Black gold’s tarnish seen in Canada. Cash and jobs flow bountifully from Alberta’s oil sands, but they come at a cost to the environment and native peoples.
By Tim Reiterman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.
Northern Alberta is being destroyed environmentally by pit mining for oil sands. Worse still, the pollution doesn’t stay in Alberta, but flows north into the Arctic Ocean. You can see some of this devastation on Google Earth. Look at the area around Fort McMurray.
Although a great amount of oil is produced, once again the net energy is not all that great because it takes so much energy to extract the energy in the oil sands. This fundamental fact — that the world energy situation is not better off, worse off, counting the negative externalities, if there is little or no net energy, is very slow to sink into the minds of decision-makers.
This web site has some good (meaning awful) photos of the endless pits. http://www.borealbirds.org/tarsands.shtml
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Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is past President of the Western Watersheds Project.
