theⓋeganⒶrchist’s Comments (group member since Jul 21, 2012)

theⓋeganⒶrchist’s comments from the Stop the Alberta Tar Sands group.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/scie...

Ripping a page — or the cover — from fellow Conservative and former tobacco industry lobbyist Ezra Levant's book, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his new environment minister, Peter Kent, have taken to referring to the product of the Alberta tar sands as ethical oil.

The Prime Minister and Mr. Levant go back a long way. It was Mr. Levant who reluctantly stepped aside as the Alliance candidate in Calgary Southwest so that Mr. Harper could run in a by-election there in 2002. But the "ethical oil" argument they promote has holes as big as the ones in the ground around Fort McMurray.

To start, the logic is faulty. Just because a country or society is considered "ethical" does not mean everything it produces or exports is ethical. If we are going to delve into the ethics of the issue, we must look at the ethics of energy overall. That means considering the impacts of various energy systems on people and the environment.

Here, the science is troubling. It shows that the Alberta tar sands contribute to about five per cent of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and are the country's fastest growing source of emissions. To date, they have disturbed 600 square kilometres of boreal forest with little or no chance of true reclamation, use enormous amounts of water, and pollute the surrounding air and water.

In the summer of 2010, an independent, peer-reviewed scientific study showed that toxic byproducts from the tar sands extraction industry are poisoning the Athabasca River, putting downstream First Nations communities and the fish they eat at risk. Health studies show these First Nations communities already have elevated rare cancers associated with exposure to such toxins.

If this is the most "ethical" source of oil we can find, we need to ask other questions about the moral purity of our intensively processed bitumen. For example, if we sell the oil to countries with poor human-rights records, like China, does that affect the product's "ethical" nature? And how "ethical" are the companies operating in the tar sands; for example, Exxon Mobil, well-known sponsor of climate-change disinformation campaigns; BP, responsible for last year's massive oily disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; or PetroChina? There's also the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our children and grandchildren, which to me is an intergenerational crime.

In this light, wouldn't energy from technologies or sources that limit the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and that have a minimal environmental and health impacts be far more ethical than fossil fuels? And, from an economic perspective, wouldn't these more ethical technologies or fuel sources be doubly attractive to foreign buyers if they came from an "ethical" country like Canada?

As award-winning Alberta author Andrew Nikiforuk has argued, with proper development, the tar sands could help provide Canada with the oil and money we need to shift to a low-carbon economy. But major changes are needed. Environmental regulation and monitoring must be strengthened. Pollution and related health problems must be addressed. More of the revenue must go to Canadians rather than fossil fuel companies. And a national carbon tax would help us move from oil to less-polluting energy sources.

The problem is, no matter what Ezra Levant and his friends in government say, oil has never been about "ethics". It has always been about money. Those who argue the case for "ethical oil" should work to ensure that our energy needs are met in a truly ethical way, now and into the future. In the end, the only truly ethical solution is to phase out oil. The black eye that tar sands oil is sporting can't be remedied with meaningless phrases such as "ethical oil".

To be seen as truly ethical when it comes to energy policy, Canada must slow down tar sands development, clean up the environmental problems, implement a national carbon tax, improve the regulatory and monitoring regime, and make sure that Canadians are reaping their fair share of the revenues. We must also start taking clean energy seriously. Rather than subsidizing the tar sands and all the fossil fuel industry through massive tax breaks, we should be investing in energy technologies that will benefit our health, economy, and climate.

It might also help if Canada's environment minister spent more time protecting the environment rather than appeasing the oil industry and its apologists.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/scie...

The Alberta and federal governments are pumping billions of dollars into carbon capture and storage (CCS) as part of their climate change plans. U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minster Stephen Harper also discussed this largely untested technology during the president’s recent visit to Ottawa.

But is it a good strategy? Think of what that money could do if it were invested in energy conservation and renewable energy instead of prolonging our addiction to dirty and finite fossil fuels, especially from the tar sands.

