Canada's Dirty Oil
Even while - and particularly so - the International Energy Agency urged world leaders to move to slash greenhouse gas emissions through pledges at a forthcoming UN-sponsored negotiating session in Copenhagen at the UN Climate summit, it acknowledged Canada's immense petroleum reserves, second only to those in Saudi Arabia. Acknowledged them as a vital reserve that the world will inevitably turn to as an energy resource in coming years.
Provisionally conflicted by irritating realities of world oil consumption and the urgency to discover alternate energy sources in the face of climate change and anthropogenic activities leading same to any degree presumed, the IEA counsels the prime necessity of achieving lower emissions on the one hand, while speaking on the other of energy demands rising 40% within the next two decades.
Making Canada's estimated 178 billion barrels of proven oil reserves vitally critical to the meeting of future energy needs. Supplying those resources is admittedly problematical, since the reserves are held mostly in oil sands deposits which require huge amounts of water to extract, and in the extraction process produce a 20% higher carbon dioxide emission effect. More expensive extraction equates with more costly manufacturing and other uses.
And then, of course, there are the further harmful environment effects, not only to the atmosphere, but the land itself, and the people who live there. Mostly, as it happens, First Nations peoples. Pointing to the recent revelations of the catastrophe that never was. Where the now-Greenpeace-affiliated fly-in doctor, John O'Connor raised the red flag of rare cancers consuming aboriginal communities nearby Alberta's Athabasca oil sands.
The good doctor's revelations have since been entirely discredited as fabrications, having been double-checked by epidemiologists and statisticians for Alberta Health. Fort Chipewyans, after all, do not appear, after an investigation by three Health Canada physicians, to have suffered disastrously deleterious health side-effects from their proximity to the oil sands.
"These weren't misdiagnoses; they were diagnoses that never occurred", according to one of the three Health Canada physicians who filed a complaint with Alberta's College of Physicians and Surgeons, that Dr. O'Connor had caused "undue alarm" in the community. The good doctor has since joined Greenpeace's "Stop the Tarsands" campaign in their effort to halt international investment in the oil sands.
That international suspicion and willingness to drop all interests in Alberta's 'dirty oil' has been manifested in the United States by the current administration's characterization of 'dirty oil' having no place in the machinery of American production and rolling stock, befouling the atmosphere far more deleteriously than the clean, easily-extractable oil from the champions of global fanaticism and militant jihad.
Another instance of there being no quick and easy decisions in this world, because there are no simple answers to all the conundrums that bedevil us.
Provisionally conflicted by irritating realities of world oil consumption and the urgency to discover alternate energy sources in the face of climate change and anthropogenic activities leading same to any degree presumed, the IEA counsels the prime necessity of achieving lower emissions on the one hand, while speaking on the other of energy demands rising 40% within the next two decades.
Making Canada's estimated 178 billion barrels of proven oil reserves vitally critical to the meeting of future energy needs. Supplying those resources is admittedly problematical, since the reserves are held mostly in oil sands deposits which require huge amounts of water to extract, and in the extraction process produce a 20% higher carbon dioxide emission effect. More expensive extraction equates with more costly manufacturing and other uses.
And then, of course, there are the further harmful environment effects, not only to the atmosphere, but the land itself, and the people who live there. Mostly, as it happens, First Nations peoples. Pointing to the recent revelations of the catastrophe that never was. Where the now-Greenpeace-affiliated fly-in doctor, John O'Connor raised the red flag of rare cancers consuming aboriginal communities nearby Alberta's Athabasca oil sands.
The good doctor's revelations have since been entirely discredited as fabrications, having been double-checked by epidemiologists and statisticians for Alberta Health. Fort Chipewyans, after all, do not appear, after an investigation by three Health Canada physicians, to have suffered disastrously deleterious health side-effects from their proximity to the oil sands.
"These weren't misdiagnoses; they were diagnoses that never occurred", according to one of the three Health Canada physicians who filed a complaint with Alberta's College of Physicians and Surgeons, that Dr. O'Connor had caused "undue alarm" in the community. The good doctor has since joined Greenpeace's "Stop the Tarsands" campaign in their effort to halt international investment in the oil sands.
That international suspicion and willingness to drop all interests in Alberta's 'dirty oil' has been manifested in the United States by the current administration's characterization of 'dirty oil' having no place in the machinery of American production and rolling stock, befouling the atmosphere far more deleteriously than the clean, easily-extractable oil from the champions of global fanaticism and militant jihad.
Another instance of there being no quick and easy decisions in this world, because there are no simple answers to all the conundrums that bedevil us.
Labels: Canada, Economy, Environment, Middle East
posted by Pieface | 6:47 PM
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