A Keystone XL Rube Goldberg Machine

Not so long ago it seemed like the world had woken up to the fact that perpetual growth powered by finite resources on a finite planet was impossible. People spoke of a transition to a green economy in which little bunnies would frolic among solar collector panels while soaring birds would circle wind turbines. Gas prices were skyrocketing, people were talking about peak oil and it was clear that we were inviting ecological, social and economic disaster by continuing our energy policy. No, I'm not talking about this summer or last year, that was 1970 and a conservative into conservation was in the White House - Richard Nixon. He brought the Environmental Protection Agency into existence and along with it a raft of legislation to protect the air, water and land. Well, here we are forty years later facing the same problems again and an American president who promised his election would bring "the moment when the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet will begin to heal..." on the verge of completing our suicidal Rube Goldberg Machine and signing our death sentence by allowing a project which Jim Hansen of NASA, the world's foremost climate scientist, said is "essentially game over" for our planet.

What, you still haven't looked up Rube Goldberg? First, it's known as Heath Robinson in the UK. Still not there? Did you ever play the game Mouse Trap when you were a kid? Too old school? How about The Incredible Machines? Still too '90s? Ok, well maybe you've seen this video:



That's a Rube Goldberg Machine, a a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction. With a little imagination it's not hard to see the world's dependence on oil as one giant Rube Goldberg machine whose aim optimistically is to burden us financially for the benefit of a few oil companies, pessimistically to catalyze the burning of the planet. Many had hoped that we'd either save ourselves by developing a new technology to replace oil or that it would simply run out, so called Peak Oil. Our machine is so deviously complex that it even works against both solutions. Despite the enormous wealth oil has created for a few companies (ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Shell made $35 billion in profit in the first quarter this year), our governments still give them massive tax breaks (more than $4 billion for that previous group of five from Uncle Sam) and allow them to write the legislation (see Dick Cheney's 2005 energy bill and it's Haliburton Loophole) to keep producing oil and gas thanks to the political influence they can buy in our corpocracy. Worse, instead of technology setting us free, it's further enslaved us in recent years making deep sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing and tar sand extraction feasible and profitable. The games been rigged and the trigger is about to be pulled.

When President Obama got back from vacation at Martha's Vineyard last weekend I wonder if he even saw the hundreds of people in front of the gates waiting to be arrested. A couple of thousand people signed up to be arrested for sitting, singing and holding signs protesting against TransCanada's plans to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Once you get past the 'huh, they can be arrested for that?' moment (you know, it would be embarrassing if the tourist saw them or worse, they could be terrorists) one naturally wonders what could drive people to such an extreme. The answer lies in northern Alberta, the source of the pipelines payload. See, Alberta's oil isn't the conventional kind, it's even got it's own name, tar sands, or if you prefer, oil sands, which is actually vast deposits of bitumen - black, tarlike goo that is mixed with sand, clay, water and oil. There are approximately 2.5 trillion barrels of the stuff, the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world and in terms of recoverable oil, the 2nd biggest in the world outside of Saudi Arabia. The problem is and has always been turning this crud into crude.

The view over Mordor, er, near Fort McMurray

Unsurprisingly, it was Obama's predecessor(s) who made it all possible. When Dubya's handlers were scouting international locations for him to begin reaping the rewards of his presidential legacy - giving speeches for cash - they found their options to be rather limited thanks to the international crimes he had committed. Fortunately for them, there was one place in the world sure to welcome him being much like Dubya's home state it was more Texas than Texas and all- Alberta, Canada. So, instead of being arrested by the ICC as he disembarked from the plane in Calgary, he only had to deal with a few protestors on his way to a $4,000/plate speech. Yes, Alberta, home of pickup trucks with shotgun racks and oil. Lots and lots of oil. It's been said that the only winner of the invasion of Iraq was Alberta as it played a part in the machine, helping push the price of oil into the triple digits and thus turning Alberta's biggest natural resource from a perennial money loser into the next big thing.

