The Canadian Tar Sands: War Crimes in the Fight Against Climate Change

It’s a stain on our nation and an international catastrophe

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

The changing climate is hitting us like a runaway freight train in Canada.

We’ve seen more heat domes forming for the past few years, and the temperatures have kept climbing. Higher and higher, the numbers tick upwards, and humidity soars.

These days, the heat is killing people faster than the wildfires are. Go figure.

I just had a discussion with my mother about wet bulb temperatures and what we should be doing to keep the house cool and dry when summer rolls around again. We spent last summer under a potentially lethal heat warning after weeks of heavy rain.

We’re battening down the hatches and installing a dehumidifier on top of our air conditioners. On the worst days, I could barely breathe with all the moisture in the air.

I’m not eager to go through that again.

Climate change is an existential threat. It threatens our health, well-being, and our very lives. In the face of chaotic weather, rising heat, and an uncertain future, you would think we would be doing everything we could as a society to stop making things worse.

You would think that. But you would be wrong.

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Here in Canada, there’s a lot that we could do to take an active role in combating climate change in the future. We could protect our substantial old-growth forests from logging, keeping the vast volume of carbon they hold from being released.

We could move faster on holding our corporations and businesses accountable for the damage they do. We could work with local populations to improve our infrastructure and make changes to our architecture to keep up with the demands of our shifting climate.

We could even put limits on our fossil fuel industry.

Yeah, sure, we could do that. Pigs could also learn to fly.

Fossil fuels are a huge industry in Canada.

We are viewed as a resource-rich nation for a reason; we have everything from vast old-growth rainforests to reserves of fresh water. We have stone, minerals, and many other high-value commodities in our natural landscape.

We also have the Athabasca oil sands, which single-handedly cemented Alberta as our wealthiest province.

Alberta holds one of the largest oil reserves on the planet, placing us comfortably in the top five in terms of volume and production.

That kind of wealth is not something that our country is interested in leaving on the table, no matter how much it hurts us to keep harvesting the stuff.

It’s not like corporations give a damn about the public good.

We’ve always known that the Athabasca tar sands posed a threat to the natural world. A certain level of pollution is to be expected in any fossil fuel extraction — but a few months ago, a report came out that demonstrates the scale of the problem.

We got it wrong, in the worst possible way. It turns out that the damage is considerably worse than anyone previously thought.

Even worse, the pollution levels exceed what the industry reported to officials. We’ve been pumping far, far more toxins into the air than we knew.

We haven’t even been performing the right tests to figure that out until now.

Photo by Leandro Callegari on Unsplash

I find it hard to come up with the right words to describe how I feel when I see reports like these. I don’t know how to articulate my deepening sense of dread and fatigue.

All I can say is that we know better than to keep pouring poison into the natural landscape and expecting everything to turn out okay. We know better because we’ve been told. Repeatedly. Going back decades.

None of this is new information, but if you stand to make money off of the business, you become deaf to the voice of reason.

The Athabasca tar sands cover an area larger than the whole of England. The state of Florida is a bit larger, but not by a whole lot.

The tar sands are an extraction site for what’s known as bitumen, which is a dense form of crude oil that is both heavier and much harder to harvest than others.

It requires more water and distributes more greenhouse gases during production than other kinds, largely due to how it tends to be buried deeper under the soil. It requires extra processing as well, which also contributes.

So, it’s about the worst-case scenario for such a massive project. Just take a look at this graph to see how bad the Athabasca fields really are — hint, go all the way to the right. It is worse than conventional oil mining. Much worse.

The impacts on both the local wildlife and the health of local people are difficult to overstate.

For over a decade, the local First Nations have been raising the alarm over ill health, and the dangerously high levels of heavy metals found in their food supply.

Naturally, it was determined that there was not sufficient cause for concern, and the studies were found to not be ‘scientifically rigorous’ enough.

Never mind that cancer rates have been reported at a shocking rate in Fort Chipewyan for two decades now, a community right in the path of pollution.

The problem is still ongoing. First Nations communities are very often underserved and under-recognized when it comes to issues of ill health, especially those linked to environmental destruction.

Never mind that elevated cancer risks are a known side effect of fossil fuel production. Best not to report on that too much; we don’t want the money to stop.

Indigenous communities are often victims of industry. We don’t call them Sacrifice Zones for nothing.

Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash

The Canadian tar sands are a crime against humanity.

All fossil fuel extraction is, but our country’s contributions are remarkably bad even compared to other nations. We haven’t slowed down, and we show no signs of putting a stop to it.

Even though there is no doubt that we should, and no time left to hesitate.

We’re well beyond the point of needing to be told this; every grade school child knows it. How is it possible that we keep letting the so-called modern-day Captains of Industry get away with making us all sick?

How is it possible that we can collectively look at reports like the one about the Athabasca tar sands and just…shrug?

We know what we stand to lose if this keeps going unchecked. We see the climate changing, and we witness the world’s weather growing more and more chaotic and unstable every year.

We see the wildfires spreading from coast to coast, the people forced to become refugees as their homes and livelihoods go up in smoke. We see buildings destroyed by flooding and tornados where they never used to occur.

We know better. Our governments know better. And yet here we are, watching our world leaders keep ramping up production instead of scaling it down.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: refusing to treat a fever is negligence. It’s a crime, and it should bear consequences for the perpetrator rather than for the people around them.

There is no excuse for this anymore. There is no denying it; there is no way to justify and explain away the rampant, despicable greed that has brought us to this point. It is killing people, massacring an entire city’s worth of people every day.

But I guess money talks louder than we can scream.

Solidarity wins.

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