“That show last night was pretty depressing!” Hubby Prad did not sleep well after watching ‘We Were Warned: Out of Gas‘, the latest in CNN’s Special Investigations Unit series. Neither did I. Listening to most of the comments in the show, you would never know we are at the brink of a planetary disaster. Hardly any mention of conservation. No, instead it is all about looking everywhere in search of yet more oil, no matter what the cost. Cost in dollars per barrel. And more importantly, cost to our future in terms of carbon emissions.
Never before has the addiction to oil metaphor been more apt. Big Oil is leaving no soil unturned, no ocean unprobed, to satisfy our need for our daily oil fix.
Now, here’s the part that really, really got to me, best conveyed in trailer for new movie, Pay Dirt:
Just when I thought coal mountain top removal was as bad as it could get . . .
La Marguerite 
I think really that the very fact of people mining the tar sands is definite proof of the imminence of peak oil. If there were any better alternative, nobody would bother with a mess like that. It is, as you say, a sign of desperation.
Mining tar sands for oil is like a family burning its furniture for heat in a cold winter. It’s something you’ll only do in times of great poverty, and it promises surviving winter, but facing a bleak and empty house in spring.
It is un-freakin believable….
Just when I was hoping an end might be in sight I get a glimpse of this……..
Just what we need more oil to keep polluting the atmosphere, Forgive me but, FUCK!!!!!!
How can the people that produce oil and coal sleep at night knowing that they may kill their kids and grand kids?
We have reached a tipping point with the environment, I just hope that the next president knows what he is doing and will take the actions needed to stop our dependence.
I have cut my oil consumption by 75% in the last 8 months without a noticeable effect on my lifestyle. It wasnt that hard, common people!
Eric
Jus – The Worlds #1 Antioxidant Drink, http://www.jusmeplease.com
There is a hugely renewed interest in coal to liquid hydrocarbons with huge projects underway in China, India and Australia now. The Air Force is spending quite a bit looking at a modified Fischer-Tropsch process to turn coal into turbine fuel and there is quite a bit of below the radar interest doing literally hundreds of studies.
If you look at a time scale of a hundred years or so there is no such thing as peak oil – just cheap peak oil. There is a huge danger of moving to shale, coal and a few other sources to give us liquid fuel.
I think you don’t understand what “peak oil” means, or the difficulties they’re having with these productions.
“Peak oil” doesn’t mean “the tap runs dry” it means “global production drops, never to rise to previous levels.”
Yes, we can wreck Athabasca, we can drill the Arctic, tear up the Antarctic, drill down through 3km of water + 1km of rock + 2km of salt +1km of rock to the Tupi field, turn coal and gas and landfill and liposuction fat into crude… but all that added together won’t make up for the declines in we’ve already seen in the US, China, Indonesia, Australia, Kuwait, Dubai, Venezuela, and those we’ll soon see in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and so on and so forth.
You’re never going to be able to boil up tar sands at the same rate as the Saudis can now pump the stuff from reservoirs. It just ain’t gonna happen. If nothing else, there’s “net energy”. It takes energy to get the oil out. Some fresh big reservoir near the surface, maybe you spend 1 barrel of oil equivalent and get 100 out, awesome! But then some reservoir down under rock, it becomes just 50. Then there’s that offshore oil, those rigs and that rock, it’s a big hassle, it’s just 25bbl you get for every one you spend. And Athabasca? Yeah, you’re looking at 5bbl out for ever 1bbl in, at best. So, they get out 6 million barrels a day, sounds great – until you realise it’s only 5 million barrels, they had to use 1Mbbl of it to get the other 5Mbbl out. Oh well, still a gain, yeah?
That’s all great, but spread it across the world as we go for the harder to get oil, or coals to liquids – and even if we can keep up total production at 85Mbbl/day, well 17Mbbl of it goes just to get the other 68Mbbl out. So as you go from 100:1 to 5:1 or lower, even if you keep the total production up, the amount of actual useful energy you get out drops…
When new production < the decline of old production, that’s peak oil.
And all the while, world demand keeps on going up. So the price goes up anyway. Woops.
It doesn’t mean the tap runs dry. It just means world production never passes a certain point, and drops off. See here for a longer explanation.
Burton, congrats on your lifestyle change. You should look up Kyle’s blog at ‘greenwithagun’, he’s got some great posts documenting the one ton carbon lifestyle.
Could you post the link to his blog?
I cant find it.
