$2 Billion Dollar Greenwash

The cost of green
Calgary Herald
Published: Thursday, July 10, 2008

Sometimes, one just does what one must. Such is the case with the provincial plan to put $2 billion of an expected surplus wholly attributable to resource royalties into pumping the energy industry’s carbon dioxide exhaust back into the ground.

Recognize it for what it is, a $2-billion public relations campaign to arm provincial cabinet ministers against critics of Alberta’s supposedly dirty oil. “No, we’re not pumping CO2 into the air: In Alberta, we bury it. Next question?”

It has to be viewed that way, because otherwise it’s a lot of money for not much.

Environment Canada’s National Inventory Report on Canadian greenhouse gas sources gives the perspective.

Nationally, Canada produced 721 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2006. Alberta was responsible for 234 million tonnes.

When fully implemented in 2015, the government’s $2-billion plan will capture and sequester five million tonnes of it annually.

That’s two per cent. Or it’s about 3.4 per cent of the 146 million tonnes of CO2 produced by the province’s electrical generators and its energy industry — perhaps the more reasonable comparison, as vehicle and residential emissions are scarcely amenable to capture.

Tar Sands a Toxic Future

Youth do an oilsands reality check, and come away with negative impressions

By CAROL CHRISTIAN
Today staff
Friday July 04, 2008

Some kind of civil disobedience from First Nation youth fed up with living with the fall-out of oilsands development of could be coming in the not-too-distant future.
That prediction was made Thursday during a meeting with First Nations representatives and young adults attending the National Youth Summit in Edmonton. Some 100 youth from across the country are expected to attend the weekend conference. Eight of the youth visited Wood Buffalo Thursday during a tour organized by Greenpeace Canada.
Most of those attending the meeting came to see the oilsands first hand, to see if the negative portrayals in the media were true. They left with the impression those negative reports were accurate.

Duck Probe Moves to More Secrecy

Dion Needs to Deal with Tar Sands

Liberal leader pitches green plan to green-minded youth from across Canada

17 hours ago

Edmonton — Still dressed in a style fitting of his stop at the Calgary Stampede, federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion pitched his party’s environmental plan to a group of green-minded youth in Edmonton on Sunday.

Dion wore jeans and a checkered shirt as he spoke to roughly 100 participants at the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition conference at the University of Alberta, where he said Canada could make “megatons” of money selling eco-friendly technologies.

Several participants at the conference suggested his plan doesn’t go far enough, but Dion stressed that the economy is important too.

Canadian Youth say Dion Carbon Tax a good first step but….

July 7, 2008 Green bonanza! Grit leader predicts his carbon plan will mean ‘megatonnes of money’ for Alberta

By GLENN KAUTH, SUN MEDIA

Federal Liberal Leader Stephane Dion brandishes a copy of his Green Shift carbon emissions reduction plan while addressing the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition conference at the University of Alberta yesterday. Dion fielded questions about global climate change from youth across the country. (JAMES MacLENNAN/Special to Sun Media)

A Liberal plan to tax greenhouse-gas emissions will mean “megatonnes of money” instead of economic disaster for Alberta, Stephane Dion vowed yesterday.

The so-called Green Shift tax proposal, which would slap a $40-per-tonne levy on carbon emissions, “will be good for a province like Alberta as it will be for the whole of Canada,” Dion, the leader of the federal Liberals, promised a crowd of dele-gates at the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition conference in Edmonton.

“Imagine Fort McMurray to be sustainable,” he told the audience. “We’ll have the know-how that we’ll be able to export around the world and we’ll make megatonnes of money with it.”

Dion, who has been touring the province in a bid to sell the carbon tax, said the advantage to Alberta will come from economic diversification fostered by the levy.

A Promise Obama Should Keep

One Obama Campaign Promise on Canada That I’d Like Him to Keep
From Canada’s Financial Post comes Peter Foster’s article “Obama plays ‘dirty’ oil card”.

On Tuesday, orotund Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama vowed to break the U. S. addiction to “dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive” oil. An advisor said it was an open question whether Canada’s oil sands were Mr. Obama’s prime target, but the word “dirty” is a dead giveaway.

Mr. Obama, speaking in Las Vegas, implied that the U. S. might somehow do without the oil sands. “[T]he possibilities of renewable energy are limitless,” he declared. “We’ve heard promises about it in every State of the Union for the last three decades. But each and every year, we become more, not less, addicted to oil–a 19th-century fossil fuel.”

[. . .]

When it comes to picking on oil sands, Mr. Obama is fad surfing a popular wave. In December the U. S. government adopted a law to ban federal procurement of fuels that generate more greenhouse gases than “conventional sources.” California has also adopted low-carbon fuel standards. On Monday, a meeting of mayors in Miami slapped a Scarlet Letter on oil sands production, demanding “full life-cycle” accounting for such fuels.

Natural Resources Defense Council to Oil Companies: Stop Tar Sands Fuel

Recently, 500 ducks mistook a lake of toxic tar sands waste in Alberta for one of the many pristine waters in Canada’s Boreal forests. Once coated with the oily residue, the ducks couldn’t fly away and they all died. Many had flown from the United States on their way to have their young in the Boreal. The deceptive waters of the enormous waste lagoons were likely too attractive for them on their long trek north. Tar sands oil is just as deceptive as a solution to our energy needs.

The death of 500 ducks was one more warning about harm caused by mining and drilling Canada’s Boreal forests for the tar sands oil that lies deep under the surface. Beneath the carpet of blue waters and green forests of the Province of Alberta, the tar sands are sand mixed with a sticky substance called bitumen. This bitumen – after using lots of energy and water – can be turned into synthetic crude oil, and from there into fuel for our cars, trucks and airplanes.

In addition to the problems of torn up forests and toxic lagoons, the process for making the synthetic crude produces three times the greenhouse gases per barrel as conventional oil production.

A Licence to Wreak Environmental Havok

This project is a licence to wreak environmental havoc

This week BP announced it is buying a 50 per cent stake in Husky Energy’s tar sands development project in Alberta, Canada, to produce more than 200,000 barrels by 2020. The move in effect signals the company is ready to participate in one of the most environmentally destructive projects on the planet.

Canada’s tar sands are second only in size to the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, with more than 149,000 sq km an area larger than all of England (130,410 sq km). Tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay and bitumen, a heavy tar-like substance that can be converted into oil. Instead of simply drilling a well, the tar sands must be strip-mined in giant open pits or mined underground with in situ technologies that inject super-heated water into the ground.

The process is very water and energy intensive. A barrel of tar sands oil requires up to five times more energy to produce than a conventional barrel and results in five times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The US-based World Resources Institute estimates the tar sands will soon match the entire carbon dioxide emissions of the Czech Republic. By 2020 the tar sands are expected to release more than 141 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, or more than the emissions currently produced by all the road transport in the UK 125.3 million tons in 2002).