Alberta Tar Sands

Canada’s right-wing Prime Minister is in New York today trying to convince lawmakers that the tar sands are okay, and that the Keystone XL pipeline should go ahead.

At the same time, Canada’s environment minister is in London trying to convince politicians there that tar sands crude is the same as regular sweet crude, and should not be subject to a polluter tax.

As a Canadian it blows my mind that we can have the second largest deposits of oil in the world, but our government remains billions in debt and one in seven Canadian children live in poverty.

I feel like we are being played for fools here in Canada, because foreign owned oil companies like ExxonMobil, British Petroluem and PetroChina (71% of oil sands production is owned by foreign shareholders) are making billions exporting raw tar sand from our country, while us citizens are dealing with all the nasty downsides.

Time for a tar sands reality check.

Here’s the top 10 reasons Canada needs to rethink their unrelenting desire to expand tar sands operations:

1. The Canada tar sands isn’t just an environmental issue, it is also a social justice, human rigths and health issue. A higher incidence of rare and deadly cancers has been documented in First Nations communities downstream of the oil sands by doctors, the Alberta Health Department and First Nations since 2007.

2. Like birds? Me too. Did you know that over 30 million birds will be lost over the next 20 years due to tar sands development?

3. 95% of the water used in tar sands surface mining is so polluted it has to be stored in toxic sludge pits. That’s 206,000 litres of toxic waste discharged every day.

4. Canada’s tar sands make Hoover Dam look like lego blocks, because we are home to 2 of the top 3 largest dams in the world. The dams are used to hold back all that toxic sludge produced by mining tar sands.

5. Producing a barrel of oil from the oil sands produces 3.2 to 4.5 times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil produced in Canada or the United States. To put that in perspective, a Honda Accord burning tar sands gas has the same climate impact as driving a Chevy Suburban using conventional gas.

6. According to an annual climate change performance index, because of the tar sands, Canada’s climate performance is the worst in the entire western world. We rank 58th out of 61 countries on the index, beating out only Kazakhstan (59th), Iran (60th) and Saudi Arabia (61st).

7. 11 million litres of toxic wastewater seep out of the tailing pits into the boreal forest and Athabasca river every day. That’s 4 billion litres a year. Anyone want to go fishing?

8. Norway has saved $644 billion in its petroleum production investment fund. Meanwhile, Alberta, where all the tar sands deposits are, has only saved $16 billion. There is no Canadian federal fund.

9. The International Energy Agency says up to two thirds of known fossil reserves must be left in the ground to avoid a 2°C global temperature rise. MIT reports that when a global price on carbon emerges to prevent climate change, it will make the oil sands economically non-viable.

10. And if you think the tar sands are going away, think again.The oil sands underlie approximately 140,000 square kilometres of Alberta – an area about the size of Florida. Oil sands leases cover about 20% of the province’s land area. If the oil companies have it their way, the tar sands operations are on a trajectory to triple in size, with literally no end in sight.

So there you go. The tar sands are paying off for the oil companies, while everyday Canadians see little upside, and a whole lot of downside.

Thanks to the Tar Sands Reality Check project for putting all these facts together, and getting them signed off by top experts.  Read the rest of this entry →

Part of the Vince Bayou, where a Shell Oil pipeline reportedly spilled this week.

While clean up continues on the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas, another oil pipeline burst was detected over the weekend – this time in Houston, Texas.

The Shell Oil owned pipeline burst was detected Friday by the US National Response Center and has dumped an estimated 30,000 gallons of oil into a waterway connected to the Gulf of Mexico (as if it needed any more oil dumped into it!).

Operators of the Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary West Columbia pipeline, a 15 mile long, 16 inch diameter line, received warnings from the US National Response Center of a potential 700 barrel release (nearly 30,000 gallons) of crude oil on Friday, March 29.

Yesterday, representatives from the US Coast Guard acknowledged at least 50 barrels of oil had entered Vince Bayou, a waterway connected to the Gulf of Mexico.

So far this latest pipeline burst has received very little mainstream news coverage, likely because there has been so many spills lately (3 in the last week alone), that it is no longer considered “news.”

