It's a dirty business -- the new gold rush that is blackening Canada's nameThe Times (UK): Canada faces a dilemma as it prepares for next month's UN climate summit in Copenhagen. It wants to present itself as environmentally responsible but also wants the profits from the tar sands, which cover an area of Alberta's natural coniferous forest larger than England...
A Co-operative Bank study calculated that, even if all other carbon dioxide emissions stopped, fully exploiting the tar sands would still tip the world into catastrophic climate change by raising global temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels. Extracting each barrel of crude from the sticky mass of sand, clay and bitumen produces two to three times as much CO2 as drilling for a barrel of conventional oil.
Most of the crude is exported to the United States, where several states are considering banning it because it is so carbon-intensive. America's dependence on tar sands is a sensitive issue in Washington, and Barack Obama's ambassador to Canada toured the mines last month and questioned the companies about their carbon emissions...
Peter Lee, director of the environmental group Global Forest Watch Canada, said: 'There is no place for oil sands in a low-carbon future. Canada is ignoring its global responsibility and betraying its promises. If we can't get it right in Canada, one of the world's richest countries, how can we expect developing countries to reduce their emissions?'
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at Victoria University, British Columbia, and contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: 'If we burn the tar sands, we are effectively saying we don't owe anything to future generations.'
