Enviros Greet Canada's PM with Tar Sands Protests Ahead of White House Meeting

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is getting a chilly reception from environmental groups as he heads to the White House today to talk energy with President Obama.

An online ad campaign showing Harper in a cowboy hat suggests the prime minister is trying to undermine U.S. climate change legislation to protect the tar sands.

"As elected leader, he helped keep America addicted to oil," the environmental groups' ad reads. "Now he's pushing big oil's latest trick.”

Activists have been putting that message into 3D this week, starting on a bridge at Niagara Falls, where six Rainforest Action Network climbers hung a giant banner with arrows pointing to a “Clean Energy Future” south of the border and “Tar Sands Oil” pointing the way back to Canada.

Greenpeace went after the oil operations themselves. Two dozen activists snuck in amid the bitumen and giant machinery of a Shell tar sands operation in Alberta and chained themselves to a three-story dump truck and a hydraulic shovel.

Their message: Ripping up the boreal forest to extract some of the most carbon intensive oil on the planet is a climate crime.

“Greenpeace has come here today, to the frontiers of climate destruction, to block this giant mining operation and tell Harper and Obama meeting tomorrow that climate leaders don’t buy tar sands,” said Mike Hudema, Greenpeace Canada climate and energy campaigner.

“The tar sands are a devastating example of how our future will look unless urgent action is taken to protect the climate.”

Canada is the United States’ largest oil supplier, with much of that oil coming from the tar sands, and its use is likely to increase. Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved a new pipeline to carry oil from Alberta into the northern U.S. Unless environmental groups and Native Americans succeed in their lawsuit, the pipeline will run though northern Minnesota to a shipping and pipeline hub on Lake Superior.

The world's oil addiction is going to expand those energy-intensive tar sands operations three to five times by 2020, says a new Greenpeace report by Canadian author Andrew Nikiforuk.

That’s bad news for the climate. The tar sands operations are already the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions growth in Canada, and their annual emissions totals are likely to more than quadruple by 2020, according to the Pembina Institute.

Tar sands’ reserves are nothing like the oil pumped from wells. Their oil is locked in a sticky, tar-like substance called bitumen. Extracting and the processing that substance is highly energy intensive, releasing three times the greenhouse gas emissions of conventional crude oil.

The process contaminates about three barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced, leaving sprawling, toxic tailings ponds that can endanger wildlife, and the bitumen contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel, six times more nitrogen and five times more lead than conventional oil, toxins that are released into the water and air when the oil is refined.

Of course, Canada also holds more than 170 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia.