The games are endless. Only the representatives of the people change. The current combatants are President Obama of the United States and Prime Minister Harper of Canada. Both have finite time left. Harper will have to face election in 2015 and Obama will be out of office in 2016. The American President grandiosely wants to save the planet. The Canadian Prime Minister just wants to save the tar sands investors.
But before then, President Obama will have to give a yes or no to the Keystone XL Pipeline. What he needs, to allow the pipeline, is Canada’s introduction of stronger rules to protect the environment in the extraction and processing of the tar sands bitumen. The solution to that does not seem to be anywhere on the horizon.
Harper’s process is flawed. His government is negotiating with the tar sands industry and with the Alberta government and it is hard to say which of the parties is more obdurate in their negotiating position.
The industry has failed to do its job. Its task was to find a way to reduce the environmental damage in the Athabasca region and instead, it continues to pollute the rivers, destroy the livelihood of our aboriginal peoples and demand that others find solutions to shipping bitumen slurry. And the Alberta government remains blind to the irreparable environmental damage caused by the extraction of bitumen from the tar sands.
But the province does recognize that refining tar sands bitumen into synthetic oil in Alberta is an absolutely no-win situation. The province and its political leaders are fighting to ship unprocessed bitumen by any means possible. They want that bitumen far away from the Alberta when the highly polluting refining is done.
But Canada cannot say in its new environmental regulations that it intends to ship billions of barrels of bitumen to third-world countries that do not care about pollution. This leaves Environment Canada with egg all over its faces. With taxpayers paying for the extensive advertising that promise environmental regulations for the tar sands, it is becoming more and more obvious to Canadians that their government just might be lying to them. Those regulations were supposed to be issued last year.
Meanwhile President Obama is in no rush. He can keep TransCanada Pipelines dangling over the Keystone XL pipeline as long as he is in office if he wants. The only problem is that Canada’s tar sands exploiters get a huge chunk of the money they need from American investors. That causes a bit of pressure on the President’s decision.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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