I’ve been reading a couple of interesting things recently about the oil sands projects in Alberta.
The first is this series, published earlier this year in the Globe and Mail. The eight-day series looks at the development of the oil sands, and the environmental and social cost of the projects, which are estimated to have a worth of $90 billion.
The second is the book Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn’t Seem to Care) by William Marsden, a colleague of mine at the Montreal Gazette. Marsden, who is an investigative reporter, spins a great yarn about the development of the oil sands, from a loony plan to blast the oil from the sand with a nuclear bomb to the boom/bust/boom experience of a Calgary oil man.
Reading the book left me with an impending sense of doom. The amount of fossil fuels left on the planet is finite, yet we seem not to care, building more roads, buying more cars, and ignoring the environmental costs of harvesting energy this way.
Reading about the oil sands has been making me think about what our family can do to conserve fuel and oil around our house.
We switched to an electric furnace a couple of years ago to reduce our fossil-fuel consumption. Now our biggest fossil-fuel user is our minivan, and I’ve been trying to use it less. It has been more challenging than I thought. I’m hoping once the weather warms up and I can get my bicycle and kids’ trailer back out on the road I’ll truly be able to reduce the amount of time we use our van.
I guess, like a lot of people, I figured if gas became expensive enough, people would drive less. What I’d never thought about was that high prices would fuel (so to speak) a race to extract as much as possible because it’s so profitable. As George Monbiot writes, at (http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/11/rigged/),
“…before oil peaks, demand is likely to outstrip supply and the price will soar. The result is that the oil firms will have an even greater incentive to extract the stuff.”
The solution?
“I have stumbled across the single technology which will save us from runaway climate change! From the goodness of my heart I offer it to you for free. No patents, no small print, no hidden clauses. Already this technology, a radical new kind of carbon capture and storage, is causing a stir among scientists. It is cheap, it is efficient and it can be deployed straight away. It is called … leaving fossil fuels in the ground.”
Same thing with fisheries. The rarer some species (eg Bluefin tuna) become, the more valuable they are, and the faster technologies are deployed to capturing those that remain. (I wish we could have some more of those great sushi dinners with a clear conscience.)
Thanks for the tip re Marsden’s book. I’m going to read it.