You see, strip mining the world's largest boreal forest for oil ain't cheap, environmentally or financially. It's kinda like ripping out your lungs while filling your chest with smoke. Loading the world's largest trucks with crud, moving it, heating it with natural gas (28 cubic metres or 1000 cubic feet of natural gas to produce one barrel of oil), mixing with 2.5 to 4 barrels of water, storing the toxic waste in tailing ponds big enough to be seen from space and finally transporting it costs money. With the price of oil stuck around $20/barrel (as low as $12 in 1998/99) it didn't make economic sense for oil companies to do the dirty work, so the government did. For decades the people of Alberta made up the loss in subsidies. A habit they still haven't seemed to shake despite the turnaround, giving more in subsidies to tar sands producers than the entire Environment Canada budget.

Higher oil prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza along with profits, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a "novel thermal recovery process", embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth. Thanks to war and insatiable usage, the surge in oil prices allowed the United States Energy Information Administration to "discover" oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta - previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil - was actually sitting on at least 174 billion "economically recoverable" barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States. Iraq's oil boom wasn't delayed; it was relocated. There is a certain irony there: The United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure access to its oil. Now, thanks partly to economic blowback from that disastrous decision, it has found the "security" it was looking for right next door.

Click to enlarge

So thank dog it's not Dubya sitting in the Oval Office deciding whether or not to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border and deliver oil all the way to the Gulf of Mexico via Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Nebraska's Sand Hills, the Yellowstone River and the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground reservoir that supplies two million Americans in the Midwest with water all lie along the path. Especially when the precursor pipeline suffered a dozen leaks in the past year would mean that a larger one in which 1.3 million barrels of bitumen with dozens of poisons needed to act as lubricants is forced at high pressure over 1,711 miles (over 2,750 kms) is bound to suffer a major leak sometime. Or wait, maybe it's the knowledge that it doesn't matter who's sleeping at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that so many people are willing to face arrest to raise awareness of what is being done to us. Faced with a financial crisis caused by too big to fail banks, greed, corruption and out of control inequality, Obama chose to bail out the very same banks and extend the Bush tax cuts which incentivized the greed and blew open the gap between rich and poor. Faced with an out of control health care system which delivers worse results for way more money than any other OECD country, Obama chose to reward the insurance industry that lead to the problems of exclusion and cost. A winning Rube Goldberg Machine takes delicate planning to put everything in place. The oil industry gets preferential access to Canadian Prime Minister Harper, together they lobby against the Europeans banning tar sands to protect the dirty fuel's clean image and a former ambassador to the US gets dispatched to lobby in Washington fueled by the petrodollars at the disposal of Exxon and BP and finding familiar nameplates in the very corridors tasked with shaping the laws and regulations for the industry. No one was surprised to hear Hillary Clinton comment that she was inclined to approve the pipeline months before the State Department or the EPA had even compiled a report. Even less surprisingly, the State Department has since given the KXL project green lights, while receiving red from watchdogs, in all their flawed reports to date.

Tar Sands. Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking). Deep Sea and Arctic Drilling. Mountaintop Removal (MTR). Nuclear Energy. It seems so counter-intuitive when we know the dangers behind each but these are the energy sources that America and the world are turning to when we have alternatives. The oil companies simply play their spin machine to keep us addicted to their crack. Fracking is poisoning watersheds and water tables across America, it's been documented, we've been warned but it'll keep being done and move to to Europe, including the UK with the same dearth of regulation and even here to Poland. The technology that goes into drilling for oil thousands of feet below the sea is impressive so nothing could ever go wrong like it did in the Gulf of Mexico until it did, disastrously with BP last summer. Or just a few weeks ago for Shell in the North Sea and, gosh, ruining their reputation! Following the Gulf of Mexico disaster, Obama gave the OK to expand drilling over 20 million acres in the Gulf and soon probably in the Arctic Ocean. Remember how hard it was to stop the Gulf spill? Now imagine the remote Arctic. But, but, the technology! Let's not even speak of the horrors of blowing the tops off mountains to get at ever more inaccessible coal. We learned the lesson of Fukishima too, right? The Germans may have but not America and certainly not China. Holy shit, thanks again Wikileaks.



