Our tar sands environmental predicament from an American progressive view. Could it be that Obama holds our polluting province in his hands? Most likely not, but it does make for an interesting dynamic between the countries and its disparate leaders.
At issue isn’t just NIMBYism or standard concerns about oil spills, but the question of whether the United States should accelerate an extraction process that some environmental experts say will lose the fight against global warming forever.
The oil in question comes from the Canadian oil sands — or tar sands, as opponents refer to it. It’s not just regular oil, but highly corrosive and particularly carbon intensive. The process of extracting the oil from the sands is more energy intensive than drilling for crude. It entails destruction of Canada’s Boreal forest, which serves as a carbon sink, making this particular resource extraction a global warming double whammy.
And there’s tons of it — perhaps as much as 200 billion barrels-worth.
NASA climatologist James Hansen, who’s been sounding the climate change alarm for years, objects to the project particularly for this latter reason. “An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts,” he wrote in June.
Canadians can do what they want with their oil in Canada, and there’s little American protesters can do to stop them. But the protesters don’t want to help them along in the process, and that’s why they’re fighting the Keystone XL pipeline construction, which also entails risk to U.S. land and water. And they make a good case. The existing Keystone XL line has leaked over and over again in its first year of operation.