Thanks,
Eric
http://getroasted.wordpress.com
I couldn’t hear the sound on that video clip but from the pictures and the subsequent comments I assume that it’s about the Alberta Oil/Tar sands. I live about 5 hours away from these extraction operations. The mentality here in Alberta about the tar sands is frightening. Many, even most people here don’t seem to care about what the effects of the tar sands are on the land, the rivers, the people, the animals or future generations of same. They drive their 4X4 one-ton chromed-out pick up trucks, spending their money as fast as they make it. Drug and alcohol abuse abound in this boom town mentality.
The government doesn’t care about cleaning the operations up or slowing them down, they just want to create a cleaner image and have budgetted 25 million bucks to do just that this year. The premier of Alberta, Ed Stelmach, looks like an innocent, honest guy, but he’s admitted that he’s cunning and has just been waiting to get a huge majority in Alberta’s provincial government so he can ram through whatever initiatives he wants to, to keep the oil sands producing, no matter the cost.
And the oil sands themselves are not just the only lands being ruined. About half an hour from where I live, 8 more upgrader plants are being proposed in addition to the 2 already built, to turn the bitumen into oil that is useable. This takes even more water and electricity. These upgraders sprawl for kilometers and prime agricultural land is being sacrificed to build them. It sickens me.
I was so glad to hear on the news today that the US City Mayors have signed a resolution saying they won’t use non-conventional oil for their municipal government operations – we need more international protest against the Alberta Tar Sands, because it just isn’t being heard from within. Those who protest here are mocked and denigrated. The 500 ducks that recently died in the huge tailings lake near Fort McMurray are considered a small price to pay – our premier responded by saying that more birds are killed by wind turbines each year and so we should just shut up about it.
I hope the international outcry against Alberta’s dirty oil gets louder and louder, because we are being muzzled here.
Burton, when you move your mouse cursor over commenter’s names in blogs, you’ll often find that they’re a link to their own webpage.
i am in mourning for the native species, the trees, the people, the ways of life which will dry up, blow away and soil us.
i empathize with theresa, and anyone being used by the users, the abusers and mindless consumers, and myself.
any bite i take of anything transported or manufactured and processed is one more toothmark upon my conscience.
The Canadians (at this point in time) seemingly value their natural heritage less than the returns on the oil mining. If this changes, oil mining won’t continue (or won’t expand), and the price of oil will rise even more, reflecting declining produciton elsewhere. Then the oil consumers have to carry the burden instead of nature.
I’m not at all surprised by this. This is just a reflection of our current valuation of nature versus the valuation of consumption, possibly combined with some sad economic inequality, which in turn is a function of our value of equality versus the value of consumption.
I do think it’s very good that you bring this to the attention of others, because I think lots of people still don’t realize what exactly they are choosing for when they’re only looking to consume more. Such a concrete result of an abstract trade-off sure helps in making the point.
Oh and by the way, Canada can look forward to further dirty mining. As reported by Theresa in this entry, the mining companies have a little problem that the law prohibits their discharging waste into the water system, they have to build their own containment ponds for their tailings.
No problem! The Canadian government has said, “We’ll just say these here lakes aren’t lakes, they’re containment ponds.”
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, said Shakespeare. But not in law! Change the name, and everything’s alright!
Eric, here is the link to Kyle’s blog:
http://greenwithagun.blogspot.com/
Theresa, thank you so much for bringing even more of a dose of tar sands reality to this thread. Scary, but necessary for the rest of the world to ‘know’.
Kyle, I am just wondering about the role of special fossil fuel interests in the government’s decisions.
Meryn, maybe the coal mashup website mentioned in my ‘coal mountain top removal’ link could be expanded to cover Canadian tar sands oil removal as well?
Greenadine, thanks for making poetic amend for all or our consciences.
For those of you interested in taking political action, here is the link to Tar Sands Watch:
http://www.tarsandswatch.org/
And also:
http://oilsandstruth.org/
I was trying to find evidence of special interests involvement in Canadian government’s decisions. No luck, so far.
Lamargeurite, oil/resources are in the provincial, not federal, jurisdiction here, so you may have some luck if you focus more on the Alberta government than the Canadian government.
Theresa, thanks for the clarification! Please feel free to list more advocacy resources in other comment.
You have some really good links there! Thanks so much for posting about this issue. It is good to hear that even Barak Obama is now speaking about wanting the US to use less ‘dirty’ oil. Pictures of the tar sands mines and the huge tracts of boreal forest they are destroying are just horrible to see. Here is a link to an organization trying to conserve the boreal forest’s birds:
http://www.borealbirds.org/tarsands.shtml
One more link I just found – a satirical “Travel Alberta” tourism website created by Greenpeace as counterspin to the Alberta Government’s 25 million dollar propaganda campaign to greenwash the tar sands:
http://travelingalberta.com/
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