If you read the wrong newspapers or watch nearly any TV (really, people still do) the oil companies myth making machines will be screaming about the jobs these projects while using numbers made up by the industry to create while presenting a false choice between the economy and the environment. Even if true the reality runs something like this - we (as in us, it's our planet) grant oil, coal and nuclear companies access to our land for a minimum fee, while providing them with subsidies and tax incentives so that they can make billions in profit today and we have to pay with our health, lives and cash thanks to the damage that they leave behind. Yeah, sounds fair, kinda like the banking industry. There are better, safer, sustainable ways to spend $7 billion. I'll bet you didn't know that America is actually a $1.9 billion net exporter of solar energy products. I'd say the big problem is that it's not the right people making or saving the money the money when alternative energy is used. BP and Exxon can charge us for the oil for as long as we need it but they can't charge us for the sun and wind.

The Real Slippery Slope

There'll also be the banshee screams of those claiming that oil from Alberta is more ethical than that from places such as Saudi Arabia, Nigeria or Venezuela, countries that are potentially unstable or hostile. Um, yeah, Canadian's farts don't smell either. And the most childish (see what I did there?) spin of all, finger pointing, the old "if we don't do it, someone else will". This one's trumpeted over and over with the tar sands, that if the US doesn't get it, then the Chinese will. The Chinese! Wrong. A devastating new report from Oil Change International shows that Keystone XL will not only allow oil companies to exploit big domestic (read US the biggest kind) tax loopholes but also send most of its oil to export. USA! USA! Not only do you get all the risk of spills but you won't even get taxes to help pay for it. Anyway, a pipeline to the Pacific will be fought in the courts by native tribes and the people of the BC will fight any plan to fill tankers with the gunk off their coast. At the very least it will staunch the flow, time will be bought, time to build alternative energy sources. Fort McMurray, Alberta is a long way from anywhere so killing this pipeline turns the tar sands into a landlocked bomb instead of a nuclear submarine. Tar sand production is set to triple by 2020, stopping this pipeline throws a wrench into those plans. As an oil company economist and vice-president said, "Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck". Alberta’s Energy Minister, Ron Liepert added "If there was something that kept me up at night, it would be the fear that before too long we’re going to be landlocked in bitumen...We’re not going to be an energy superpower if we can’t get the oil out of Alberta." Exactly.

Back to Richard Nixon. He wasn't really more progressive than Obama when it comes to the environment. It took 20 million people out in the streets for Earth Day in 1970 to get him to finally act. Yes, people power forced him to sign the bills that established the EPA and the landmark Clean Air Act then in 1972 Nixon signed the Coastal Zone Management Act; the Ocean Dumping Act; the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungide, Rodenticide Act; and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Nixon's term also saw passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Somehow we've allowed ourselves to be sent back to the 70's while becoming so apathetic that only a handful are forced to try to defuse the largest carbon bomb on the planet.

Look, I'm not here to try to convince you that climate change is happening. It is, regardless of what your chosen means of indoctrination tell you. Of course this doesn't mean we're causing it regardless of what most climate scientists are telling us. I get it, there's no way to prove it despite the overwhelming evidence. The fact is we might be and whether or not you think volcanoes contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than human activity (they don't) or that stolen emails showed that scientists manipulated data (they didn't) or that only an benign deity can influence the planet (he/she/it doesn't), carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is steadily climbing. So, as we approach seven billion inhabitants we're allowing the powers that be dictate our continued addiction to oil which will get harder and more dangerous to retrieve. Simultaneously, tar sands not only uses vast amounts of fresh water, it poisons it as part of the production process and carries an elevated risk of contaminating more in transportation. War is a natural consequence of shortages in either oil or water and now we've also learned that it also occurs thanks to warmer weather associated with El Nino. Hmmm, not good if the planet is indeed heating up. Oh, yeah, all part of the Rube Goldberg suicide machine. Tar Sands production is set to triple by 2020 while producing more CO2 than conventional oil both in production and ultimate use, you know, when you burn it in your Godcar going down to Wal-Mart. As most emissions come from burning it, the industry tries to spout figures comparing "well to wheels" (about 15% higher) instead of the more damning "well to tank" figure (up to 300% higher).

