One of Canada’s most senior politicians is back in Europe on yet another lobby tour to try and bully politicians there to ditch their landmark climate legislation as it discriminates against the dirty tar sands.
One of Canada’s most famous scientists has launched a scathing attack on the country’s politicians, claiming that labelling the tar sands as environmentally harmless is “lies”.
Forget Kramer versus Kramer, the new battle worthy of a motion picture is the increasing bitter spat of Redford Versus Redford over the tar sands.
Billionaire Tom Steyer argues that Keystone XL “has become the defining issue in the climate change fight of our times”.
Yesterday history was made. The organisers had hoped for the largest climate rally in history, but even they were amazed at how many people turned up.
Recently released documents reveal that the Canadians are worried that the tar sands have become a “totemic issue, hitting directly on Brand Canada”.
Existing analyses of the impacts of tar sands fail to account for a byproduct of the process that is a major source of climate change causing carbon emissions: petroleum coke – known as petcoke. Petcoke is the coal hiding in North America’s tar sands oil boom.
Increasing petcoke use is a clear result of the increasing production of tar sands bitumen. Petcoke is a seldom discussed yet highly important aspect of the full impacts of tar sands production. Factored into the equation, petcoke puts another strong nail in the coffin of any rational argument for the further exploitation of the tar sands.
It’s pretty safe to assume one or both of the candidates will bring up energy issues in some predictable ways.
There was the tar sands boom and then the shale gas boom. Then there was the export boom and the tight oil boom. Now it seems there’s the midstream boom.
