americandream wrote:
Manufacturing uses oil extensively. The scenario you are contemplating (costs destroying profit) would be pretty much a pre-collapse point in the system but the issue here is do we want to be opening up another source of substantial environmental damage, not whether its cost effctive or not.
Without tar sands production Canada would be a net oil importer (consumption of 1.6Mbbd versus conventional oil production of 1.3Mbbd) so the economic cost of not developing the tar sands would have been significant. Production has been going on now for over 30 years and has left a legacy of open pit mines that have not been reclaimed and large areas of tailing ponds. A huge cleanup job would be needed even if mining was completely stopped today.
Peter Loughheed, the premier of Alberta at the time development of the tar sands started, believed that the tar sands should be developed slowly to maximize the benefits to Albertans. An eminently sensible idea that unfortunately was totally forgotten by his successors. We now have a situation where the province and federal government are trying to develop the tar sands as quickly as possible. Development rights have been sold to quite a few companies and there would be no easy or cheap way to rescind those rights. When the priority is on fast development environmental concerns are likely to take a back seat.
Why isn't the Alberta government making more of an effort to get the oil companies to clean up the mess they have created and reduce pollution? I think that is because they want the current development boom to continue but the reality is that a lot of the new players are not making a profit. The transportation bottleneck is one reason for that -- tar sands oil is selling at a substantial discount to the world price for oil. It's not the only reason companies are not making money -- I believe the cost of developing and operating new mines has been higher than they expected.
If the transportation bottleneck was eliminated and mining became more profitable it is conceivable the province would apply more pressure on the oil companies to clean up their act. Then again, it might not make any difference. If the transportation bottleneck remains, I would expect that some companies would shutdown their operations. Everyone is continuing to produce right now because they expect the transportation bottleneck to be eliminated but no company can operate a mining operation at a loss indefinitely. So I would say that anyone who is opposed to tar sands mining should focus on the various projects like the Northern Gateway pipeline that are intended to alleviate the transportation bottleneck.
We certainly have a legacy of mining in Ontario with many abandoned mine sites, some of which were not properly cleaned up after mining ceased. However, there is no question that the tar sands mining is impacting an area at least 2 or 3 magnitudes larger than any mining operation we've had here!
"new housing construction" is spelled h-a-b-i-t-a-t d-e-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n.