To stop it we need a change, not just in energy production, transportation and exploitation, but in our way of thinking, behaving and advancing. Regardless, you don't have to believe in climate change, anthropogenic or not, to believe in the increasing cancer rates caused around Fort Chipewyan by tar sands extraction and the destruction wreaked by the run off of arsenic, lead and mercury into the Athabasca River flowing into and thus endangering the Peace-Athabasca Delta. More than just mutant fish I'm afraid. Alberta won't stop it, decades of pro tar sands cheerleading have ensured the population is completely misinformed by what was just recently revealed to be pure propaganda as a federal report released in December accused the authorities of not having anywhere near the proper monitoring and controls in place.

To be fair, as the Economist pointed out, the report also indicated that environmentalist's claims that the tar sands are the "most environmentally destructive project on Earth" were "not accurate". Via the Globe and Mail on the same report, it "notes that scientific data shows air pollution is minimal, water pollution a potential concern but is having no immediate impact, that there's no correlation between oil sands pollution and an elevated cancer rate in Fort Chipewyan". All this of course without saying what is more destructive or much data thanks to the lack of monitoring. You might remember the preferred method of regulation and oversight in the Alberta oil industry from the financial industry a couple years ago. Ironically, the one man who can bring a change is the same who promised he'd bring it a few years ago, Barack Obama. As it crosses an international border, Obama and no one else gets to decide if the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico goes forward or not.

View of the Athabasca-Peace Delta

There's a lot of things that I just can't seem to wrap my head around. There are Christians who profess to follow the teachings of the world's most famous socialist, Jesus Christ, yet whose true system of belief is based on a greed that makes them believe the best way to allocate scarce resources is a corrupt, oligarchical system they call the free market or capitalism. Haven't they even read the bible? Don't they even listen to the pope? Even sillier are those who believe in a democracy in which two (or maybe even three) corporate financed and thus controlled parties conspire to determine who maybe half of the population will choose between. America is of course where economics, politics and religion meet head on. It's the only place in the world where batshit crazy wackos such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry could be considered for the presidency. Thanks to folks like them monopolizing the media, the tandem of natural disasters that hit Washington DC in the last couple of weeks are more likely to be seen as acts of god warning the American people to cut spending in the words of Bachmann (please, don't look into her eyes) than independent events. Perry can extol the wonders of Texas schools teaching creationism alongside evolution to children in a land where most of the population believes that a bearded man in the sky created the Earth in six days around 6,000 years ago to once again drown out the lesson that could be learned of preparation and conservation by screaming like the monkeys they really evolved from.

Ah, Rube Goldberg again, keep the people stupid, feed them garbage and keep degrading the science that tells us that our actions aren't necessarily creating the climate but almost definitely making it worse. How else could Americans not connect the dots from April, when a series of killer tornadoes tore up the South to May, when floods ravaged the entire Mississippi River basin, through July, when killer heat waves seared the Midwest and Northeast to August, when Texas officially passed its worst one-year drought on record and finally to the warmer ocean pulling Hurrican Irene northward last weekend? The same way as last year. And the previous decade. By framing the issue with their media cohorts by asking the wrong question - "What caused these events?" - instead of "What's making them worse?". Despite 595 people (and counting) - from regular folks from Nebraska to event organizer and 350.org founder Bill McKibben and Daryl Hannah - being arrested in front of his bedroom, it's clear the Faux sound machine and the petro-interests have made sure President Obama has heard the wrong question on this issue as they have on all the others. We're this close to getting him to hear the message but there's only a few more days in Washington (then September 26th in Ottawa) so stand up, sit down, sign up, help out and call out the right answer to the right question - US!

