Citizen Power

President Obama met with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper on Thursday during a brief official visit to Canada.

They talked privately and later held a join press conference. The crowds loved President Obama; he stopped at a shopping center and got a lot of Canadian love along with some Maple Leaf cookies for the Obama daughters. (Finally, we can be not ashamed that our president is liked, and not despised, when he visits other countries!) But the discussion during this brief visit was serious. In part, Harper and Obama discussed “clean energy”. We presume they discussed the Alberta tar sands, or what the industry euphemistically refers to as the “oil sands.” There isn’t technically oil in the dirt in Alberta; it’s a form of tar, which is a super thick, sludgey form of a very crude, very dirty substance than can be processed into oil, after a massive expenditure of heat and water and energy. Then it is shipped into the U.S., where we buy a lot of it, unfortunately, to run our cars and more.   All this at the expense of the atmosphere and the environment in the area where this sludge is mined.

But they did make some quasi-progress:  they both vowed to speed up carbon capture and sequestration to clean up C02 in some type of joint agreement/project.  This will be difficult, however, since CCS does not yet exist except in experimental stages.  It just does not exist.  Basically, if this is progress, it’s meaningless.   Canada will continue to pump C02 into the air, uncaptured, and so will the U.S.  When will real progress come?

Environmental groups and most everyone else who knows about the tar sands were hoping President Obama would finally tell Canada that we don’t want their dirty tar for our energy. But the conversation was obviously much more amicable than that, (as it probably needed to be) and at the very least it laid the groundwork for cooperation on “clean energy” in the future. Oil and especially tar sands oil will never, ever be “clean energy”, no matter what they do with it. And the environmental damage being caused in Canada is just devastating.

This all comes after a federal court judge has reversed a decision on mountaintop removal in the United States. (See Appeals court overturns new mountaintop mine rules).

The coal mining issue is not turning out as well as I had hoped, but there is time for Obama to redeem himself in all of these areas and I expect he will soon. Meanwhile, you can see amazing photos of the tar sands in Alberta at this Flickr stream called Stop the Tar Sands.

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