Highlights from a May 10 CBC interview with Al Gore

Al Gore was US Vice-President  from 1992-2000 and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. This interview with Michael Enright (on the Sunday Edition) was mainly to talk about Gore’s new book: “The Future: Six drivers of global change”.   

As part of it, they had an interesting discussion about the Oil Sands development. Here are some highlights: 

When asked how we can possibly transition off oil when there are new sources of oil being made available regularly:  

AG: As a former Saudi oil minister, Sheik Al-Yamani, said, ‘The Stone Age did not end because of a shortage of stones. Rather it was because people found better, safer, more efficacious ways to continue to improve civilization.’

AG: The problem that blocks our rapid transition away from fossil fuels is the political and economic power of the legacy industries that depend upon our willingness to continue to use our atmosphere as an open sewer. Today, fossil fuel burning produces 90 million tons per day of Carbon Dioxide.  We are trapping additional energy due to increased GHGs in the atmosphere which is equivalent to 400 000 Hiroshima bombs. It is a big planet but that is a lot of energy.

AG:  These resources (oil sands) are so dirty. It is not only that burning produces a significant amount of Carbon pollution. It is also all the fracking of gas that’s necessary to process this tar and turn it into heavy oil. It is also gravel mining. It is also the waste which has already contaminated the ground water around Ft McMurray, already polluted the Athabasca River.

GE: But the companies say that they are cleaning that up.

AG: Oh, yes they do.

GE:  It is the most extensive recovery program ever, environmentally.

AG: Well, BP said it did a great job of cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico, too. These companies have a way of sugar-coating what is necessary.

Look, I understand why the value of these resources tempts Canada to fully [exploit them].  I understand how the failure of policy leadership by your big neighbour to the south, my country, has opened the door to irresponsible policy.

Even though it’s understandable how you got into this policy cul-de-sac, and many in my country support you in it, I do think that we are not far from that day when the entire world is going to have to look at reality squarely, and realize that we’re destroying our home. We are not going to some other planet. We couldn’t even evacuate New Orleans!

ME: Is there such a thing as “Ethical Oil”? Various American administrations have said that we would rather buy Canadian oil than Saudi oil because Canada is a more benevolent and more open democracy.

AG: I think oil is oil. ... You know the evidence shows how much of this would be exported from the terminals of Houston and Galveston. That is really the purpose of it. There is oil and then there is dirtier oil and beyond dirtier oil is tar sands.

AG: We need to make a shift in our global civilization as rapidly as we can to produce energy from renewable sources. The good news is that we can. The more solar and wind we use, the cheaper it gets. The more oil and coal we use the more expensive it gets. It’s just that simple.

V. Investment in the tar sands, including pipelines and upgraders, now (2010) totals approximately $200 billion. The tar sands boom has become the world’s largest energy project, the world’s largest construction project, and the world’s largest capital project. No comprehensive assessment of the megaproject’s environmental, economic, or social impact has been done.

   - "Declaration of a Political Emergency" in Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent 
                                            by Andrew Nikiforuk

Collateral damage of Oil Sands development

- Letter to the Editor, Edmonton Sun, November 27, 2011. Heather Plaizier is a participant in the :Bearing Witness to the Oil Sands Project.


"IV. Nations become what they produce. Bitumen, the new national staple, is redefining the character and destiny of Canada. Rapid development of the tar sands has created a foreign policy that favours the export of bitumen to the United States and lax immigration standards that champion the import of global bitumen workers. Inadequate environmental rules and monitoring have allowed unsustainable mining to accelerate. Feeble fiscal regimes have enriched multinationals and given Canada a petrodollar that hides the inflationary pressures of peak oil. Canada now calls itself an 'emerging energy superpower'. In reality, it is nothing more than a Third World energy supermarket."
        - "Declaration of a Political Emergency" in Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent 
                                            by Andrew Nikiforuk

Purpose of the Project

"Canada’s oil sands industry continues to reduce GHG emissions intensity."

