Donald Trump, along with many other Americans, is reluctant to admit refugees from foreign wars. In Europe, there’s a backlash against admitting refugees.
Of course there might be fewer refugees if the United States and other governments hadn’t destroyed or tried to destroy functioning governments in Iraq, Libya and Syria. A decade ago, Syria was a country that took in refugees, not a country from which refugees fled.
But within the next 10 years or so, the number of war refugees might be overtaken by the number of climate refugees—families fleeing drought, floods and hurricanes caused by global warming.
Think of the people fleeing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or people fleeing the Dust Bowl region in the 1980s. Think of the crisis in Germany over hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and other war-torn countries in the Middle East.
Now imagine this on a global scale and magnified 10-fold or 100-fold.
Most of the world’s governments, including the USA and China, have been slow to respond to the need to slow down climate change. But President-elect Donald Trump is committed to policies that will actively make things worse!
Unless something important changes, a global climate refugee crisis is inevitable.
I can’t predict when the climate refugee crisis will hit—whether during the Trump administration or later.
I can predict that when it does, the United States will be the world’s scapegoat for everything bad that happens.
We Americans will deserve the blame for a lot of it. We will get the blame for all of it.
The dangerous and destructive Alberta tar sands project may be in jeopardy economically because of falling oil prices, the Washington Spectator reported.
An end to the project would be good news, but the desperate struggles of the dying industry to survive by any means necessary could cause even more damage before it disappears.
Tar from tar sands is extracted by a process as environmentally destructive as strip mining and hydrofracking combined. Tar Sands Solutions says an area of northern Alberta the size of Florida is being devastated. Scientists say that the tar sands project in and of itself could have a measurable effect on global warming.
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Extraction products a product called bitumen, a corrosive slurry that must be brought to a refinery to be converted into a useful product. This creates a high risk of pipe breaks or leaks from tanker train accidents along the way.
As oil prices fall, the higher the volume of bitumen that must be shipped from northern Alberta to generate enough revenue to keep the project going. Mark Dowie, writing in the Washington Spectator, says this creates an opportunity to block the project.
It is not necessary, he wrote, to stop all tar sands pipelines—the two planned for Canada’s west coast, the one planned for Canada’s east coast or the Keystone XL pipeline through the United States to the Texas Gulf Coast. Blocking two or three would be enough to make the project economically unfeasible.
This makes sense. But tar sands in its death throes could be even more destructive than it is now, as the owners try to ship their product by tank cars or by any other means necessary.
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President Obama vetoed a bill requiring him to approve the Keystone XL pipeline on his own. But he still could approve it on his own authority. Canada could ask a NAFTA tribunal to order the United States to pay penalties if he doesn’t. Or it could wait for until a new President is elected in 2016.
I used to look upon Canada as not just a good neighbor to the United States, but as a good example. That’s no longer true under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
While the U.S. government ponders whether to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, another Canadian company decided to short-circuit the process and transport tar sands oil across the upper Midwest to the great lakes.
The company, Enbridge, had applied for permits to transport the highly corrosive tar sands bitumen, but then it decided that it didn’t need permission, and decided to go ahead with the project anyway, the Washington Spectator reported.
The project is dubious because, among other reasons, of the danger of pipe leaks and spills, which would pollute streams and underground water. Enbridge has a bad record in this respect. Tar sands developers have been blocked by other Canadian provinces from building pipelines east and west, so they’ve chosen to go south into the United States.
The Washington Spectator reported that Enbridge already has a permit, issued in 1967, to transport oil across the border via its Alberta Clipper pipeline. The company claimed it didn’t need a new permit to expand the pipeline and transport tar sands bitumen, and federal regulators raised no objection. So unless state governments decide to stop the project, the Alberta Clipper is a done deal.
The fight against global warming consists of many local struggles that, at first glance, don’t have anything to do with climate change.
These struggles include resistance to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, to the Alberta tar sands industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, to deep ocean oil drilling and to other destructive practices by oil, gas and coal companies.
Such destructive practices are necessary to keep the fossil fuel companies in business because all the easy-to-get oil, gas and coal has been used up. And greenhouse gas emissions will decrease only when oil and gas drilling and coal mining decrease.
Naomi Klein in her book, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: Capitalism vs The Climate,reported on how these scattered local resistance movements are coming to realize they are part of a common cause.
In just one chapter, she touched on protests in Greece, Rumania, Canada’s New Brunswick, England’s Sussex, Inner Mongolia, Australia, Texas, France, Ecuador, Nigeria, West Virginia, South Dakota, North America’s Pacific Northwest and Quebec—all related directly or indirectly to stopping fossil fuel operations that would produce greenhouse gasses.
She and others call this alliance “Blockadia”. Unlike some of the big, established environmental organizations, the grass-roots protesters do not limit themselves to lawsuits and political lobbying. They engage in nonviolent direct action, the kind of mass defiance that GeneSharp advocated. These movements, more than the lobbying and lawsuits of the Big Green environmental organizations, will determine the future climate, she wrote.
I don’t think many Americans are aware of how much of our coal, oil and natural gas production is for export. In particular, I don’t think Americans are as aware as we should be that the pipeline to carry bitumen from tar sands fields in Alberta to oil refineries in Texas is for the benefit of Canadian exporters, not (except very indirectly) American consumers. The tar sands production is being piped south to Texas because other Canadian provinces are unwilling to take the environmental risk of having it piped east or west.