Additional links (cause you can just never have enough!):
- Stop the Pipeline!
- "Tipping Point: The Age of the Oil Sands" (only available in Canada)
- Top 10 Tar Sands Facts
- Is There a Cancer Threat from the Oil Sands Industry?
- Slow Motion Oil Spill
- Ten Years After 9/11 - Canada's True Cost of Oil (great pics)

Pwned by the Podium

The Olympic Games are competitions between athletes in individual or team events and not between countries

-International Olympic Committee

I don't like it one bit, it makes me feel somehow, I dunno ... unclean. Just as the Macbeths needed more than water to remove the blood from their hands, Monday's shower couldn't remove the stink from my hangover. The blood was symbolic of the stain left on the conscience of those royal usurpers by unchecked ambition while the stench of nationalism hangs in the air thanks to an all-out pursuit of medals and glory. I admit it, I'm proud that Canada won the most gold medals at this year's Winter Olympics; so why does it make me want to puke? Easy, as most foreign journalists have observed over the past couple of weeks it's just not Canadian, this kind of jingoistic flag-waving belongs to our neighbours to the south.

"Own the Podium". The program sponsored by the Canadian federal government at a cost of C$117 million is what got under the skin of most people. Seems that us canucks were fed up with coming in fourth place and seeing that as host nation, this would be Canada's chance to shine in the world's spotlight, funding was directed towards those events where we deemed our chances of winning to be greatest. Based on the results from the two previous times Canada hosted the Olympics, perhaps you can't really blame the Canadian Olympic organizers for wanting to improve on their past performance. You see, Canada failed to win a single gold in either Montreal in 1976 or Calgary in 1988, the only host nation in history who can claim such a dubious record. OK, Montreal was the summer Olympics, but Calgary? We couldn't even muster a gold in the winter games!

So, this time it would be different. Thanks to a $66 million infusion from the country's taxpayers, along with $51 million in sponsorship funds, the program offered Canadians who took home gold $20,000 apiece in a stated goal to take the overall medals title. While we may not have reached it, you can't argue with the result that was achieved as Canadians took home the most golds, 14. But hold on, it seems there is no agreed upon way of measuring who 'owned' the podium. Europeans generally tend to rank the countries by total golds won, while ironically North Americans usually rank by total medals. Both methods have their inherent weaknesses. Is a bronze really as valuable as a gold? Conversely, if a team wins only one gold while another country garners, say nine, but all of them silver and bronze, can you say the gold winners had a better Olympics? Such was the case in Turin in 2006 as the Japanese with a solitary medal, golden, were ranked ahead of the Fins with six silvers and three bronzes according to some tables.

But here's the rub: should it even matter? After all, the trappings of podiums and flag-raisings were not even part of the rebirth of the Olympics in the modern era. 1956 and Soviet domination brought it about as rivaling ideologies jockeyed for superiority any way they could. Those Italian Winter Games saw the Soviets come out ahead with seven gold and a total of 16 medals, but it wasn't until the Melbourne Summer Games that the world noticed politics taking over the event. The Hungarian Uprising and the Suez War combined to see multiple nations pull out of the games: Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden boycotted due to the Soviet presence while Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon did likewise in response to the Israeli invasion of Egypt. The age of political boycotts was initiated, up to then no one had made such a political statement, not even of the Nazi games of 1936. Of course the fall of the Berlin Wall has brought with it the end of the age of politics, ushering in the age of economics which coincidentally hasn't seen a single boycott in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Sadly, 'Own the Podium' didn't begin and end with solely helping Canadians; it also hindered everyone else as non-Canadian athletes found their access to practice sites was strictly limited. It started last winter when speedskaters from several countries were denied access to the Richmond Olympic Oval. The benefits of familiarity vary by sport. It may be irrelevant for some sports, after all, an oval is an oval, but it is particularly important on one-of-a-kind new sites like the alpine skiing runs or the track for luge, bobsled and skeleton. At the Whistler downhill course, unfamiliar to most of the world’s best skiers, several medal contenders were left watching over a fence as the Canadian team trained. Meanwhile a gentlemen's agreement between the luge teams of the United States and Canada was ignored, cutting practice runs. Canadian athletes had hundreds of trips down what is widely considered the world’s most treacherous course while foreign athletes had a few dozen. Some have gone so far as to say that lack of access to the luge run was a factor in the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili.

