Federal New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair has taken a shine to tar sands economics. He has joined with Stephen Harper’s Conservatives who seem titillated with the sexual suggestiveness of having big pipelines lacing our country. Tommy thinks that there is a compromise if we just refine all this potential oil in Canada. As the old song goes; Tommy is looking for love in all the wrong places.
Meanwhile MP Peter Julian, the New Democrat’s energy critic has been busy learning all about renewable energy in Denmark. He was also looking in the wrong places. He would have learned more about the reality of renewable energy if he had done his fact finding here in Ontario.
But Tommy has directed his energy critic to come up with a policy for the party that will include refining tar sands bitumen in Canada without increasing pollution. And if you thought Hercules of mythology had it tough in the Augean Stables with what was an impossible task, Julian is in far more deep do-do than that.
What he will find if he checks it out is that the pollution starts with the extraction of the bitumen from the tar sands. The tar sands companies use hot water to literally wash the sand out of the bitumen. Along with the sand, the water becomes a soup of obnoxious chemicals and it is destroying the fragile environment of the Athabasca.
No matter where you refine it, processing bitumen to synthetic oil leaves a huge residue of carbon. What carbon you do not pump into our atmosphere creates endless piles of a carbon slag that can be burned but sends out more pollution into the air we breathe.
And then, when we use the refined gasoline and other fuels, the pollution cycle continues. At a time when we are becoming far more conscious of the destruction of our environment, the demand for these highly polluting fuels continues to grow.
What Peter Julian is going to have to report back to his Leader Thomas Mulcair is that there is no technological solution today that provides a pollution free use of Alberta’s tar sands. The Harper Conservatives gave it their best shot by trying to ship it to countries that do not care about pollution. Too bad, Tommy, Canada cares.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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