In and of itself, anything that reduces the U.S. trade deficit is a good thing, not a bad thing. We need to import things from abroad, and we need to pay for them with exports. Now we pay a price for this, which we did not have to pay for oil exports from Texas in the 1950s.
The easy-to-get coal, oil and natural gas has been pretty much used up, and so we need hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, mountaintop removal to dig for coal, deep water drilling for oil and the Alberta tar sands to get at what fossil fuels are left.
All these methods involve risks to human health and the natural environment, but that’s a price that can’t be avoided until alternatives are found and energy consumption is reduced.
An advanced nation should not depend on exports of raw materials, and imports of high-tech manufacturing goods, but that is the U.S. situation today.
The oil product extracted from tar sands is a thick gunk called bitumen, which can’t be moved through pipelines unless it is diluted by a natural gas produced called condensate. The U.S. State Department on Nov. 19 approved construction of a 1,900-mile gas pipeline to carry condensate produced by hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Fort Shale Basin in Texas through Kankakee, Illinois, to the tar sands area of Alberta. This will make it feasible to pump diluted bitumen through the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast.
Maybe “supports” is too strong a word, but Israel’s top brass would rather have negotiations and a slowing of Iran’s nuclear program than no negotiations and no concessions. The Israeli stock market also responded favorably to announcement of the negotiations.
Tar sands crude oil (bitumen) is a corrosive mixture of sand, clay, water and crude oil which can be refined into useful petroleum products. It is produced in the Canadian province of Alberta, but Canadian provinces to the east and west don’t want it piped through their territories because of fears of pipe ruptures and environmental damage. Instead tar sands crude is piped southward through the Great Plains to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. There have been two pipeline ruptures already this year in the USA, in Michigan and in Arkansas
In order to be economically feasible, TransCanada, the major tar sands producer, wants to expand the pipelines crossing the USA and build supplemental pipelines. Part of the project involves a new border crossing, which is subject to approval or disapproval by President Obama. The President hasn’t made his decision yet, but the U.S. State Department issued a favorable report on the project.
While the United States looks to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas for energy independence, our northern neighbor Canada looks to an even more problematic and dirtier energy source—tar sands.
Tar sands are a mixture of clay, sand, water and a tarry substance called bitumen, which can be processed into crude oil. Bitumen can’t be pumped. It has to be mined. Then it has to be cooked in order to separate it from the sands and mixed with chemicals to make it liquid enough to be piped to a refinery.
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Canada is the only country with an important tar sands industry. The Canadian province of Alberta has one of the world’s two largest known deposits of tar sands (the other is in Venezuela). They underlie an area as large as the state of Florida or the nation of England. If all the tar sands were usable as oil, Canada could in theory be an oil producer equal to Saudi Arabia.
Tar sands are pumped into the United States partly through Keystone pipeline, which became operational in June, 2010. The pipeline extends from Hardisty, Alberta, to Cushing, Oklahoma, and Patoka, Illinois. Now the TransCanada, the pipeline owner, wants to make extensions of the Keystone pipeline—the Keystone XL pipelines—which would take the tar sands crude from Cushing to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas, and create a more direct route from Hardisty across the Great Plains.
Canada is the largest source of U.S. oil imports, and a large fraction of that is tar sands oil. Enbridge, another Canadian tar sands company, also operates pipelines in the United States and also looks to expand.
Environmentalists have valid objections to tar sands generally and to the Keystone XL plan in particular. Alberta’s tar sands are extracted through surface mining, one of the most destructive extraction practices in existence. Tar sands mining contributes to global warming by releasing underground carbon, increasing carbon emissions, and destruction of forest land. Environmentalists say tar sands mining and processing uses four times as much energy as it makes available.
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Processing of tar sands bitumen requires corrosive chemicals to make it liquid enough to pump. The chemicals can corrode pipes and create the danger of spills. Whistleblowers say that TransCanada doesn’t properly inspect its pipelines. There were 12 spills during the first year of the Keystone pipeline’s operation, admittedly all relatively minor, and a more serious spill in Michigan by Enbridge.
TransCanada says it already has the necessary approvals for the southern Keystone XL through Texas, but President Obama has authority to disapprove the northern Keystone XL because it would cross the U.S. border at a new point. That extension would take the tar sands pipeline through the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground water reservoir which supplies irrigation water for 20 percent of U.S. farm production and drinking water for many communities. A spill or leak could contaminate this water. If President Obama can’t bring himself to disapprove the pipeline altogether, he should insist that it be rerouted around the aquifer.
No matter what he decides, tar sands will reamin as a presence in the United States and as an issue.
I have to admire the oil industry’s enterprise and ingenuity. It is amazing to me that techniques such as deep water ocean drilling, horizontal hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, and conversion of tar sands to usable petroleum are even possible. I think the environmentalists’ objections to tar sands are all valid. But I want gasoline for my car and that gasoline has to come from some source, dirty or clean.
I wish the intelligence, hard work and capital investment that is going into developing dirty energy can be redirected into developing clean energy. The oil industry probably would say the latter isn’t economically feasible. I can’t prove this is wrong, but if it is, industrial civilization doesn’t have a future.
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