Of course, this all comes at a time that the Obama administration is under great pressure to make a final decision on the new Keystone XL pipeline that will complete a span of pipe from Alberta, Canada all the way to Texas. The Keystone pipeline will transport diluted bitumen (also known as dilbit or “junk crude”), the same type oil that spilled from a burst pipe last weekend in Mayflower, Arkansas.

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Record heatwaves, droughts, bushfires, rainfall, coastal erosion can all be expected in Australia in the near-term, reports the country’s Climate Commission. According to this esteemed group of climate scientists, the increased extreme weather events are courtesy of man-made climate change.

I must admit what really stood out to me after reading the Climate Commission’s most comprehensive evaluation of climate change’s effects on Australia was the report’s use of the seemingly non-descript term energetic climate.

It’s not that the facts aren’t important. People need to know the number of record heat days has doubled since 1960; heavy rainfall is increasing globally, which led to Queensland experiencing record-breaking floods in 2010 and 2011; between 1997 and 2011 dam levels for Sydney and Melbourne dropped 40% causing serious water restrictions; between 1973 and 2010 the Forest Fire Danger Index increased significantly at 16 of Australia’s 38 weather stations with none reporting a decrease, a strong indicator of increased bushfires country-wide. Even more, all of these extreme weather events have cost the country billions of dollars.

Yes, the data presents a bleak picture, especially when the Commission states:

“There is a high risk that extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy rainfall, bushfires and cyclones will become even more intense in Australia over the coming decades.”

With concerted, strong action, we can gradually slow the effects of climate change that are growing in intensity, the group says. Yet, this is not a new story. For years, scientists across the world have come to the same conclusions. The only thing that seems to have changed is the urgency of their tone: we must act, now. This is what made the term energetic climate jump out for me.

It reframes climate change into a more accessible form for the public. It informs us that climate change is not just “global warming,” but actually encompasses much more. It is the over-arching way in which we describe the earth’s climate becoming exponentially more dynamic and active.

This activity shows up in many forms of extreme weather events not just warmer ones, but more pervasively: floods, hurricanes, cyclones, heavy rainfall, drought, cold snaps, and rising sea levels. The term climate change does not hold the same power. In order for climate action to take place, people must feel its effects in their own community and be able to see their relationship to similar events in different places. Then it becomes the shared story for everyone. Uncovering the facts is only part of the story; communicating and connecting them is the other. The facts have been laid out, study after study. Nevertheless, we still choose just to dip our toes into solving the problem.

And, in some cases, we move away from taking any action. Canada, my homeland, provides a remarkable example of climate ambivalence. After serving as a global example for environmental action, over the last decade, the Great White North has pulled a complete policy reversal.

The country has slowly morphed into a petro-state, eroding its environmental principles, including international agreements on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, along the way. Last week, Canada became the first nation to pull out of a United Nations convention to fight droughts across the world.

This comes just a year and half after the country walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, the most comprehensive global climate agreement to date. Every UN nation — 194 countries and the European Union — is currently part to this agreement. Canada is setting a shocking precedent of climate ambivalence at a time when strong leadership is what is needed the most.

All of us live in a world governed by a climate whose energy is becoming more dynamic and expressive by the year; if we really “got” that, I wonder if we’d stand for inaction or regressive actions such as Canada’s withdrawal from the UN drought convention?

The climate is becoming more energetic, while Canada looks to be taking some pretty strong sleeping pills.

Tar Sands protesters in Canada. Support for the pipeline and extraction of Tar Sands is dwindling in that country.

The Helmholtz Association of Research Centres, a major German scientific body with more than 30,000 researchers and US$4.4 billion in annual funding, has dropped out of a joint Alberta tar sands project over fears that the project was damaging the institution’s reputation.

In April 2011, the Province of Alberta invested $25 million to form the “Helmholtz-Alberta Initiative” that would study ways to deal with leakage from the toxic tailings ponds that are a by-product of tar sands mining operations. The HAI was also tasked with finding ways to upgrade the energy extracted from bitumen and lignite coal in order to reduce energy consumption, and a few other “sustainable solutions” to Canada’s ongoing environmental and energy challenges.

Speaking on behalf of the Helmholtz Association, Professor Frank Messner, told EU media that: 

“It was seen as a risk for our reputation.  As an environmental research centre we have an independent role as an honest broker and doing research in this constellation could have had reputational problems for us, especially after Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.”