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But really, who won? Just as in Beijing, where the Chinese led in golds while the US led in total medals, the US repeated the overall medal victory while again losing in gold, this time to Canada in Vancouver. So depending on your view, optimists may see it as two winners, while pessimists may see none. It's all academic anyway as even winning 'only' nine golds in Vancouver, the Norwegians continued there medal per capita dominance at the Winter Olympics. In fact the nation of 4.7 million has won more medals than any other country at the Quadrennial Cold Weather Athletic Competition (thanks Stephen Colbert). Norway has 290 total medals to the USA's measly 237, with Canada lagging well back in 7th with 127. Well, at least the success of "Own the Podium" allowed the canucks to move past the Swedes who are now back in 8th and in fact if measured by gold, Canada is now tied with Finland for 6th with 42.

Yes, the maple leaf was in your face at these games, but that's the idea for the home team isn't it? To show the rest of the world you kick ass, like they did in Sydney and more recently at the Beijing coming out party for the aspiring G2 superpower. Every country that is awarded the Olympics immediately prioritizes the winning of more medals than ever to inflate its national ego and help justify the enormous expenditure and effort. China was guilty two years ago of favouring the home team and don't forget their Project 119, named for the number of additional gold medals it might contend for by focusing on medal intensive sports. Yes, I guess what's ok in China is ok in Canada. And don't forget Salt Lake City in 2002 which saw a nation desperate to prove to the world that it was still the world's superpower and therefore needn't fear anyone. What's a few maple leafs jerseys when the stars and stripes were just as ubiquitous eight years ago? Oh yeah, that was the fringe benefit to these Olympics for the host nation's government, it distracted the people's attention from that little political fiasco that saw democracy shut down for over three months in the true north strong and free. Canada's national fascist rag admitted as much and even claimed the strategy a success. Yeah, that's right, it's ok to torture, or it least be complicit to torture, like the Americans too.

So, unfortunately for Canada, it seems it's alright that they have a leader determined to turn their once distinct nation into a watered-down version of their southern neighbour so long as he's a hockey fan. Somehow Harper has missed who's winning the global race these days, but he better wake up quick as the thin-skinned response of the Canadian media to comparisons between 1936 Berlin and 2010 Vancouver won't be in evidence at the site of the next winter Olympics, Socchi, Russia in 2014. I'm sure they'll choose more dramatic nationalistic maneuvers, anyone remember the Arctic? Medvedev has already demanded officials responsible for Russia's abysmal medal performance step down so we know that one of the stories of 2014 will again be the home nation's drive to top the podium. As China has raced to lock up resources around the world to feed their growing economy, Canada (and the US, Denmark and Norway) better watch the Russians close. After all, they did take advantage of the distraction that the opening ceremonies in Beijing afforded them in 2008 as the Georgian conflict kicked off. Guess we'll have to wait and see what they have in store for the world.

