Harper’s Petro-Whopper

Yeah, right. Is this like fixed election dates, or accountability, or transparency in government?

Our Furious Leader has – get this – said that, “…if elected in October, the Conservatives will prohibit oil sands companies from shipping bitumen from Canada’s oil sands to countries that do not have equivalent emission reduction targets.” (National Spot).

So, let’s see. I guess that rules out China. Australia is definitely out. Remind me how much of Alberta’s bitumen they’re getting anyway.

Oh yeah, but what about the States? Well, you see, that’s where the hoax part comes in. What did he really say? If they have “equivalent emission reduction targets” they can have all the tar sludge they want. Nobody ever said anything about actual equivalent emission reductions. You just have to announce a “target” that sounds nice.

And, if you don’t announce a nice-sounding target, why we’ll always be happy to refine the damned stuff here. Harp will make damned sure that Canada’s targets leave lots of room for bitumen upgrading plants galore.

One thing we know about Harpo is that he doesn’t let things like his word stand in his way when he wants something and he wants the mantle of Energy Superpower so bad he’d say anything. So, given his impressive record of lying his ass off, this assurance is bound to be as empty as Harper’s integrity.

Hey Steve, wasn’t the election supposed to be next year?

 

Putting a Number on the Tar Sands

The US Conference of Mayors annual meeting came up with a great idea – tracking the “life cycle impact” of various fossil fuels. They also passed a resolution urging member municipalities to stop using unconventional fuels with lage carbon footprints. The resolution specifically referenced Canada’s Tar Sands:

“The production of tarsands oil from Canada emits approximately three times the carbon dioxide pollution per barrel as does conventional oil production and significantly damages Canada’s Boreal forest ecosystem – the world’s largest carbon storehouse.”

You see, once you factor in the carbon footprint of various fossil fuels – assign a number to them – it’s an easy process to translate that into any of several forms of carbon tariffs.

Alberta’s Tar Sands have always benefitted from the “out of sight/out of mind” syndrome. They’re way up north where few Albertans live. People don’t have to see them if they don’t want to. That, I suspect, is a key reason why Big Oil and the Alberta government have been able to get away with the environmental destruction the Tar Sands necessitate. Whenever someone does complain they’re rebuffed with the same old assurances about new technologies being just around the corner, an excuse that’s then put back in the bottom drawer until the next time it’s needed.

A carbon tariff by end user markets might give Big Oil and the Alberta government the big, swift kick in the ass they’ve needed to actually make those promised new technologies a reality. You simply make it more expensive for them not to clean themselves up. They say they can do it. It’s time they did.

Kudos to the US Conference of Mayors. They just might have pointed to the right path to curbing tar sands pollution.

 

Dead Ducks All In a Row

Special Ed Stelmach has a problem and it’s one that’s not going away.

Ed’s problem, or at least his latest problem, is the toxic waste dump also known as the Athabasca Tar Sands. Getting ersatz oil out of Athabasca’s bitumen tar uses an awful lot of water – fresh water that’s turned into a black, oily waste that has to be pumped into tailing ponds built out of earthen walls.

These tailing ponds are big. They can be seen from the shuttle as it orbits in space. And they’re not getting any smaller because no one, it seems, has any plan for dealing with this toxic sludge. Now I don’t know what the lifespan of an earthen wall may be but I’m pretty sure it’s not all that long. No one’s really sure how much of this stuff may seep into the groundwater or when or just who may be effected by it eventually.

When it comes to the Tar Sands and the rich array of environmental threats associated with that boondoggle, Special Ed clings to the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” school of environmentalism. When native villages downstream get swept with cancer or migratory birds die in the tailing ponds, he proclaims the Tar Sands an environmental triumph and brands his critics as outsiders, sh*t disturbers.

So now Ed has five or six hundred dead ducks on his hands and, of course, it’s not really about the ducks at all but where they died – the tailing ponds. That defeats the “out of sight, out of mind” firewall on which people like Ed rely so heavily. The timing couldn’t have been worse, coming at the same time as Ed had dispatched his Number Two to the US to promote the Tar Sands. How did Ed react? Predictably. Ed tried to set up the province of Alberta as the underdog, the David to the environmentalists’ Goliath. Why not? That kind of bullshit has worked great for the White House for the past eight years. Who cares whether the statement is utterly ridiculous so long as your target audience is willing to swallow.