     - from The Facts on Oil Sands - Report by the Canadian Association of Oil Producers

"You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."    -  Malcolm X

Purpose  of the "Bearing Witness to the Oil Sands Project":

To bear witness to the impact on people, wildlife and the land of the Oil Sands development in northern Alberta through traveling through the area by canoe, experiencing what is taking place and by interviewing local residents. To bring more awareness to the Albertan and Canadian populations of what is happening through film, photography, writing and public presentations. The following are some of the issues that concern us:

1.       Oil sands development is expanding much too fast

2.       There is no credible environmental monitoring

3.       Currently project proposals are being automatically approved with insufficient regard for effects on community infrastructure, or cumulative effects on air, water, land and wildlife

4.       Oil sands development is economically devastating:  far too little royalties and taxes are being collected, no funds are being saved for the future, and the effects of the world’s biggest industrial project are distorting the Canadian economy

5.       Current land reclamation plans are in the realm of fantasy

6.       Insufficient funds are being set aside for future reclamation efforts

7.       Current management of waste water (so-called tailings ponds which are actually toxic man-made lakes) is environmentally devastating to the watershed

8.       Exporting of bitumen is an export of Canadian jobs as well as increasing the likelihood and seriousness of oil spills

9.       The duty to consult with affected Indigenous groups prior to project approval are not being respected

10.   As the world needs to rapidly move away from fossil fuel use to prevent run-away and catastrophic global warming, the scale of investment in the Oil Sands development is keeping Canada from moving in this direction; instead we are feeding the habit of the world’s biggest energy addicts (notably the U.S.A. which, with less than 5% of world population uses almost 25% of world oil production).


"II. Northern Alberta's bituminous sands, a national treasure, are the globe's last great remainingoil field. This strategic boreal resource has attracted nearly 60 per cent of of all global oil investments. Every major multinational and nationally owned oil company has staked a claim in the tar sands.

III. Neither Canada nor Alberta has a rational plan for the tar sands other than full-scale liquidation. Although the tar sands could fund Canada's transition to a low-carbon economy, government has surrendered the fate of the resource to irrational global demands. At forecast rates of production, the richest deposits of bitumen will be exhausted in forty years."

    -  "Declaration of a Political Emergency" in  Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent 
                         by Andrew Nikiforuk

Toxic Lakes: Alberta Recreation Areas of the Future

June 15, 2013.  Toxic Lakes: Alberta Recreation Areas of the Future. 

“I. The world’s oil party is coming to a dramatic close, and Canada has adopted a new geodestiny: providing the United States with bitumen, a low-quality, high-cost substitute.”

                --- A Declaration of a Political Emergency by Andrew Nikiforuk   

            

NOTE: Major Keystone XL sit-in in Chicago this weekend: June 15-16

https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/2427-help-chicago-say-nokxl?locale=en

Here are some facts about the “tailings ponds”, a euphemism for toxic lakes that are being created in the Oil Sands area. These come from Andrew Nikiforuk’s book, Tar Sands: Dirty oil and a future of a continent (2010), and from Hugh McCullum’s report entitled “Fueling Fortress America”, commissioned by the Polaris Institute, the Parkland Institute and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

1       Enough toxic sludge- contaminated water is produced ever y day to fill 720 Olympic pools: 3 barrels for every barrel of oil produced.

2       There are 120 sq km of toxic lakes as of 2010 and growing rapidly.

3       They are surrounded by earthen dams that rise an average of 82 m above the forest floor. They were never designed to be that high.

4       Nearly a dozen of them on are placed on either side of the Athabasca River

5       “Even at -30 C, the water does not freeze. It just sits there steaming. The stench from these ponds is indescribable.” says Steven Borsy, an oil sands worker.

