U.S. President Barack Obama met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Wednesday, marking their second official state visit and stirring up more protests against the importing of oil from Alberta’s tar sands.
Greenpeace activists chained themselves to an earthmover, shutting down operations at a site in Alberta, and the Rainforest Action Network released a 70-foot banner over the U.S.-Canadian border in Niagara Falls.
Daily production of 1.2 million barrels from the oil sands is expected to nearly triple to 3.3 million barrels in 2020, according to an MSNBC report. Due to an energy-intesive extraction process, tar sands oil has a much greater carbon footprint than oil tapped from traditional wells. In addition, huge tracts of forest must be cleared to remove and process the tar sands.
Native American and environmental groups filed suit in federal court earlier this month challenging a proposed tar sands oil pipeline between Canada and the United States.
The Obama administration is stuck between wanting to reduce the country’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil and needing to cut carbon emissions. Obama has said he wants to pursue carbon capture programs with the Canadians–a solution that is likely to have only a small impact on emissions, and not any time in the near future.
Read the MSNBC coverage at the link below.
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The whole point of the Ethical Oil argument is not that oil doesn’t hurt the envnronmeit, that you trade off envnronmeitalism versus human rights, it’s that the point that the US should buy their oil from a more virtuous country than say Saudi Arabia, since oil would have to purchased for much of the foreseeable future. Unless you like taxes going to such lovely examples of both envnronmeital & social concerns. Of course it won’t matter to the extreme envnronmeitalists, who won’t be happy until all oil production is shutdown, and the magic of wishful thinking replaces the energy oil now provides which it just won’t. I wish it would, then everybody would be happy, but it won’t. As for the CBC interview with the Ethical Oil chick, where Tremonte (spelling?) constructed an attack on Kathryn Marshall it was such an unbalanced interview. But nobody expects to find balance at the public broadcaster anymore anyways, merely views ranging from the centre to the far left. However, Marshall should have spoken more slowly like the other guests, so that Tremonte would not have kept cutting her off, unlike the other two guests.As for MartinM, I can only tell what I observed. At the beginning of round 3 of envnronmeital alarmism a few years back, Most enviromentalists called it global warming. I stand by that it later began to be called climate change popularily. This from the same folks who couldn’t tell you the weather forecast 1 month from now just trust their mathematical models. And again, to combat our measly less than 1% of GHG??? This is why you folks want to kill the sands?