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The Smell of Money: Alberta’s Tar Sands

Posted on September 7th, 2011 in AK Authors!, AK Book Excerpts, Current Events

Many of you are no doubt aware of the recent Tar Sands Action in Washington, D.C. that culminated in over 1,250 arrests, and the battle against the Keystone XL pipeline rages on. In this time of dirty energy and even dirtier money, the seasoned organizers and researchers included in our massive 2010 release Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution are voices we should all turn to as we consider sane, sustainable alternatives to the capitalist energy system that is currently wreaking havoc on the environment.

As Raj Patel says, this is “a vital anthology for anyone who wants to understand both the roots of the energy crisis, and the flourishing radical resistance that offers a sustainable future beyond capitalism.” Order your copy of Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution today to learn more about the tar sands as well as the many other dynamic (and essential) struggles going on within the energy sector.

Below, you’ll find a short excerpt from one of the pieces in Sparking examining the tar sands question, by Shannon Walsh and Macdonald Stainsby. Be sure to get a copy of the book to read the whole piece, and many more!


Excerpt from “The Smell of Money: Alberta’s Tar Sands”

Shannon Walsh and Macdonald Stainsby

Published in Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution:
Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World (AK Press 2010)

There is no environmental minister on earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big.
—Stéphane Dion, former Canadian Federal Minister of Environment

At Syncrude’s Wood Bison Viewpoint, thirty-five km north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, visitors usually first stop to take photos of the carbon-spewing smoke stacks puffing away at the refinery in the near distance before turning their lenses to the grazing bison on “reclaimed” Syncrude land. Syncrude Canada Ltd. is the largest producer of synthetic crude oil in the world, and one of the oldest companies in Alberta’s oil patch, producing 111 million barrels of oil in 2007 alone. On a cold afternoon in March, visitors from Ontario, California, Edmonton, Newfoundland, and India pocket their cameras and tread carefully across the deep snow to catch a glimpse of Syncrude’s famous imported bison grazing on reclaimed land a stone’s throw from the refineries.

The land is not exactly boreal forest, with commercial trees, long grasses, and maintained animals being fed on hay that a local bus driver said he saw being hauled in by truck up Highway 63. The bison, once endemic to the region, have been re-introduced to this patch of reclaimed land with much fanfare. “That’s the deal they made with the natives,” proclaims an enthusiastic Newfoundlander to his visiting family as they gaze out over the snow at four or five bison casting little black shadows on the white fields, “to put this land back the way it was.”

“As long as the buffalo can live here, anything can live here,” he explained.

This is ground zero of tar sands development and about as soaked in contradiction as could be expected from what has been coined the largest industrial project in human history—and perhaps the largest environmental catastrophe on the planet right now.

You don’t have to look much further than Canada’s tar sands to see the petroleum economy spiraling out of control, and with a changing political and economic context for oil production being heralded in, the boom seems to only be changing form.

Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Water Scarcity: An Unholy Trinity In the Tar Sands

Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert’s Peak—that peak oil moment— whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.
—Mike Davis

The world consumes 86 million barrels of oil a day—over a billion barrels every 12 days. But very few new oil deposits have been found. For every barrel of oil we now discover, we consume approximately six. The connection between peak oil, climate change, and the oil rush in Alberta is undeniable. The link to capital is both an obvious and complex story to tell.

While many mainstream environmentalists have welcomed high oil prices in the hopes that it will force market-led solutions to tackle climate change and petrol-economics, it is increasingly clear that rather than the market rising up to develop solutions for climate change, prompted by dwindling oil resources (such as rethinking hyper-consumptive lifestyles), it is advancing in just the opposite direction, attempting to squeeze oil out of the most untenable of regions with gross environmental and human consequences. At the moment we are witnessing what can only be described as the irrational, frantic push of market-forces in their most naked form, precisely at a time where reductions and radical transformation is required.

The tar sands are a case study in the way that the deregulated marketplace so completely spirals out of control. Market-based logics depending solely on self-interest will inevitably come in violent opposition with the very ability of humanity to live. All rational logic has been set aside for the steel arm of the market to generate solutions. While government regulations exist, as the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Oil Sands Division of Alberta Environment Jay Nagendren described, it is the market that directs the Environment Ministry, not the environment. Nagendren explained,

The premier has said that market forces will dictate the pace of development. So our job is, given that labor forces and finance will decide what kind of conditions need to be set in terms of the cumulative effects, to decide what kind of caps we will have to place on emissions, what kind of restrictions on water use, carbon capture storage, reclamation, tailings ponds, water use, etc.