And then there's hockey. Without the gold medal victory Sunday night against the American squad, the Canadian Olympics would've been deemed a bust by most no matter the other results. Again, I must admit that my nationalism gene was activated as I walked into my local bar here in Poznan and in my Polish-English garble inquired whether the game would be on TV there. After a moment of confusion the owner/bartender broke into a smile and said "Oh, your friends!" And so it was, as my Canadian brethren took the ice, I was settled in comfortably on a bar stool, beer in hand enjoying 'The Game' on the other side of the world. The win wrapped up Canada's 14th gold from 17 days of competition, moving them past the Norwegian team's 2002 performance for most ever. The glow of victory remained Monday as everyone seemed to have seen the game as well and made sure to tell me what a good game we played, on the street or in school. But when the hangover finally cleared on Tuesday, this dirty feeling crept back, nagging me, demanding to know: what comes next for Canada?

The first week of the Vancouver Olympics threatened to turn the games into the worst ever, but by the end of day 17, the city and Canadians had managed to turn this perception on its head. The city seems to have come out a big winner, but I fear it'll turn into a loss for the country. Politically rudderless, a wasteland with no credible opposition and a megalomaniacal leader intent on burning the Reichstag; economically dependent on her sickly neighbour to the south and the biggest environmental disaster in the world (which coincidentally just welcomed billions in investment from, you guessed it, China); and morally corrupt, where the Olympics sponsors can snow the public with a green campaign while being the dirtiest corporations on the planet (and no, I won't go into the irony of trucking in snow to a Winter Olympic site bereft of snow thanks to trucking). My hangover has passed, the world seems less foggy. Now that the Olympics are over, Canada gets to have a functioning government once again. I think I can deal with the new Canadian attitude so long as the energy from Own the Podium gets turned into Own Your Government.

Slow Motion Oil Spill

As a Canadian living abroad, I have to admit to being more than a little proud of pointing out some of the Canadianisms that are with all of us. Whenever a Canadian song comes on or a Canadian actor appears on the screen, I'm guilty of being the guy who has to say, “s/he's Canadian, eh!”. The maple leaf, a beaver, even a hockey game always make me smile. That's why today's post is so difficult to write. If someone were to ask you where the largest recoverable source of oil in the world was located outside of Saudi Arabia, what would you answer? Unfortunately, I'd have to answer that it, along with Celine Dion, is Canadian. Welcome to the biggest capital project underway on earth.

Having grown up in the capital of Alberta, Edmonton, I've always known of the existence of tar sands. Today, you're more likely to hear the term oil sands to describe the Florida sized reserve of oil trapped in dirt, sand and rock in the northern portion of my home province. It is actually deposits of bitumen, a molasses-like viscous oil that won't flow unless heated or diluted with lighter hydrocarbons. Essentially, it is oil trapped in the rock. Fortunately, for most our lives, the price of a barrel of oil has been under $30 a barrel which made extracting the oil from the muck an uneconomical proposal. Of course, 2008 has brought with it a new world energy order, one where oil companies have been given the green light to rape the world at any cost in order to keep America running.

So how is this goo extracted from the earth? There is the “easy” way, and the “hard” way. The easy stuff is near the surface, representing about 20% of the reserves. The topsoil is simply scraped away by huge excavators and the underlying tar sands are dug out and put in huge trucks and taken for extraction. It is steamed to extract the heavy bitumenous oils and piped to refineries. The hard way, for the remaining 80% that lies in sand too deep to be mined again involves steam. It is injected deep into the earth, loosening the bitumen, allowing the producers to draw it upward.

