U.S. shouldn't be enabling a destructive industry
The long-awaited State Department report on the environmental impacts of TransCanada's Keystone XL Pipeline makes a dubious justification for its construction: The oil is going to flow in any case, so it won't add to carbon emissions from Alberta's oil sands industry.
Through this extremely narrow lens, that may be true. The commitment on the part of the Canadian government to fully exploit the sands will go on whether or not this pipeline is built — as long as so many are willing to enable it.
In fact, the pace at which the infrastructure to move the oil is being constructed throughout North America is breathtaking, even before this last portion of the Keystone is completed. Old Enbridge pipelines are already transporting tar sands oil across our state into Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and beyond. More pipelines are being proposed across Canada, while rail transport is growing exponentially in both countries.
In September, I spent two weeks in Alberta with five Canadians, traveling along the Athabasca River from its origins in Jasper National Park to Fort McMurray, the economic heart of the industry. We wanted to learn more about the impact of the mining on Alberta's ecosystems and on First Nation communities living downriver. These are some of the things we learned:
The oil sands, spread across an area the size of Florida, contain an asphalt-like substance called bitumen, which can be refined into synthetic crude oil. In about 3% of this area, the bitumen is found within a few hundred feet of the surface. This is where surface-mining takes place.
First, all the trees are stripped away, then the muskeg, the rich soil of the boreal forest. Giant hydraulic shovels and mining trucks then roll in, removing the soil and hauling it to the processing plants where the bitumen is separated from the sand using heated water.
Since bitumen is too thick to move through a pipeline, diluents (chemical solvents) are added to soften it. The resulting substance is called dilbit. That's what flows through pipelines.
After separation, the residual sediment and chemical-laced wastewater is dumped into tailings ponds, toxic lakes that will be allowed to sit for years until the sediment settles and the area can be reclaimed.
It's hard to describe the scale of this project, how the moonscape stretches from horizon to horizon, the pollution and dust that fills the air until you can taste it.
That moonscape is perhaps the most notorious environmental signature of the tar sands. But the region also is seeing an acceleration of in situ mining to get at the other 97% of available bitumen. Drilling wells and pumping stations increasingly dot the landscape.
The process is very energy intensive, using vast amounts of water and steam to force up the goo. Demands on the Athabasca River watershed for all of this mining are causing river levels to decline.
Tar sands mining emits about 14% more greenhouse gas emissions than other forms of crude oil, and they continue to rise, expected to double again by 2020.
We spent two long afternoons with elders of the First Nation community in Fort McKay about 40 miles downriver. We heard stories of how the industry has destroyed their old ways of life, surrounding them more and more in a toxic vise. We also met with Dr. John O'Connor, who has worked there for several years, to get information about the impact of the industry on the community's health. He shared with us his concerns about the increases in respiratory diseases and blood, bladder and other cancers.
For many centuries, the river was the community's source of water. Now, it is so contaminated that people must rely on bottled water. They are warned not to take hot showers for more than a couple of minutes because sometimes their skin breaks out in rashes and lesions. Fort McKay is now economically dependent on the industry for jobs and income even though residents have lost land, their old ways of life and in many cases their health.
The State Department report avoids a crucial question about our nation's relationship with this industry. It is not about whether Keystone XL will add an extra measure of carbon emissions; it's whether we should be enabling this industry at all.
The argument about creating jobs is bogus. It's really about what kind of jobs we want to create in what kind of world. We have plenty of innovative energy technologies that could begin to move us in a different direction and create many more jobs along the way — without doing so much harm to the planet.
Margaret Swedish of Milwaukee has been writing and speaking on environmental issues since 2006. She is the author of "Living Beyond the 'End of the World:' A Spirituality of Hope" (Orbis, 2008).