Archons: Tar Sands destroys Ancient Forest larger than Florida : The Canadian Business Daily

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Archons: Tar Sands destroys Ancient Forest larger than Florida

The Alberta Oil Sands is the largest energy project on the planet, lying beneath 140,200 square kilometers of northern Alberta forest, an area almost as large as the state of Florida. This area represents 21% of Alberta and 37% of Alberta’s Boreal Forest Natural Region. As of mid-2009, there were approximately 5,012 oil sands (mineral rights) agreements with the Province and 91 active Oil Sands projects. Oil Sands development is turning once pristine stretches of forest into desolate landscapes.

The scale of the Alberta Tar/Oil Sands project absolutely boggles the mind. Last Spring Michelle Mech released a comprehensive report on the Tar Sands which got far too little attention. Among other things, Mech’s report estimates that total production-related GHG emissions could be almost double the government’s figure for the Tar Sands emissions impact for 2008.

Based on the Alberta government’s 41.9 Mt GHG emissions for 2009 for the Tar Sands, extrapolating Mech’s report’s 2008 figures to 2009, results in the same conclusion. Some of the Tar Sands-related emissions in her report occur in the U.S., but isolating those that only occur in Canada and adding them to the 41.9 Mt figure would bring the Tar Sands share of Canada’s emissions to 9% for 2009, assuming the government utilized the same criteria to calculate emissions for both 2008 and 2009.”

Internet site reference: http://westcoastclimateequity.org/2011/11/01/the-immense-alberta-oil-sands-project-a-definitive-examination

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Date: 29 January 2012

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This article provides hyperbole rather than facts. The area currently stripped of forest cover in the Alberta Oil Sands region (AOSR) is about 2,500 square kilometers and will grow in the future to about double that. The area of Florida is 170,000 square kilometers. The remainder of the AOSR mining will be subsurface Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) methods which do not dramatically affect surface vegetation. Since major air pollutants (e.g. SO2, NOx, heavy metals, VOC's and PAC's) are being controlled significantly from polluting the air, air pollution is not a big problem in the region. Especially in light of the fact that CO2 is not, and never will be, an air pollutant, we have no major problem with the relatively small amounts of CO2 produced by the processing of the bitumen at on-sight plants. Also, of importance is that the current concentration increase of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere of 0.0004% (up from about 0.0003% in 1900, is not enough to cause any problem on earth. This is especially true in light of the fact that current mean annual temperatures on the earth have stabilized and even declined over the past 10-12 years; even though CO2 concentrations have increased from 0.00035% to 0.00038% since about 1975.) CO2 concentrations do not appear to be significantly increasing earth temperatures. In fact, Dr. Henrik Svensmark has discovered and published findings that it is solar magnetic field fluctuations as they affect surface cloud cover changes on the earth which are the major drivers of climate change on the earth. (This hypothesis has been reproduced twice by Dr. Svensmark and has been recently confirmed by independent research at the C.E.R.N. physics facilities in Geneva, Switzerland - see "Nature", August 2011.) So it's clear from solid science that CO2 is not the problem the U.N. and Al Gore have made it out to be. Their theories have been completely falsified by the real scientific findings we now have at our disposal. It is now high time to scrap all carbon taxing currently being employed by those reaping commissions on these tax schemes.