Bob
Hunter

strictly
personal

BY THE time this is pub-
lished, the road to Fort
McMurray, Alberta, will
probably be open again. And
therein hangs the most dra-
matic story unfolding in
Canada this summer.

Never mind the Quebec referen-
dum or the Ontario election or even
the upcoming B.C. election. These
are pin-pricks on the chart of our
history. ;

The real story concems the
impact of global warming on this

up-until-now blessed country.

ft is a country that has begun to
undergo a terrifying transformation.
And as the disaster gathers momen-
tum, the astonishing thing about it is
that 99% of the population seems to
be sleepwalking, pretending the
problem doesn’t even exist.

Oh, there have been u few
squawks of alarm. Our federal envi-
ronment minister, Sheila Copps, has
admitted that global warming is an
actual, measurable phenomenon.

Before his untimely banishment
from cabinet, Moe Sihota tried to
make the same point. And the
world’s leading climatologists have
been shouting themselves hoarse.

But, so far, not even a semblance
of an intemational policy framework
has taken place, unless you count the
foot-dragging and obfuscation which
is the only legacy of the Rio
Summit, which promised to address
such pressing planetary problems as
global warming, but which bogged
down in games-playing by the vari-
ous national governments. intent on
defending their strategic interests,

period, Canada not least among
them.

According to warnings I've seen
issued by Environment Canada, this
summer could very well see the
worst forest fires on record,

Somewhere around 1,000 of them
are buming in Western Canada
already, and northern Ontario is
expected to see its firs) major out-
breaks any day now.

That's why the 35,000-hectare
blaze that cut off the main road to
Fort McMurray is so symbolic.

Fort McMurray is the home of
the enormous Syncrude Canada Ltd.
refinery, the largest single industrial
complex in Canada, which is sitting
at the heart of oi] sand deposits esti-
mated in total at 360 billion barrels
of oil, more than the entire reserves
of Saudi Arabia.

The Fort McMurray complex
already produces 21% of the petrole-
um used in Canada. but Synerude
wants to triple its rate of production
to [.2 million barrels per day over
the next years.

It also wants Canada to throw out
the few remaining barriers to the
wholesale exporting of this oil to the
United States.

Conventional oil reserves are
dwindling — just as we knew all
along was going to happen.

True to form, having exhausted
one resource, we are now turning
our attention to the last relatively
untapped source of petroleum left in
North America: the oil sunds of
northern Alberta, located in three
major deposils.

The National Task Force on Oi]
Sands Strategies, a front organization
for the Alberta Chamber of
Resources. representing all the big-
stakes players in the oil extraction
business, is pushing for a massive
expansion of the oil-sands program.

The talk is all about profits, jobs.
something called “energy self-suffi-
ciency,” (a lie, since the main push is
to export the stuff) and, oh yes, some
subsidies would be nice. even
though all of this is going to be “dri-
ven by the private sector,

Sure.

Behind the glossy public relations

“pamphlets, the dark secret about the

oi} sands is that the private seclor
that wants to suck them up would
like $3 billion from the taxpayers to

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get things going, otherwise it’s tou
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Between now and the next feder-
al budget in the fall, a ferocious but-
de is going to be waged behind the
scenes, with lobbyists for the petro-
leum industry doing everything in
their power to bend the arms of cabi-
net ministers and caucus members to
make sure the Liberals open up the
public trough to the corporate wheel-
ers and dealers, backed by their pals
in Ralph Kicin’s inner Oil Patch cir-
cle.

One of the problems of “develop-
ing” the oil sands is that the extrac-
tion method is so much messier.

The sind in the oil sands contains
bitumen, a thick mixture of heavy
hydrocarbons that has to be separat-
ed from the sand before being
upgraded into premium grade crude
oil.

In the process the greenhouse gas
emissions soar to eight times the
level that occurs while extracting
conventional oil reserves.

in terms of impact on the atmos-
phere. getting oil from the oil sands
puts the final petroleum product on a
pollution scale similar to burning
coal,

‘To even be contemplating such a
bizarre megaproject in the face of
irrefutable evidence that global
warning is gaining momentum at a
frightening rate verges on insanity,
never mind plain old criminal profi-
(eering. There is a direct relationship
between those forest fires raging

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across Canada and the amount of
CO, we blast into the atmosphere.

Last year, just to jog your inemo-
ry, three million hectares of forest
were incinerated in the Yukon and
Northwest Territories alone,

The prediction is that the fires
will be even worse this summer,
simply because the globe itself is
hotter this year than last.

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And each year it is steadily get-
ling hotter, except when a volcano
comes along and cools things down
for @ season or two, as Mount
Pinatubo did a few years ago,

It is more than slightly ironic that
Fort McMurray finds itseff cut off by
flame before it can tool up to spew
even more greenhouse gases into the
almosphere, causing the globe to
heat up even faster,

The best thing that can happen
now is if the Syncrude complex
itself burns dawn conipietely before
it can do any more damage.

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