Yesterday Greenpeace released a new report titled Dirty Oil: How the tar sands are fueling the global climate crisis. Written by Andrew Nikiforuk, Dirty Oil shows that the tar sands are not only dirty, but that they are destroying the Boreal forest too.

The Boreal forest has been called “the lungs of the planet,” tragically though it is as if the lungs of the planet are being assaulted by cigarette smoke. This forest “stores an estimated 186 billion tonnes of carbon across Canada”. The peatlands, that composes 40% of the Boreal forest, in particular are invaluable. The peatlands filtrates water and captures carbon. Unfortunately our economics cannot compute the value of this, so they continue to be annihilated.

With most of the dirty oil focus on the greenhouse gas emissions of the tar sands, the environmental benefit of the Boreal forest tends to get pushed aside. This is a tragedy since a University of California study “estimates that GHG emissions caused by land disturbance for tar sands production could be two to three times greater than those of conventional fuels”.

                  

The tar sands produce a dirty oil. “US diesel fuel made from Canadian bitumen has a carbon footprint 144 per cent greater than that of domestic crude.” To add insult to injury we are using natural gas, a relatively clean fuel, to create tar sands oil. Incredibly peatlands are also destroyed to drill for natural gas.

The greenhouse gas emissions from the tar sands is ginormous, not even calculating the entire carbon life cycle. Right now the emissions from just tar sand oil production is larger than the entire emissions from all of Lithuania or Estonia. Two tar sand producers, Syncrude and Suncor, each produce more emissions than even Cyprus. With activity in the tar sands expected to triple by 2020, the greenhouse emissions will be greater than that produced in all of Belgium.

                  

Shamefully Canada is one of the worst offenders in the world for per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Canada emits 24 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per person. When compared to Sweden ( 7 tonnes), which has a similar climate, it is really atrocious. Since 1990 Canada’s emissions have increased 55%, compared to the US (14%), France (-9%), UK (-16%), Germany (-19%), and Norway (-29%).

Our government is in bed with the dirty energy producers. Despite the federal government’s ‘Turning the Corner’ initiative to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020 (using 2006 as the base year), our government is just going through the motions. Despite the federal government spending $6 billion to decrease emissions, not one target has been met thus far. In fact our government is actively lobbying to ensure that we can keep producing dirty oil. In California, the Minister of Natural Resources, lobbied to try to ensure that tar sands was not discriminated against during the debate of a low carbon fuel standard.

Canada has been a recipient of the ‘Fossil of the Year’ in Poland. Our government is world renowned for obstructing climate change talks. While other countries are committed to decreasing their emissions by 25% to 40% from 1990 levels by 2020, Canada is becoming the fossil economy in the future. It doesn’t have to be that way though.