Agree with your sentiments completely. Unfortunately if they can get away with it, they will get away with it. Wasn't there 500 birds killed just from landing on a toxic 'pond' they use to get rid of waste?

There has never been a better case (IMHO) for government intervention. Now oil has dropped, they are going to be even less likely to spend any more money than needed.

CBC..canadian government funded...canadian government stands to gain billions in revenue from the oil sands and associated activities. Not sure thats the neutral venue of choice in this debate,

The BBC may or may not be biased, but the BBC are not the ones putting arsenic and mercury out as by products, or carrying out the studies that found higher levels of tailings contaminants downstream from the tailings ponds.
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/...ter-study.html

Its interesting to see how the bbcs reporting has evolved from this largely positive piece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4649580.stm
to this largely negative one
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7776775.stm

Its sort of reflective of my journey too I supose.

There was a CBS 60 minutes bit;
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/...n1225184.shtml

Maybe the open edit format of wikipedia is the best hope for balance?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athabasca_Oil_Sands

Gotten?

You deserve to be buried head-down in a petcoke landfill..., er, storage, area.

Sorry, going for the sarah palin down home folksy vibe.



Its a fair cop, as long as she is burried first! It wont happen again dad.

20 minutes! Give you a couple of weeks and you could feed all the starving children in Africa.

Of course the optimistic view point is that they've learnt from mistakes in the smaller installations and the larger newer ones will be much cleaner.

As long as there is money to be made from the tar sands, there will be companies there so it's important to make sure that they operate in a clean and sustainable way. Although the price of crude has come down recently, I suspect it'll be way back up again in a year or two.

I just hope that they're saving some of the tax dollars for when the tar runs out or the environment damage becomes too great to invest in new products for Alberta to sell.

As well as ignoring the energy cost of tanker construction, which is not insignificant when you consider the steel production and then the fabrication in the yard, you've also ignored the production of the oil itself in the Gulf, and the transportation from the oilfields to the loading terminal.

It's also a bit disingenuous to attempt to argue against the oilsands on environmental grounds by 'ignoring the occasional Exxon Valdez'. I think most marine biologists would agree that the enormous increase in shipping traffic and associated marine pollution is one of the major problems facing the world today.

Roasted ham, sugar snap peas and new potatoes tonight. Burp!

Taco Bell take-out for us.

AS I said, the energy cost of tanker construction is hard to quantify, although no doubt considerable. (I'm not about to spend days doing the research on that). However I would be astonished if said cost, amortised over the life of the tanker, were to be higher than the energy cost of the infrastructure need to extract oil crude from the oilsands, similarly amortised.

I intentionally didn't repeat the ERoEI on Gulf oil extraction, which is ~6 as I have previously posted. Including the ERoEI of ~100 for transportation hardly changes that.

I'm surprised you picked up the Exxon Valdez issue, since the crux of your case is that we can trust the oil companies to carry out full remediation on the open cast oil mines once the resource is extracted (and somehow or other clean up the watershed and lakes). The Valdez incident hardly adds credibility to that belief.

As I said upfront, I'm not arguing in favour of transporting oil around the globe, simply debunking your absurd suggestion that oilsand exploitation is preferable to that activity on environmental grounds.

money, money, money....must be funny, in a rich mans world........

A view of Fort McMurray from the BBC website

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7777984.stm

Black Gold

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7762226.stm

and Dirty Oil

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7763365.stm

The graph at the end of the Dirty Oil page shows countries with largest oil reserves. They are not generally countries that could reasonably be described as stable, democratic and likely to be reliable sources of oil for the next 10, 25, 50 etc years.

Canada is generally considered to be a stable democratic country with freedom of information. Various action groups are well funded and have freedom to take action within the law to oppose developments where they believe they are not in the public interest. The oil companies may have huge resources to make their case but they clearly don't have things all their own way which is the way it should be.

Some of the reports are disturbing most certainly. I was quite suprised to see how the system of tailings lakes has been allowed over the years. However, from what I've heard there are projects aimed at cleaning these up. It would be unfortunate if these projects were cancelled as the price of oil falls.

Dinner tonight was 6 pints of assorted ales, so excuse any biftecks.

Frankly, if you live in Canada, pump gas into your car, heat your home with gas or oil, work in a building that's heated day and night as if by magic... you haven't got a leg to stand on when it comes to offering an opinion about the source of your comfort.

BEGGARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS Burp.

Only six? Oh, dear. Sleep well and be careful who you call a beggar.

What utter nonsense, I take it that was the beer typing.

We may have no choice, but we do have the right to make out views on the subject known and seek to change the situation.

We use electricity to heat our home - Hydro electricity and a bit of nuclear - how green and environmentally friendly is that?

Of course, we could always go back to living in caves and doing some small scale farming to get by.... it wouldn't be so much fun living in Canada then. No Tim Hortons!