A Must-Read Book on Tar Sands for Obama Before His Trip to Canada

An area of pristine boreal forest in Canada -- equivalent in size to Ireland -- has been given over recent decades to oil companies for development of the tar sands deposits there. It will be the priority item up for discussion when Prime Minister Harper meets with Barack Obama on his visit to Canada days after being sworn in on Tuesday.

Required reading for the President in preparation for his first foreign trip is the book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent by Andrew Nikiforuk which was published to wide acclaim in Canada in the fall, and is slated for release in the US in March. It details the impact that the $200 billion of oil money that has poured into the region has had, creating the world's largest energy project and one of its dirtiest and most dangerous.

In anticipation of Obama's visit, Prime Minister Harper told the press: 

To be frank on the oil sands, we've got to do a better job environmentally.

Read Nikiforuk's book and you will see why Harper's comment has already won the award for Biggest Understatement of 2009. Nikiforuk reports that the Energy Resources Conservation Board, responsible for regulating oil and gas development in Alberta, the province where the tar sands lie, functions largely as a rubber stamp group.

Curiously, the agency has only two mobile air monitors to investigate leaks from 244 sour-gas plants, 573 sweet-gas plants, 12,243 gas batteries, and about 250,000 miles of pipelines. In any given year, the board approves more than 95% of the 60,000 applications submitted by industry.....

...there is no denying that the world's biggest energy project has spawned one of the world's most fantastic concentrations of toxic waste, producing enough sludge every day (400 million gallons) to fill 720 Olympic pools....

The result is an environmental disaster area destroying Canada's largest river basin. The tar sands are also the prime reason why Canada is projected to increase global warming emissions 24% by 2020. That puts Prime Minister Harper on a collision course with President Obama who on November 18th -- two weeks after his election, declared:

Stopping climate change won’t be easy. It won’t happen overnight. But I promise you this: When I am President, any governor who’s willing to promote clean energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that’s willing to join the cause of combating climate change will have an ally in the United States of America.

Obama did not say what a nation committed to making climate change worse would find in the White House.

But things are not so simple in politics.

When he spoke to the press about the tar sands, in the same breath, Harper also said:

At the same time, the development of these things is pretty important, in our judgment, to North American energy security.

That comment gets the award for Second Biggest Understatement of 2009. The oil that flows from the tar sands makes Canada the #1 foreign supplier of oil to the US. Nikiforuk reports:

By 2002, Canada had officially replaced Saudi Arabia and Mexico as America's number-one oil source, and event of revolutionary significance. Canada currently accounts for 18% of US oil imports (that's 12% of American consumption), and the continuing development of the tar sands will double or triple those figures.

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