In an effort to capitalize on the U.S.’s national yearning for energy security—and on Obama’s promise to deliver independence from Middle Eastern oil—Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made the busy president-elect an offer.  Framed as a joint climate change pact, many are interpreting his call for common pollution standards and a unified emissions trading scheme as little more than a shield to protect Alberta’s massive oil sands projects.  

As Andrew Nikiforuk reported in OnEarth last Fall, the tar sands in northern Alberta represent one of the world’s last great oil rushes, and certainly one of the dirtiest.  Reached by Highway 63—or more commonly known as Hell’s Highway—Nikiforuk describes the area that UNEP has designated as one of the world’s top “environmental hot spots” like so: “the project will eventually transform a boreal forest the size of Florida into an industrial sacrifice zone complete with lakes full of toxic waste and man-made volcanoes spewing out clouds of greenhouse gases.”

Harper, seizing on America’s foreign oil hysteria, is hoping to get Obama to make a swift, symbolic gesture to secure a reliable supply from a trusted neighbor.  The problem is, tar sands produce the heaviest hydrocarbon product.  It requires massive amounts of energy to process the raw bitumen (“a thick, sloppy mess of oil, water, clay, and sand”) into a substance that can be used and poured like a normal barrel of oil.  It’s really worth reading Nikiforuk’s whole description of the mess to get a sense of just how filthy, damaging, and dangerous the whole process is.  

Obama has, however, committed to reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.  Without a massive carbon capture and sequestration CCS) effort—nothing of the kind is planned—getting energy from the Alberta tar sands would make this goal essentially impossible.  

And, in fact, Obama’s camp, during his campaign, specifically criticized oil sands as a climate and ecological catastrophy.  Offering protection to the dirtiest, most globally threatening fossil fuel projects in the world under the banner of a “climate change pact,” Harper’s move is a clever--if disingenuous--one.  If Obama’s progressive energy and climate team lives up to expectations, we should expect them to say “thanks but not thanks” to this catastrophically dangerous wolf in sheep’s clothing that Harper has sent south.