The Helmholtz Association has come under fire recently for their work on Alberta’s tar sands operations, most notably in 2012 when Germany’s Green Party (a very powerful political player) filed a query to the German government, asking why German taxpayers’ money was going into a project that contradicts Germany’s official climate policy agenda.

The response at the time from government was very evasive and concluded that the project had only just started and that it was too early to say anything more substantial.

This recent news is the latest in a string of stories about the Alberta tar sands and climate policy damaging Canada’s reputation abroad.

Earlier this year, former BC Premier Gordon Campbell, and current High Commissioner to the UK, stated in a meeting that Canada’s tar sands are  “a totemic issue, hitting directly on Brand Canada.”

Republished with permission from DeSmog Canada

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The climate change site, DeSmogBlog has found that Environmental Resources Management, the consulting firm behind the Keystone XL Pipeline environmental impact assessment, has been at the center of controversial pipeline projects in the past.

Activists working against the 2002 planned construction of British Petroleum’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Turkey, singled out Environmental Resources Management (ERM) for what they saw as ERM “grooming” the BP pipeline for construction. Like the Keystone XL pipeline assessment, ERM’s assessment of the Turkish pipeline was seen as flawed and drafted in a way that gave all but the green light for the pipeline to be constructed.

Environmental and human rights group London Rising Tide went as far as occupying ERM’s offices in London, handing out pamphlets to employees stating that:

Your employer [ERM] plays a crucial role if low-key, in grooming BP’s Baku Ceyhan pipeline for construction.

In recent days, similar concerns have been raised after the website InsideClimate News revealed that: 

The State Department’s recent conclusion that the Keystone XL pipeline “is unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the rate of Canada’s oil sands development was based on analysis provided by two consulting firms with ties to oil and pipeline companies that could benefit from the proposed project.

Researcher Brad Johnson writing on Grist then made the link to Environmental Resources Management, finding that,

The “sustainability consultancy” Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was paid an undisclosed amount under contract to TransCanada to write the statement, which is now an official government document.

The construction and operation of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline has impacted the livelihoods of local fishermen, as seen in this video:

Tom Borelli, a former science director at Philip Morris who fought claims that secondhand tobacco causes lung cancer and respiratory illness in children, is now touted on Fox News as an expert on the cleanliness of the coal industry. Borelli was busy this election season fighting Obama’s “war on coal” on behalf of his new employer, FreedomWorks.

Borelli has a long history of attacking the EPA on behalf of Big Tobacco. Serving in his role as Philip Morris’ Director of Corporate Scientific Affairs, Borelli appeared in a notorious 1992 film produced by Philip Morris attacking the Environmental Protection Agency for declaring secondhand tobacco smoke a known cancer causing agent. Borelli states that:

“Based on careful review of the science we believe that environmental tobacco smoke has not been shown to be a risk factor in the development of lung cancer, respiratory disease in children or heart disease.”

Watch it:

Borelli has come a long way since then, including a short stint as a professional climate change denier. He is now working at the right-wing think tank FreedomWorks as a Senior Fellow and a self-styled “expert” on the coal industry.

Here’s Borelli on Fox News Business in July 2012 talking about the widely-debunked Obama ‘war on coal’:

Is their no dirty product that Tom Borelli won’t defend for the right price?

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass), has penned a letter to Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, looking for answers about a Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) containment dome that “crushed like a beer can” in tests earlier this Fall.

Rep Markey was critical of the containment dome failure.

Markey, who is the Ranking Member the US Committee on Natural Resources, is referring to a story first broke by Seattle radio station KUOW, that in September Shell performed tests on a containment dome that was to be deployed as part of the company’s controversial Arctic offshore oil drilling operations.

According to government reports obtained by KUOW, the dome “breached like a whale” and then sank to the bottom of Puget Sound off the coast of Washington State. When the dome was recovered a government official described the dome as “crushed like a beer can.” The containment dome is a key piece of emergency spill equipment that is used to cap an oil well when a pipe burst occurs, like the one we saw in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Markey describes the failed test in his letter to Salazar:

“Remotely operated submersible robots became tangled in rigging lines, warning indicators were dismissed as defective, and divers were requested, even though using divers would likely not be possible during an actual disaster in the Arctic. The test was conducted in Puget Sound, far away from the actual Arctic environment.”