Searching for reliable information can be exasperating due to the fact that the federal and provincial governments have decided to give the oil companies themselves oversight over the environmental impact. A more extensive report on the cost can be found here if you have the time to study. A simple input/output analysis of extracting one barrel (1/8 of a ton) of usable oil is: (mostly 2006 figures)
Input:
-two tons of tar sands (yes about 16 times the weight of oil you'll get)
-two to four and a half, I've read as much as 3 to 7, barrels of water (yes, some is recoverable, most goes to tailage ponds, some of which can be seen from space)
-um, that's about 350 million cubic metres a year, twice the amount the city of Calgary uses
-one to 1.25 gigajoules of natural gas. The barrel of oil that will eventually be produced is about 6.227 gigajoules, so about a fifth is wasted off the top
-that's 1,000 cubic feet per barrel of oil, 20% of Canada's total natural gas production goes to the extraction process, and it still will need further refining
-does this remind anyone of reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead as we take a relatively clean burning fuel, natural gas, and turn it into crude oil?
Output:
- one barrel of oil (that will still require further refining and will eventually contain 6 times the carbon levels of conventional sweet crude)
- between 85 and 125 kg of CO2 simply from the extraction, with refining and ultimate use still to add much more (by comparison conventional oil extraction releases about 28.6 kg)
-these oil sands are centred in one is the boreal forest ecosystem which stores more carbon in its peat lands, soil and trees than any other ecosystem in the world, yes, including the tropical forests, that's why there's so much of this stuff. The lungs of North America are being ripped out to produce the destroyer
-the Athabasca River, Canada's longest river runs through the heart of the area has a experienced a runoff decrease of 50% in the 93.7% of the Athabasca Basin that is downstream of the Rocky Mountains.
-pollution as far downstream as the Peace-Athabasca Delta which drains 1/6 of Canada's water, causing mercury levels to rise 98% higher, a jump of 466% of dissolved arsenic and 114% in sediment arsenic
-seepage and plain old dumping into the water system creating cool looking mutant fish
-arsenic levels 453 times acceptable levels in moose meat from the region
-cancer clusters popping up in areas downstream, potentially 458 times higher rates than expected
-huge tailing ponds of used, dirty, toxic water that kills anything that lands on it
-an old fashion gold rush boom town, Fort McMurray, a place I've had the opportunity to visit. It was the middle of the summer, which due to it's northern latitude meant that I enjoyed a midnight sun of sorts as it never quite set. The population has doubled in the last 9 years to about 75,000 with a “shadow” population of 12,000 living in work camps, campgrounds or hotels. (With debilitating effects on the infrastructure link)
-fun for conspiracy theorists as the amount of cover up from these effects becomes known, lives destroyed, people dying. For an excellent article click here.

While most people probably think of Canada as an environmentally friendly country, they are not only allowing this to happen, but encouraging it, while the Americans are at least keeping the oil companies out of Alaska... strange dichotomy. One report called the fiasco a slow motion oil spill, which is essentially the game being played by the powers that be. As long as the oil can get pulled out of the ground fast enough, hopefully not enough people will notice what's going on. Oil companies are pouring money into the area on a mind-boggling scale. As of 2006 the Alberta government said it had issued leases for 4,264 oil sands projects covering 25,065 miles. New projects costing more than $100 billion are on the books for the region as production is expected to at least triple to 3 million barrels a day by 2015.

The Alberta provincial government says it has issued leases for 4,264 oil sands projects covering 25,065 square miles . It knows the oil industry, luring them to invest by only charging a 1% royalty until capital costs are recovered. New projects costing more than C$100 billion are on the books for the oil sands region and production is expected to triple to 3 million barrels a day by 2015. This is a government that also knows it's people, who in turn have kept the Conservative party in power since 1971. Over the years the Alberta government has shown the people that they are saving for the future by building the Heritage Trust fund and issuing occasional royalty cheques to the people. However, when you contrast what a country like Norway has done with it's resource wealth, it puts Alberta to shame. 32 years of savings equals $16.6 billion in Alberta, in Norway they have over 160 billion Euros! Environmental Defence calls the whole thing the most destructive project on Earth and it's hard to argue. From the huge toxic tailing ponds with earthen dams holding them back from the river, rivalled in size only by China's Three Gorges dam, which could burst any time and are continually seeping into the groundwater to the greenhouse emissions that have forced the entire country to abandon it's Kyoto commitments, it is a source of intense shame to any Canadian. More importantly it's could be the biggest danger to mankind in the entire world.