Now it turns out that a Seattle scientist is calling “bullshit” on Ed Stemcell’s claims that the normal, annual loss from the Tar Sands ponds is only 20-birds. Jeff Wells belongs to a group that conducted research at just one operation in 2003 that found, even with bird-deterrence programmes in place, 705 birds died in just a four week span. That’s one operation, the Albian Sands project, and just four weeks. Albian Sands is a joint venture of Shell and Chevron-Texaco, operator of the Muskeg River mind about 75-kms. north of Fort McMurray.

Makes you wonder. If Ed’s going to deceive the public about a few hundred migratory birds, when it comes to his cherished Tar Sands, what else is he willing to hide and bury and lie about? My guess is that he’ll do whatever he thinks it takes.

No one seems to be asking why these tailing ponds are being left to grow and spread? The wealth associated with those tailings is leaving Athabasca and much of it is leaving Canada with the American oil companies running these mines. Simply leaving these tailings unresolved as a future threat to the region doesn’t sound like much of a plan.

The National Spot ran the predictible opinion piece dismissing the incident as just a few hundred birds that otherwise would have fallen to hunters anyway. What was interesting was the furor that sparked in readers’ letters. People were uniformly incensed with the Post’s whitewash. Maybe there is hope yet.

The satellite picture at the top shows the Albian Sands project. I expect you can figure out for yourself what those black objects are at the top left.

 

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

100-million tonnes of garbage. Flotsam – floating debris. Spread out over an area twice the size of the United States.

It’s all floating off the shores of California and Hawaii and other Pacific Rim nations. Much of it comes in the form of discarded plastic. From AlterNet:

The vast expanse of debris — in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump — is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: “It moves around like a big animal without a leash.” When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. “The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic,” he added.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. “You only see it from the bows of ships,” he said.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.”

Few realize it but, with the exception of a very small amount that’s been incinerated, every bit of plastic that’s ever been produced still exists somewhere. Recycling? Globally, we’re recycling somewhere between 3 to 5% of total production.

Drive through the back country of Mexico, for example. The sides of the roads are covered in discarded plastic bags. The fences are full of them. Unless you’ve seen it you can’t believe it.

 

Taxes Can Reform Attitudes

The New York Times reports on a highly successful Irish initiative to do away with the scourge of plastic bags:

“There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.“

Now I know this is going to send you libertarian folks out there into cardiac arrest but it shows that, like public smoking bans, we can adapt quite easily and, afterward, wonder what all the fuss was about.

 

China’s Next Great Revolution?

Usually revolutions are aimed at toppling the very highest authority. In China there’s a call for a revolution against local government.

The head of China’s environmental agency blames public discontent and riots on pollution and has called for a “struggle” against polluters. Sounds straight out of Mao’s Red Book, eh? From The Guardian:

Zhou Shengxian’s comments “underscore the frustration of state mandarins at local government officials who ignore environmental standards in order to attract investment, jobs and bribes.

“Beijing is trying to shift the economy on to a more sustainable development track. But factory owners who violate state guidelines are often protected by local officials. …According to Mr Zhou, the state environmental protection administration chief, many plants build secret pipes to discharge polluting chemicals. Others release toxins when locals are asleep.

“Demonstrations against power and chemical plants have become increasingly common in recent years. In May, thousands took to the streets of Xiamen, in Fujian province, leading to the suspension of a petrochemical plant. In 2005, police killed at least three villagers in Dongzhou, Guangdong province, while quelling a riot over a planned power plant.

“Anger has been fuelled by unfair land grabs and health fears. According to the government, two-thirds of China’s 595 cities now have unhealthy air.

“Pollution scandals are common. Earlier yesterday, state media reported that tap water had been restored to 200,000 residents of Shuyang county in Jiangsu after a chemical spill halted supplies for 40 hours. The environment agency said more than a quarter of the seven main river systems were so polluted that the water was unfit for human contact.”

China today faces a hellish host of critical, environmental threats ranging from air and water pollution to freshwater depletion and desertification. It is really difficult to conceive how China can bring these threats under control and maintain its planned industrial and economic expansion. It is definitely burning the candle at both ends.