
The diversity and severity of the negative impacts of the tar sands industry led economists Leslie Shiell and Suzanne Loney at the University of Ottowa to conclude that “at the global level, exploitation of the oil sands may in fact reduce aggregate welfare [total human well-being] rather than increase it.”[17]
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