Head in the sand

Image Credit: mastermaq, Creative Commons.

With all the attention the U.S. government lavishes on the Middle East, it's hard to blame Americans for assuming that most their oil comes from that troubled part of the world. But that hasn't been true for several years. The top source of imports is Canada.

This is good for Canada, of course. Petro-dollars are largely keeping the Canadian economy afloat. And it's good for the U.S., insofar as energy security and national security tend to be associated with each other these days. But it's not so good when it comes to keeping the planet's ecosphere in the Goldilocks zone that makes it comfortable for human habitation.

Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are now rising faster than any other member of the G8 industrial powerhouses, according to national reports just filed with the United Nations. They went up 4% between 2006 and 2007, which puts Canada's emissions more than 33% above its Kyoto Protocol targets -- targets the current, Conservative government has basically abandoned, despite the fact they are enshrined them in law.

There's no reason to believe things will change any time soon, largely because a lot of those emissions are associated with the Alberta tar sands. Those sands represent an enormous economic opportunity for the country but also happen to be the most energy-intensive method currently in use to extract oil from the ground. It takes about three times as much energy (in the form of other greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels) to squeeze a barrel of oil out of the tar sands than it does the oil from Saudi Arabia's "conventional" wells. The amount of water required and the habitat destruction involved in digging up the tarry sand are also enormous, but one thing at a time.

The biggest problem is this: Fully exploiting the tar sands' 174 billion barrels of oil that can be affordably produced will generate so much in the way of greenhouse gases, through production and combustion, that it will be impossible for civilization as a whole to meet any kind of useful greenhouse gas emissions reductions target. In other words, the tar sands projects must be shut down, just as we have to close all the coal-fired plants

The oil company's have invested billions in the tar sands, though, and because they are a prime mover of Canada's economy, there's little chance of that happening. There are experimental schemes in the works to use bacteria to extract the oil instead of the water- and energy-intensive heating process now being used, and even nuclear reactors could be built to replace the natural gas now boiling the water. But those are both decades away from implementation and do nothing about the GHG emissions that come from burning the resulting product.

The recent ruling by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide is a threat to human health increases the possibility that imports of tar sands oil could be banned. Many consider that a long shot. But it might be the only way to hasten the closure of what is widely considered one of the most environmentally destructive industrial projects on Earth.