By Alison@Creekside
Remember that two year Environment Committee study on the tarsands that was ultimately shredded because the four parties at the table couldn’t agree on the wording of the witnesses’s testimony? The Lib members of that committee have now released their own report on the testimony and, as Andrew Nikiforuk reports at The Tyee, it is “scathing.”
~ Athabasca River is being polluted
~12 barrels of freshwater required to produce one barrel of crude
~world’s largest man-made dams contain 170 square kilometres of toxic mining waste and they’re leaking
~steam plants could affect aquifers over an area the size of Florida, using 3½ to 6 barrels of groundwater to extract one barrel of bitumen
Most alarming is the report’s contention that science-based policy has been replaced by “bureaucratic compromise,” with the federal government entirely abrogating its responsibility to monitor and protect our water supplies. The Alberta government just flat-out refused to appear before the committee at all.
You’re shocked I’m sure.
Wait. Did I say our water supplies?
A year ago Alberta Energy spokesman Tim Markle said: “The Chinese takeover is good news for Alberta.”
He was referring to tarsands in northern Alberta being developed by the Chinese state investment fund in partnership with Calgary-based Penn West Energy Trust. China National Petroleum Company obtained 11 oilsands leases and the Chinese Offshore Oil Corporation invested $150 million in Calgary-based Meg Energy. Sinopec has bought into Syncrude. PetroChina, also state-owned, holds a 60% majority stake in two oilsands projects, and has also signed a memorandum with Enbridge to take up to half the space on its proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline from Alberta to the port of Kitimat in BC.
In comments under Nikiforuk’s Tyee article, commenter Ed Deak weighs in:
The opposition can jump up and down, they won’t get anywhere, because they’re attacking the effects and not the causes.
Attacking other political parties, this is also true for BC, and anywhere on Earth, is a waste of time, because politicians are nothing more than pimp/executioners of and for the criminal neoclassical market economic theory, being taught in our universities as a “science”, that’s destroying the Earth and humanity.
Unless our politicians will one day get enough gumption together to attack the causes they’re part of the problem, regardless of the hot air they’re blowing.
The tar sands crime wave is part of the “growth” and the “GDP”, without any deductions for damages and no politician would dare to question it, as it would bring panic to the almighty stockmarkets.
Then, when the Chinese bring back the money we’re paying them for killing our manufacturing infrastructure, praised by economists and the WTO, to buy the country up from under our feet with our own money, it is called “wealth creating foreign investment” that helps to pay for the billions spent on “defence”.
Afterthought : An Alberta Energy spokesdude says: “The Chinese takeover is good news for Alberta” and yet back in March we were all apparently shocked shocked shocked when CSIS head Richard Fadden casually mentioned China in his remarks about “foreign interference” on “possibly unwitting” Canadian public servants and politicians here in the West.
We pretty much behaved as if we were teenagers horrified to discover that our parents have sex. I mean obviously we know they must have but we don’t much like to hear about it. And given the public pillorying Fadden received for it, I don’t imagine it will be brought up again.
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