In late February, a group of young people representing several Canadian First Nations visited the United States Congress and presented a letter to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and others with the message: "The tar sands are killing us."

In just the past five years or so, rising oil prices have contributed to a resurgence in the Canada's oil sands industry that has not only transformed an extraordinary amount of land in northern Alberta, there is also mounting evidence that water and air pollution from the extraction processes is endangering the health of human and animal populations.

Officials for the Province of Alberta estimate the total amount of bitumen locked up in the country's largest tar sands deposit-the Athabasca River valley area-to be in the vicinity of 1.7 trillion barrels. So prevalent is bitumen in this part of northeast Alberta that energy companies and provincial regulators claim it already occurs naturally in the waters of the Athabasca River, even without the disturbances of oil sands development.

For each barrel of bitumen extracted from a surface mine, developers clear wide swaths of boreal forest, build roads that fragment habitats and threaten migratory bird populations; remove tons of peat and dirt above the oil sands layer, all to get to the sand itself. Large quantities of water, natural gas and chemicals are used to strip the bitumen from the sand. After the bitumen is stripped away, the resulting sludge is discharged into large toxic tailings ponds. When all is said and done, extracting and refining oil from Canadian tar sands expels three times as much carbon dioxide as does capturing oil from the gushers Saudi Arabia.

But ten percent of all U.S. oil comes from Canada's tar sands, and unless the popular support for (North) American energy independence subsides, the development of Canada's oil sands will likely continue to push forward. In fact, in late 2008, the International Energy Agency released a report forecasting $120-a-barrel oil by 2030-a price that would more than justify the effort it takes to get oil from oil sands.
 
Tailings ponds are the biggest threat to the health of humans and ecosystems

Negative attention to the devastating ecological impact on oil sand development came to a head last April, when 500 migratory ducks were reportedly killed after landing in the toxic tailings ponds at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, Alberta. That news was compounded just last week when the company admitted that it had under-reported the number of birds killed last year and, in fact, there were 1,600 bird kills in that one incident.

But unusually high rates of a rare form of bile duct cancer amongst the residents in the small village of Fort Chipewyan, just down the Athabasca from major oil sands operations, and incidents like the duck incident are shining examples of what eco nomists like to call, the "externalities" of energy development: the rising social and ecological costs associated with oil sands production.

If we accept that pressure to develop Canada's oil sands will continue to be strong, we should then ask if Alberta's regulatory oversight has been, or will be, sufficiently robust to ensure that the bitumen is being extracted in a way that the social and ecological externalities become internalized by oil companies like Syncrude, Suncor and Shell. We should also ask whether the governments of Canada and the United States are doing enough to mitigate the ecologtical damage caused by oil sands development. In other words, Americans cannot merely sit back and blame Canada and Alberta for their lax environmental oversight on the development of the oil sands without recognizing that we are part of the problem-as well as part of the solution.

What lies ahead for the North American continent

While the tar sands future doesn't look terribly bright, other conservation gains in both the United States and Canada have given many environmentalists reason to be hopeful. During a recent trip to Canada, U.S. President Barack Obama (who is far more popular in Canada than Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper) signalled what many hope to be a new era of cooperation on the environment with Canada, by agreeing to work together on clean energy and other pressing environmental issues.

Just after the trip, landmark conservation bills were signed into law in both Canada and the U.S. that together protect some 6.5 million acres. In Quebec, Premier Jean Charest announced that 4.5 million acres of Boreal Forest would be protected through the creation of 14 new national parks and the expansion of an existing park. To put the scale in perspective, this is more than double the size of Yellowstone National Park. In response to the two important bills, David Childs of the Boreal Songbird Initiative told me, "It's been a good week for conservation in North America."

As is the case with much environmental policy, good news only comes in the context of the bad. But it is heartening to note that, at the very least, there is some good news to report.

Related Reading:
President Obama Urged to Say No To Tar Sands
The Grand Distraction

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