the exploitation of tar sands must end

Although countries of the entire planet are more concerned about climate change, Canada has unfortunately become one of the world’s highest green house gas emitters per capita. The reason is tar sands. The biggest oil reserve of the planet is located north of Alberta in the ground of the boreal forest. The site is as large as England. The Canadian government can’t continue to ignore the warnings of the scientific community that recommends reducing the earth temperature of 2 degrees Celsius to avoid a catastrophic climate change. Besides causing the destruction of one of the oldest forest in the world which was called boreal forest and is now called “death ground” by the industry, tar sands have a lot more impacts on the environment. The energy required to extract this oil is three to five times bigger than other forms of oil. This project has been qualified as the more damageable project of the planet by the association Environmental Defence. Presently, 155 000 barrels of oil are produced each day and this quantity is going to increase at 4 millions of barrel by 2020. Extracting one barrel of oil requires astronomic quantity of natural gas and water. In fact, 20% Canada’s natural gas consumption is used to extract oil from tar sands. 1,8 billion of contaminated water is produced per day which is the biggest environmental impact of the project. This water contains arsenic, mercury, xylene and benzene, just to name a few. It is stocked in basins that totalize 130 km2 in areas and the companies use propane cannons to keep birds away from those artificial lakes. One night, the cannons broke down. The day after, a thousand birds were found dead. Even worse, according to some environmentalists, those basins may contaminate the Athabasca River which is situated at 700 meters from the oil installations. One day, two kids who lived in Forth McMurray, a village near the Athabasca Lake found what they figured out to be a goldeye fish with two mouths. Strangely, the cases of cancer, lupus and leukemia have increased in those native villages. Several cases of cholangiocarcinoma have been detected, a disease that usually affects one person in 100 000. There is presently no way to prove the correlation between those diseases and tar sands but one thing is sure, the government is not going to get it investigated further more. Tar sands are also causing air pollution that has created acid rain problems in western Canada when there were none. Due to these environmental impacts, tar sands have given the nation the largest carbon footprints in the world. This project must be stopped and it should be replaced by other alternatives, less damageable for the environment.