Category Archives: Tar Sands

Peak Oil or Peak Canada?

Posted on by
3

Peak oil or Peak Canada?

Yogi Berra famously said “It’s hard to make predictions – especially about the future”.  I like to think that Steven Harper was thinking this exact thought if he read the Globe and Mail’s double page spread on how shale oil promises to make the USA the world’s biggest producer of crude within a decade.

What price Canada’s status as an energy superpower now, Mr. Harper?

The Bakken Shale Zone, an area of Devonian and Lower Carboniferous rock that straddles Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba (Figure 1), may contain upwards of 3.65 billion barrels of oil.  Production in the region is increasing exponentially, up to 750,000 barrels a day last year.  This “glut” of light, easily transported crude is already depressing prices for our northern bitumen, threatening the viability of current operations and future plans.

So, this should be good news for Canadian environmentalists, right?  Continue reading →

Dutch Disease Canadian Style?

Posted on by
1

Thomas Mulcair, the newly minted leader of the Federal New Democrats (NDP) says that Canada has “Dutch Disease”.
 
What does he mean by that? Does Dutch disease mean that we have excellent public transit, bicycling as a way of life, and legal marijuana?

Anyone looking at Canadian infrastructure will immediately see that this can not possibly be what Mulcair meant. No, what the NDP leader is referring to (in the words of Wikipedia), is “the apparent relationship between the increase in exploitation of natural resources and a decline in the manufacturing sector”. 

Continue reading →

A Tory War on the Environment?

Posted on by
3

Monday May 30th, 2012

A couple of months back, Joe Oliver, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, rose in the House of Commons to say that his government was “standing up” for Canadian Science.  But if you are an ecologist, an Environment Canada scientist, a climatologist, or an environmentalist, you might be forgiven for thinking that the Tories are more interested in stomping on your work than supporting it.  Recent rounds of cuts and program closures show what a prosecuting lawyer might call a clear and repeated pattern of hostility towards environmental protection, monitoring, and advocacy in this country.

This hostility is more than just an attitude. It manifests as a four-pronged strategy that undermines the monitoring of industrial impacts, weakens critical legislation, suppresses legitimate criticism, and seeks, ham fistedly, to control the language that shapes environmental discourse. 

How is this strategy shaping up?  Let’s count the ways. Continue reading →