Canada Pays Environmentally for U.S. Oil Thirst

[IDemo]

Huge Mines Rapidly Draining Rivers, Cutting Into Forests, Boosting Emissions

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 31, 2006

FORT MCMURRAY, Alberta -- Huge mines here turning tarry sand into cash for Canada and oil for the United States are taking an unexpectedly high environmental toll, sucking water from rivers and natural gas from wells and producing large amounts of gases linked to global warming.

The digging -- into an area the size of Maryland and Virginia combined -- has proliferated at gold-rush speed, spurred by high oil prices, new technology and an unquenched U.S. thirst for the fuel. The expansion has presented ecological problems that experts thought they would have decades to resolve.

"The river used to be blue. Now it's brown. Nobody can fish or drink from it. The air is bad. This has all happened so fast," said Elsie Fabian, 63, an elder in a native Indian community along the Athabasca River, a wide, meandering waterway once plied by fur traders. "It's terrible. We're surrounded by the mines."

From her home on the bluff of the river, she can see billowing steam rising from a vast strip mine 10 miles away. There, almost 200 feet below what was once a forest, giant machines cleave the earth into a cratered moonscape. Immense shovels plunge into the ground, wresting out massive chunks. Trucks the size of houses prowl the pit. They deliver the black soil to clanking conveyers and vats that steam the tar from the sand.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/30/AR2006053001429.html

[YankeyMCC]

1. It's a global issue

There's no getting around it...so often environmental laws in one nation just means an exportation of an environmental problem or as in this article a demand in one area affects areas all around the world.

Acting locally is important but ultimately it's a problem humanity as a whole is going to have to face/solve one way or another or it will be solved without our "input" and probably not to our liking.

[phantom power]

2. according to google maps...

that region is in the middle of nowhere. And so most people will never give a flying fuck about it. Certainly not Americans. Maybe Canadians can mount some kind of defense, analogous to the perennial ANWR battles.

[ramapo]

3. S**T!, Not the Athabasca

I have great memories and pictures of my trip through the Canadian Rockies in 1978. The glaciers, the blue waters of the Athabasca, the clean air. I had always hoped to go back but I'm not sure I'd want to see this...

This is both disgusting and depressing. Canada is now one of our top suppliers of oil. They seem to have no problem destroying vast parts of their country to extract oil from the tar sands so we can drive around.