It makes you wonder. When we first heard of the vast tailing ponds for Alberta’s bitumen production, we were concerned about what they were leaching into the rivers. We knew the ponds were loaded with a witches’ brew of toxins and heavy metals but we did not understand how much. Last time we were there you could inhale deeply of that wonderful air off the Rockies. North of Edmonton today, you need a gas mask.
Now Environment Canada tells us that those toxins are five times more plentiful than we had been lead to believe. And they cause cancer. The purpose of tailing ponds is to evaporate the water and leave the poisons to be buried. What they are really doing is dispersing the toxins into the air and letting the rest of the poisons leach into the northern Alberta eco-system. These tailing ponds are killing people for the almighty dollar.
The ponds are spreading rapidly across the province as more and more fresh water is being used to wash the sand out of the tar sands. And added to this is the heated water being pumped down many hundreds of metres to free the bitumen from the subterranean shale. Only a small percentage of the province’s bitumen resources can be reached with open pit mining.
What it means is that you get serious pollution at every stage of tar sands oil production. You kill with the extraction of the bitumen. You endanger people when you transport it by rail or pipeline. You get three times the pollution because of the residue of bitumen slag from processing the bitumen into synthetic crude oil. And you leave a further carbon deposit when you use the products of the synthetic crude for energy. And that is why environmentalists say “Leave tar sands in the ground.”
This writer is not as much of an environmentalist as someone with fond memories of Northern Alberta. It seems sick though for people to sit in their comfortable homes in Calgary and Edmonton enabling the rape and devastation of the northern half of the province for its resources. Maybe you think it is right to not want to pay your fair share of taxes but yours is the only province that does not have a sales tax. You can hide from reality if you wish but stop acting like spoiled children. And please tell your politicians they can stick their bitumen where the sun does not shine. Nobody needs oil that badly.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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