[All] Tom Homer Dixon on "The Tar Sands Disaster"

[Eleanor Grant]

Local prof writes in New York Times:
"Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics
of a petro-state."

On As It Happens today (April 2), he said he wrote the article with "oil
sands" all the way through, and the NYT changed it to "tar sands".  He said
it's a bad mental state we've got into, when if you say "tar sands" in
Canada you are considered unpatriotic.  In fact he's received mail since
the article appeared, telling him to get out of Canada because he's
un-Canadian.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/opinion/the-tar-sands-disaster.html?_r=0

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Tar Sands Disaster
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Published: March 31, 2013

WATERLOO, Ontario

IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll
do Canada a favor.

Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant
reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous
low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this
resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost
full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are
desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.

Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by
Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians
were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound
down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of
dollars annually into our economy.

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s
most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal
forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge
quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps
the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square
miles.

Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in
extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the
form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North
America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in
tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates
significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.

There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want
the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into
something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and
political characteristics of a petro-state.

Countries with huge reserves of valuable natural resources often suffer
from economic imbalances and boom-bust cycles. They also tend to have
low-innovation economies, because lucrative resource extraction makes them
fat and happy, at least when resource prices are high.

Canada is true to type. When demand for tar sands energy was strong in
recent years, investment in Alberta surged. But that demand also lifted the
Canadian dollar, which hurt export-oriented manufacturing in Ontario,
Canada’s industrial heartland. Then, as the export price of Canadian heavy
crude softened in late 2012 and early 2013, the country’s economy stalled.

Canada’s record on technical innovation, except in resource extraction, is
notoriously poor. Capital and talent flow to the tar sands, while
investments in manufacturing productivity and high technology elsewhere
languish.

But more alarming is the way the tar sands industry is undermining Canadian
democracy. By suggesting that anyone who questions the industry is
unpatriotic, tar sands interest groups have made the industry the third
rail of Canadian politics.

The current Conservative government holds a large majority of seats in
Parliament but was elected in 2011 with only 40 percent of the vote,
because three other parties split the center and left vote. The
Conservative base is Alberta, the province from which Prime Minister
Stephen Harper and many of his allies hail. As a result, Alberta has
extraordinary clout in federal politics, and tar sands influence reaches
deep into the federal cabinet.

Both the cabinet and the Conservative parliamentary caucus are heavily
populated by politicians who deny mainstream climate science. The
Conservatives have slashed financing for climate science, closed facilities
that do research on climate change, told federal government climate
scientists not to speak publicly about their work without approval and
tried, unsuccessfully, to portray the tar sands industry as environmentally
benign.

The federal minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, has attacked
“environmental and other radical groups” working to stop tar sands exports.
He has focused particular ire on groups getting money from outside Canada,
implying that they’re acting as a fifth column for left-wing foreign
interests. At a time of widespread federal budget cuts, the Conservatives
have given Canada’s tax agency extra resources to audit registered
charities. It’s widely assumed that environmental groups opposing the tar
sands are a main target.

This coercive climate prevents Canadians from having an open conversation
about the tar sands. Instead, our nation behaves like a gambler deep in the
hole, repeatedly doubling down on our commitment to the industry.

President Obama rejected the pipeline last year but now must decide whether
to approve a new proposal from TransCanada, the pipeline company. Saying no
won’t stop tar sands development by itself, because producers are busy
looking for other export routes — west across the Rockies to the Pacific
Coast, east to Quebec, or south by rail to the United States. Each
alternative faces political, technical or economic challenges as opponents
fight to make the industry unviable.

Mr. Obama must do what’s best for America. But stopping Keystone XL would
be a major step toward stopping large-scale environmental destruction, the
distortion of Canada’s economy and the erosion of its democracy.

(Thomas Homer-Dixon, who teaches global governance at the Balsillie School
of International Affairs, is the author of “The Upside of Down:
Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 1, 2013, on page A19 of
the New York edition with the headline: The Tar Sands Disaster.

More NYT on tar sands:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/tar+sands
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gren.ca/pipermail/all_gren.ca/attachments/20130403/f0977cd8/attachment.html>