The role of government to create a resistance to the excesses of capital is clearly not at play in the oil patch. The tar sands presents a gruesome yet succinct reflection of David Harvey’s (2006) ideas of uneven geographical development, as it activates the conditionalities around “the material embedding of capital accumulation processes in the web of social-ecological life.” What we are witnessing here is a capitalist push towards a total separation between the market’s abstract and self-sustaining logic, and the social-ecological realities of our own life-worlds. This disconnect is critically important, we think, at this particular moment in history when the balance between peak oil, climate change, and water shortages hang in a dangerous trinity, effecting the very bare life of most of the planet’s population (read here, the expanded impacts on agriculture, food shortages, mass displacement, and migration due to ecological disaster, labor migration to these frontiers of capital, droughts and flooding, effective access to food and safe drinking water, etc.).

This material embedding of capital into our ecological life-worlds is crucially important, especially since many of the environmentalist challenges to climate change use “green capitalist” logics as a frame for post-petrol arguments. When market-utopias take over completely, as we are seeing in the tar sands, its gross excesses become very difficult to curb. The absurdity of reclamation plans in the tar sands, currently approved by government, actually purport to reconstruct entire ecosystems with technologies that are still being developed (there is, of course, faith that the market will succeed in developing in some ever-evolving future). They are market-utopias at their most extreme. Boreal forest is “reclaimed” in terms of “equivalent values,” which in a recent case has meant that 40 percent of disturbed land must be returned to “commercial forest capabilities,” effectively creating a natural environment of harvestable reconstructed commercial forest and artificial lakes. It’s an absurdist creation only possible at this point in market-utopian logics.

The truth is that as the world runs out of oil, fresh water is also quickly drying up. Available fresh water represents less than half of 1 percent of the world’s total water stock. Many analysts on both sides of the fence, from the World Bank to the Polaris Institute, believe that, by 2025, we will be living in an era of serious water scarcity and water shortages across the globe. The logical incongruity between the pillage of water through the lust for money cannot be more apt. The realities of an impending water crisis impel us to seriously challenge market-led logics within industry and government before it is too late. Green capitalism is most certainly not going to lead us out of what is, ultimately, a market-driven, capital induced crisis.

The tar sands can only be seen as evidence of an untenable state of denial and psychoses around market-based, petrol-energy dependence. Some of the many serious and cumulative human and environmental impacts deserve a brief recounting here:

• Pipeline and refinery projects that cut straight through indigenous land throughout the continent, with serious social, ecological, sovereignty, and health implications for indigenous people, including the construction of the Mackenzie Gas Project, which will bring natural gas from the Arctic straight through unceded Dehcho First Nation territory;

• Health and human impacts of those living in the region of the developments, including the appearance of rare forms of cancers;

• Depleting large amounts of cleaner energy, natural gas, to produce dirty crude, what some call “turning gold into lead”;

• Intensive carbon production and adding to climate change;

• Creating new systems of migration of wealth and bodies through trade, resources, and labor agreements, including proposals for thousands of new temporary foreign workers, who will not even be allowed to apply for landed immigrant status;

• Depleting fresh water at a time of increasing fresh water scarcity by drawing off the Athabasca river, whose water system accounts for 25 percent of the fresh water sources in North America;

• Supplying oil for the military industrial project, given that the Pentagon consumes about 85 percent of the oil used by the US government;

• Impacts on fish and wildlife, including the destruction of thousands of hectares of boreal forest and muskeg that acts as an essential “sponge” for water that flows throughout the region.

Perhaps most disconcerting is that most of the tar sands oil ends up as dirty crude, and at the other end of its cycle puffs its way back into the atmosphere out the tailpipes of North American planes, cars, and military vehicles. As Mike Davis (2008) writes, there is a madness to creating a more carbon-intensive process at the very moment when we urgently need to reduce emissions:

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora’s box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of “energy independence”) is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance “humankind’s ability to accelerate global warming” and slow the urgent transition to “non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles.”

US president Barack Obama has quickly stepped onto the train of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), touted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach as the technological quick fix to the massive carbon emissions issues in the American coal and Alberta oil industries. In fact, Carbon Capture and Sequestration is not a proven technology, is extremely expensive to develop, and has a very limited potential to sequester the carbon emissions that come from tar sands extraction;10 by some estimates it would only capture 10 percent of tar sands emissions.

“I think to the extent that Canada and the United States can collaborate on ways that we can sequester carbon, capture greenhouse gases before they’re emitted into the atmosphere, that’s going to be good for everybody,” President Obama told CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge. “Because if we don’t, then we’re going to have a ceiling at some point in terms of our ability to expand our economies and maintain the standard of living that’s so important.”

But there is a ceiling to growth. While this largely unproven technology would bury harmful emissions underground, we would still be left with more exploitation of the tar sands, more depletion of fresh water and natural gas, and more devastation of the boreal forest. As Gerald Butts writes, this technological optimism is like telling our kids “keep smoking—we need the tax revenue. Trust us, we will cure cancer by the time you get it.”

It is starkly clear that there is no just and sustainable way to continue living in a petroleum-based economy. The harsh truth remains that the only alternative is a radical rethink of the way that we live, including a serious challenge to capitalism itself.


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