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Black Bonanza: Canada's Oil Sands and the Race to Secure North America's Energy Future (2010)
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| Size | Seeds | Peers | Completed |
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What if Canada's so-called environmental nightmare was really an engineering triumph and the key to a stable and sustainable future?
For years, Canadians have been hearing nothing but bad news out of the Athabasca Oil Sands. From 20th Century economists decrying it as a perpetual money-loser in the face of more easily-extracted foreign oil to green groups around the world declaring it the world's worst industrial enterprise, sometimes it seems as though no good could ever come from this so-called dirty resource. But what if developing Canada's Oil Sands was the key to bridging the gap between current petroleum-based economies and the alternative energies that aren't ready for market yet? What if it meant eliminating the threat of Peak Oil and providing economic stability not just for Canada and the rest of North America, but for the world? And what if the environmental costs of the resource were both not nearly as dire as some would have you believe, but currently better than many other options with the industry already making huge advances in sustainability, energy use and water reclamation? That's exactly the case that Alastair Sweeny, author of BlackBerry Planet, argues is at the core of the Athabasca Sands: a bright future. By digging into the past, present and future of oil sands technology, Sweeny cuts through the hype and hysteria and makes a solid and engaging case that The Sands aren't the environmental boogeyman set to destroy humanity, but rather our best hope for a truly stable and sustainable future.
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Apologist for criminally corrupt polluters
Is the spin making you dizzy yet? This boot licker Sweeny is telling us that corporations poisoning our land for profit are not to be despised, but to be admired as heroes! After all, they're securing North America's Energy Future! Yay!
Typical of apologists for criminals destroying Alberta, Sweeny sets up a series of straw men and knocks them down with a smirk. He of course ignores the fact (hidden by industry and the media) that the criminals doing the extracting are breaking environmental laws faster than governments can roll them back. They are creating huge lakes of sludge contained behind berms* which could fail at any time, and are unlined which means the sludge is destroying the water table. And to top it all off, these lakes of sludge don't even need to be created in the first place! We have technology to convert the sludge into solid inert matter during the extraction process, which is energy neutral because it uses the energy to convert to solids that is now left in the toxic sludge. The only reason it's not being done is so Big Oil can save money.
OTOH if environmentalists weren't so busy whining about worthless global warming computer models predicting a rise in global temperature of a couple of degrees by the end of this century, then maybe more people would know about what's really going on in the Tar Sands (see, I can capitalize too, Sweeny).
*It's been shown that some of the berms created to contain the sludge aren't even solid! The criminals who built them used inflatable tubes which they covered with soil. How sick is that?