What is CCS? People in the oil industry found that as they drained oil from wells, they could pump CO2 back in to increase the yield. And the CO2 appeared to stay in the ground. But we have no idea what happens to this gas. Does it form a bubble under a big rock? Is it chemically bonded to its surrounding matrix? How long will it stay down there? We don’t know.

We air-breathing terrestrial beings seem to have the attitude of “out of sight, out of mind”, and so we dump our garbage into the oceans or the ground or the atmosphere, as if that were a solution.

I can’t overemphasize the degree of our ignorance. Until a few years ago, scientists assumed no life existed below bedrock, but miners kept reporting that bits drilled far deeper into the ground came back contaminated. Researchers later discovered bizarre forms of life almost three kilometres below the surface. The organisms are bacteria, which in some cases are embedded in rock, eking out an existence scrounging for water, energy, and nutrition. Some are thought to divide only once in a thousand years!

When these organisms are brought to the surface, their DNA is unlike anything we know about bacteria aboveground. Biologists have had to invent whole new phyla to describe them.

The layer of life on Earth’s surface is very thin, but these single-celled organisms go down kilometres. Now, scientists believe that protoplasm living underground are more abundant than all of the elephants, trees, whales, fish, and other life above. We have no idea how important these organisms are to the subsurface web of life. Do they play a role in movement of water and nutrients, of energy from the magma? We have no idea.

I met Princeton University’s Tullis Onstott, a geologist and expert on these organisms, at a lecture I gave at Princeton last year. I told him of the plans to pump millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the ground for CCS. “What effect will that have?” I asked. “I have no idea, but the methanogens should love it,” he replied. “What are they?” I asked. “They absorb carbon dioxide and make methane,” he responded.

Methane is 22 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So, we could be pumping a greenhouse gas into the ground and ending up with a super-greenhouse gas instead. Has anyone even considered this possibility?

Remember that Paul Mueller won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for his discovery in 1939 that DDT kills insects. Years after we started using it on a massive scale around the world, we learned that DDT is “biomagnified” up the food chain, harming birds, fish, and human beings. When we began to use chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in spray cans, most people didn’t even know there was an ozone layer, let alone that chlorine-free radicals from CFCs destroy ozone. And mark my words, we have no idea what genetically engineered organisms or nanotechnology will do.

But if we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.

CCS is a simple-minded idea based on a first impression. You’d think we would have learned from the past that we shouldn’t rush to apply new technologies before we know what the long-term effects will be. Carbon capture and storage may be worth studying, but the technology’s potential should not be used as an excuse for the oil and coal industries to avoid reducing their emissions and investing in renewable energy. After all, we know that energy conservation and renewable energy will yield immediate effects of a cleaner environment.

We don’t know what carbon capture and storage will cost, when it will be commercially viable, or what it will do, other than perhaps to give us a way to keep relying on finite and polluting sources of energy.

In his book, The Great Turning,

David Korten, begins with a quote from author Joanna Macy, and writes:

"Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transistion we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning."

He then goes on to ask:

"By what name will our children and our children's children call our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unravelling, when profligate consumption led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's resources, a dramatic dieback of the human population, and a fragmentation of those who remained into warring fiefdoms ruled by ruthless local lords?"

"Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the noble time of the Great Turning, when their forebears turned crisis into opportunity, embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the living Earth, and brought forth a new era of human possibility?"

And in a recent communication I had with author S. Brian Willson,

he says with regard to climate change and people's attitudes:

"...without the consciousness shifts emerging from the viscera that then in turn influence the cognitive, the Earth will be correcting us without our active participation. Extinction or near so is a likely consequence. Meanwhile, we continue to explore right livelihood and share that process with as many as possible."

So I ask you, while a few may be exploring right livelihood in an effort to change the world for the better, will it be enough for "the Great Turning" to happen or will "the Great Unraveling" continue unabated?