Saturday, June 12, 2010

Canada's Dirty Oil: Breaking our addiction

Polaris

This new DVD convincingly makes the case that Canada’s oil sands are too dangerous, too dirty, and too expensive. Highlighting the local and global impacts of oil sands extraction, Breaking Our Addiction also makes the case that dirty oil sands crude vs Middle Eastern oil is a false choice. In this, the 21st century economy, a clean transportation future awaits if we choose to make it happen.


Canada's Dirty Oil: Breaking Our Addiction - General audience (long version) from Dirty Oil Sands on Vimeo.

1 comment:

  1. This video boasts that the oil sands are causing us to be addicted. Drugs exist but you don’t have to use them, you can choose not to be addicted. The Oil and Gas industry is supply and demand based. If individuals choose to live more ecologically friendly lifestyle without reliance on oil that can result in positive change rather than producing biased videos. Why isn’t the money used to produce this video not used to discover new energy technologies.
    The only reason there are pipelines that cross the United States is because they have the refineries for them. Refines that produce the fuel and jobs the United States relies on.
    The video states that the land developed by oil sands is the size of Michigan, however that’s just how big the deposit is not how much is actually going to be developed. Also they say that the land can never be reclaimed, what about Syncrude’s Gateway Hill? Regarding emissions and water use they talk about it using 4 barrels of water to make 1 barrel of oil but almost 90% of all the water used is recycled and that’s why tailings ponds exist. The oil sands also only use 1% of the flow from the Athabasca River and majority of in-situ projects use only saline water that is not consumable for human or animal consumption which is also recycled. You talk about the oil sands as the dirties but the Oil Sands account for 4.6 per cent of Canada’s GHG emissions and Canada accounts for 5 per cent of global GHG emissions so overall they are only 1/1000th of the world’s total emissions. US coal is much higher than that. The world relies too much on oil but that’s not the oil companies fault. They exist only to feed our needs and these needs will always exist until we spend money on new technologies for cleaner energy. Not all areas of the world can rely on wind and solar power alone. The change has to start with us and our problems should not be blamed on the industry.

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