Markey goes on to ask the question that should be on everyone’s mind given this disturbing revelation:

“Shell’s unsuccessful test in Puget Sound raises new questions about the company’s ability to successfully drill offshore in the Arctic and, more generally, about the ability of containment devices to function properly in the harsh Arctic environment.

The outcome of the containment dome test, the fact that Shell may have missed warning signals that something was wrong and Shell’s problems using ROVs, which could be required in an Arctic environment, raise troubling questions about whether Shell can drill safely in this harsh and sensitive area.”

You can read the full text of Markey’s letter here: Markey Questions Interior on Failed Arctic Spill Containment Test.”

In his acceptance speech last Tuesday, President Obama stated that: “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

The President’s words will be put to the test very shortly.

As Glenn Hurowitz points out on Grist, a bill is about to land on the President’s desk that will allow US airlines to ignore a European Union climate law.

Hurrowitz writes:

“If he signs the bill, Obama will not only be failing to take sufficient action to address climate change, but actively going out of his way to stop another country from doing so – a pretty extreme act at the worst possible time.”

This is a line in the sand and a really big deal. We will soon know if President Obama plans to stay true to his word on his commitment to curb the emissions of climate change pollution by industry in the United States.

Hurrowitz’s piece is well worth the read, as it goes into a lot of detail on the issue of transnational aviation and climate change policy.

So what do you think? Will he keep the President remain true to his word?

Train Tracks Washed Away by Hurricane Sandy - (Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York / Flickr)

Andrea Saul currently serves as Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s press secretary, but in 2006 she was heavily involved in the attack against the scientific evidence showing that climate change was happening, humans were to blame and the result would be extreme disruption of weather patterns.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans Saul had this to say in a press release:

Coming off one of the most devastating hurricane seasons in recent memory, many are quick to blame the strength and frequency of these storms on global warming. Leading climate scientists, however, say there is no link between increased storm activity and a massive change in global climate.

No coincidence that Saul was at the time working for the PR firm DCI Group who was paid millions by oil giant ExxonMobil to downplay concerns about climate change.

Saul is well-versed in the role of climate science spindoctor and showed that in July, 2011 when she told Politico that:

“Gov. Romney does not think greenhouse gases are pollutants within the meaning of the Clean Air Act, and he does not believe that the EPA should be regulating them,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. “CO2 is a naturally occurring gas. Humans emit it every time they exhale.”

Yes, CO2 is natural, but so is water and it is perfectly safe until you are drowning in it.

So what is Saul going to say on behalf of Romney in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the latest and most extreme example of how our climate is changing for the worse? There is very little wiggle room this time around.

If voters weren’t looking for leaders and long term solutions on the issue of extreme weather and climate change before Hurricane Sandy, they sure are now.

Last year, the US broke the record for the most billion-dollar weather disasters in a year, which was 14 events costing a total of $47 billion. Just the other day the insurance giant Munich Re released a new report finding that the number of weather-related loss events each in year in the United States has grown 500% over the last 30 years, costing Americans over one trillion dollars.

And, of course if the trends continue, extreme weather is only going to destroy more homes, more roads, more buildings… not to mention more lives.

This is as much an issue related to the economy as it is a human rights and environmental degradation and people like Andrea Saul and her boss Mitt Romney need to stop spinning and start taking climate change and extreme weather seriously.

Guess we will see what happens. Any predictions?

Cato Institute, the right wing think tank co-founded by the Koch brothers, plans to release a document this week that has all the appearances of being a government report on the impacts of climate change in the United States – but of course it is not.

The Cato report, titled: “Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” uses the same cover design, title and fonts as a report issued in 2009 by the US government’s Global Change Research Program titled: Global Climate Change Impacts in the US.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the Cato fake report and the US government climate impacts report.

As John Abraham, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, puts it best,

“It’s not an addendum. It’s counterfeit. It’s a continued effort to kick the can down the road: a steady drip, drip, drip of false reports by false scientists to create a false sense of debate.”

Let’s see if any media fall for this obvious ploy to create the appearance of officialdom and real science by the Cato Institute.