Neither Canada nor the world can afford growth of dirty oil

Today in Copenhagen, the Harper government will walk into the UN climate summit not with the intention of transitioning Canada into a clean energy economy, but instead with the agenda of prolonging the oil industry frenzy in the tar sands in northern Alberta.

It is crunch time to stabilize the climate so that our children inherit a safe world. Scientists tell us there is no more room in the atmosphere for the heat-trapping gasses that result from our burning of fossil fuels, and that we must in fact reduce the concentrations of those gasses if we want some measure of security.

Into this historic moment steps the tar-sands industry, on the one hand breathless when describing the hundreds of billions of barrels of oil it could potentially get out of the ground, while on the other pleading to be seen as a minor global warming villain. But you cannot have it both ways.

The current estimate of recoverable oil from the tar sands is 175 billion barrels, which if processed and burned amounts to over 110 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This alone, if it happened quickly, is enough to increase global concentrations of heat-trapping gasses to levels that scientists consider more than dangerous.

Full Story Neither Canada nor the world can afford growth of dirty oil – thestar.com.