Jeff Rubin: The Bar Has Fallen So Low Now Big Oil Is Pushing Alberta Tar Sands As “Green”

Originally from The Huffington Post and then re-published in The Globe and Mail, economist Jeffrey Rubin, author of “Your World is About To Get a Whole Lot Smaller”, had this to say about the recent attempts by the governments of Alberta and Canada, as well as Big Oil, to rebrand the dirtiest project on earth, the Alberta tar sands, as “green” in the face of the Gulf oil catastrophe:

It’s funny how it’s taken the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history to suddenly make other forms of oil extraction and processing look green. Only months ago, the carbon trail from the massive planned expansion of tar sands production made Canada a pariah at the world environmental summit in Copenhagen. But now tar sands producers and others are promoting tar sands oil as an ecologically friendly alternative to the environmental risks of another deep-water oil spill.

How low the bar has fallen.

There’s nothing clean about the production of synthetic oil from tar sands. The production of a single barrel of synthetic oil pollutes some 125 gallons of fresh water and emits over 200 pounds of carbon dioxide, principally as a result of the combustion of the natural gas, over 1,000 cubic feet of it, needed to generate the heat to separate the oil from the sand and then process it.

Click here to read the full article on The Huffington Post.

More Links:

“Syncrude Pleads Not Guilty in Deaths of 1,606 Ducks”

Click here to play the game “Tar Nation”, where you can take out some of your frustration on the lack of action on climate change by spraying Stephen Harper or Micheal Ignatieff with oil.

The Pembina Institute’s Tar Sands Watch is one of the best places to get data on what is happening in the Alberta tar sands. Click here to go to their site.