The tar sands deposit is huge in Canada. It covers an area of boreal forest about the size of Florida. And NASA scientist James Hansen has told us that if we exploit this entire resource, that’s game over for the climate. That’s going to push us past the tipping point of catastrophic climate change. So there’s a very direct link there about the huge emissions from the tar sands, and they’re skyrocketing. It’s the fastest-growing source of emissions in Canada. The Canadian government has made it quite clear that not only are they not going to meet their current Kyoto Protocol commitments, but they aren’t going to agree to any targets under a second commitment period.
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…to even get to the tar sands, they have to remove boreal forest, old-growth forest. And they call it overburden. They just scrape it off and get rid of that, and then they dig down and move so many tons of earth. And then they squeeze out the last little 10 percent of oil that’s actually in the sand. And then they have to use chemicals to make it liquid enough to be able to put it through the pipelines. It’s much more toxic than any other kind of sweet crude oil. So it’s even worse. And it is about four barrels of water to every one barrel of oil. It’s immensely toxic. Not only that, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re actually using coal-fired power plants to get out the tar sands oil. They’re using natural gas to get out the tar sands oil. And now they’re talking about nuclear energy, building nuclear plants, to be able to get out more of the tar sands oil.
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