6       The Syncrude toxic lake, built in 1973, is 23 km long and holds 550 billion liters of water, sand and toxic sludge as of 2010. It is the world’s second biggest artificial lake after China’s Three Gorges Dam reservoir which has swallowed up 13 major cities.

7       Already Syncrude’s “tailings ponds” are bigger and more plentiful than the natural lakes in the area.

8       Two nasty pollutants in the toxic lakes:   PAHs or Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Naphthenic Acids. Half of PAHs tested are known human carcinogens. Naphthenic Acids comprise 2% of the bitumen deposits. These acids kill fish, are one of the key ingredients in napalm bombs and are used as fungicides and wood preservatives.

9       Most of the toxic lakes now leak so badly that they have created toxic wetlands near their bases. Indigenous fish, amphibians, and nesting birds live here and live short, disease-filled lives.  They were supposed to be a temporary solution to a dangerous problem. It now looks like they will Alberta’s problem after the oil sands have been sucked dry.

 10  There is nowhere near enough money being put on deposit by oil companies to reclaim these lakes even if it were possible.

 11   Every year, thousands of ducks, geese, shorebirds, moose, deer and beaver are swallowed up by these ponds to drown, die of hypothermia, or if they survive, to die of cancer later.  

 12   The latest genius solution is “End-pit lakes”. Toxic lake contents will be piped into old mine sites (from open pit oil sands mines) topped with billions of liters of fresh water, and then.... pray for a miracle. Solves two problems at once: the left-over open pit mines and the toxic lake contents. The only thing missing for this solution is the miracle.

                                        This is what an Alberta Oil Sands "Tailings Pond" looks like.

This is from an Alberta Oil Industry 2012 Document describing how an End-pit Lake will look (described in Point #12 above). Like I said, the only technical issue missing to make this a reality is a miracle.

And here is a news story from this week just to show you that the Alberta regulator is on top of this problem.

Posted on June 12, 2013 – Ian Angus

Breaking tar sands rules? Regulator says that’s okay

Here’s a suggestion for Alberta drivers. The next time a cop  stops you for speeding, tell him that the highway code is overly optimistic. He’ll let you go.

If you don’t have a valid drivers license, tell him you were overly optimistic about your ability to pass the test. He’ll let you continue driving.

At least he will if you get the same treatment as the super polluters who mine the Alberta tar sands.

In the Tailings Management Assessment Report released this week, the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board (ECRB) says that no tar sands company has complied with regulations requiring them to clean up their tailings ponds. But that’s okay, there will be no penalty, because the regulator says the standards the industry agreed to in 2009 were ”overly optimistic.”

“Tailings ponds” is a euphemistic name for massive lakes of toxic sludge, used to store  the liquid effluent created by tar sands mining. For every barrel of oil there are six barrels of this oily goo. Of the 25 chemicals found in every tailings pond, 14 are known carcinogens. The ponds themselves are large enough to be seen from space — over 900 million cubic metres, covering an area greater than 170 square kilometres.

In theory, the poisons eventually sink to the bottom. leaving clean water that can be reused. In theory, the land will eventually be reclaimed and returned to its original state. In practice not one has been reclaimed, and they are leaking poison into the Athabaska river.

In 2009, after a public outcry when 1600 migrating birds landed in a tailings pond and died, the industry’s tame regulator finally set some rules. Directive 074 required the mining companies to reduce the fine particles in the poisoned water by 20% in 2011, 30% by 2012 and 50% by 2013.

Not only have those targets not been met, the total volume of tailings dumped into the Alberta landscape has risen 27% since the regulations were established.

But that’s okay. The executive manager of the ERCB says:

“Both industry and ourselves are finding that we were overly optimistic as to how quickly they could integrate various significant tailings management equipment and operations into those complex facilities.”

In other words, it isn’t easy being green, so we won’t insist.

The ERCB report does not set any new compliance targets, and it does not plan to report on tailings again for two years. Given the industry’s long record of successfully evading regulation, no one should be overly optimistic about a tailings cleanup.