In 2012, Esquire magazine published an anti-oilsands polemic that described Fort McMurray as “the little town that might just destroy the world.”
The target of the article was the Keystone XL pipeline that was to take upgraded bitumen from the Hardesty pipeline hub, to Steele City, Neb. In the article, Hardesty was also trashed as a “co-conspirator” in the coming world apocalypse.
In 2011, the retired NASA climate chief James Hansen said expanding the oilsands means “game over” for the planet. Hansen said that oilsands growth means Canada has gone rogue on climate change. What trash!
The fabrication that oilsands bitumen is the dirtiest oil in the world because its greenhouse gas emission from “(oil) well to (vehicle) wheel” are 18 per cent higher and it uses more water in its processes than conventional crude oil has become an absolute truth to environmental fundamentalists.
When the American foes of oilsands asked the Pentagon, the largest buyer of fuel in the United States to stop buying fuel refined from oilsands bitumen, the military determined that gas and aviation fuel from the oilsands did not represent a significant environmental hazard.
The American reserve of two trillion barrels of unconventional oil in the oil shale deposits of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, now being researched for production, vastly exceed the volume of bitumen in the Athabasca oilsands.
The driver of human input to greenhouse gas emissions is the feeding and housing of a growing population. World population is 7.72 billion this month.
Electricity production and home heating account for a quarter of the world’s human-caused emission.
Agriculture, livestock production, forestry and land use changes rank almost equally at 24 per cent.
Cement production for homes, commercial, industrial buildings and infrastructure is also greenhouse gas intensive.
Half the greenhouse gas emissions that humans will generate will be to provide the basics of life for a population that will be 8.5 billion in 11 years.
And coal is the fuel that will make it possible in the two counties that will have a third of that population increase – China and India.
The skies over the biggest Chinese cities have intense coal smoke in the air reminiscent of the smog epidemic of London in the early 1950s that killed hundreds and drove England off coal for home heating.
India is 99 per cent electrified. The remaining rural parts of the country have 31 million homes that need coal-fuelled power. All of Canada, by comparison, has 14 million total homes.
North America is going off coal. Alberta is carrying the heaviest load with Premier Rachel Notley’s decision to halt electricity generation from coal. Alberta is leaving in the ground coal deposits that lie under 47 per cent of the land, have three times the energy content of the oilsands, and are 70 per cent of all coal reserves in Canada.
If the environmentalist saints of the United States want to fix something, go to West Virginia where a surface mining technique called mountain top mining has destroyed 1.5 million acres of the Appalachians by levelling 500 mountains, ruining the waters that flow from the valleys that the trees, topsoil and millions of tons of rock are shoved into, devastating 2,340 square miles of pristine wilderness.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran business and political journalist and author.
