Scenes From the Tar Wars
NEWS: As Canada scrambles to dig up some of the world's dirtiest oil, a bush doctor tracks mysterious diseases, poisoned rivers, and shattered lives.
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At a small airport in the northern Alberta town of Fort McMurray, a rickety, single-engine Cessna hurtles off the ground with a roar. Dr. John O'Connor ignores the shuddering fuselage, the tail wiggle, the steep climb above the spruce trees at the end of the runway. For O'Connor, a bush doctor who has tended to some of Canada's most remote Native American communities for more than a decade, this October morning is the start of a routine commute. In his fleece vest and green fedora, the small, middle-aged Irishman looks simultaneously rugged and elfin. A plastic tray of fruit salad vibrates beneath his seat, a gift for locals who are used to subsisting on moose, pickerel, and muskrat.
Outside, a carpet of boreal forest unfurls at the southern edge of town. Our plane flies past suburban subdivisions, freshly paved culs-de-sac, and what O'Connor says is the largest trailer park in North America. As we head north, tracking the steep banks of the Athabasca River, the forest returns. And then the trees quickly vanish, along with everything else, into miles and miles of rolling hills of sand. "The sand blows around like you wouldn't believe," O'Connor shouts over the propeller buzz. "Drive from Fort McMurray, and you will encounter what looks like a sandstorm."
Below, some 2 billion tons of soil and rock—"overburden," as the oil industry politely calls it—have been stripped away to reveal deposits of hydrocarbon-laced sandstone known as tar sands. Trucks that can carry up to 400 tons lumber across the subarctic expanse, hauling the oily muck out of terraced pits to "crushers" located in massive processing facilities.
The tar sands began forming 350 million years ago, when a prehistoric ocean deposited a layer of organic materials that was gradually cooked into a huge underground pool of light sweet crude beneath what became Alberta. Erosion made way for microorganisms that invaded the oil, forming a thick tar sandwiched between the forest above and the groundwater and limestone beneath. Along the banks of the Athabasca River, the black goop sometimes seeps through the sand as if Jed Clampett just made another lucky strike.
Underlying an area the size of Florida, Canada's tar sands (also known as oil sands) contain as much as 173 billion barrels of recoverable oil—more than the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Russia put together. Only Saudi Arabia possesses larger oil reserves. But removing oil from the sands, which involves injecting them with steam or digging them up and pumping in vast quantities of water to heat them, has always been astronomically expensive—until now. As American politicians talk about weaning us from Middle Eastern crude and the price of oil has skyrocketed, the tar sands have become a viable source of foreign fossil fuel. Canada is now the United States' top oil supplier, selling us more than the Saudis. Not since Texas wildcatters hit black gold 80 years ago has North America seen such a frantic rush for oil. Over the next five years, investment in the Alberta tar sands is expected to exceed $75 billion; oil production is set to increase by 160 percent by 2015. Alberta's 59 tar sands sites now form the single largest industrial zone in the world. If it is fully developed, the result could be up to 54,000 square miles of man-made wasteland.
Digging up the tar sands is a dirty, wasteful business. Yet in their desperate scramble to cash in, the provincial government and the oil companies have downplayed the environmental risks. The boom is a major reason Canada will likely miss its carbon targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Converting tar sand into gasoline emits up to three times the greenhouse gases as drilling and refining conventional oil. The extraction process consumes roughly twice the energy of producing conventional oil (in total, enough energy to heat a tenth of Canadian homes). And there are growing questions about the mines, which have transformed once-sleepy northern Alberta into an industrial frontier, and their health effects on wildlife and people. O'Connor is under investigation for expressing his concerns, accused by the national health system of raising "undue alarm."
As we cross the Athabasca River, I spot the belly of our plane reflected in a shimmering reservoir of oil waste—two gallons for each gallon of oil produced. Scarecrows dressed in old mining uniforms bob on top of the gunk to discourage birds from landing and drowning in it. The oil industry consumes some 15 percent of the Athabasca River's winter flow—enough to supply a city of 2 million. Tailings ponds such as this one, owned by Suncor Energy, are required by Albertan law to keep waste out of groundwater. Yet the law allows some 1.5 million gallons of slurry containing arsenic and mercury to leach daily from the reservoir into an underground aquifer; some of it drains into the river.
Following the river's northward course, our plane threads the white steam coming from the smokestacks of Suncor's "cracker," the smell of petroleum and sulfur permeating the cabin. Below, the cracker is heating bitumen—the "tar" in tar sands—to 900 degrees Fahrenheit and turning it into synthetic crude oil before it will be piped to special refineries in the United States to be made into gasoline.
A patchwork of more pits unfurls for miles ahead. We fly over Syncrude, partly owned by an ExxonMobil subsidiary, then Albian Sands, a division of Shell. The giant mines give way to fresh clearings where Chevron Canadian Natural Resources Limited and Petro-Canada are just starting to dig. ConocoPhillips and the Exxon subsidiary Imperial Oil have staked additional claims in the area.
Finally, the last tentacles of mining roads give way to pristine forest. The river debouches into Lake Athabasca, and we descend toward Fort Chipewyan, a tiny trading outpost that clings to the rocky shore. In summer, once the ice road melts into an impassable bog, the only way to reach the hamlet is by plane or boat.
O'Connor has been flying in for seven years, serving as the town's only doctor. It's the kind of work that kept him in Canada after he came over from Ireland in 1984 for a three-month stint. "You see the same people over and over, and the whole community," he says. "You feel like part of a family."
The outside world largely ignores Fort Chip, O'Connor says. But isolation has not protected the town's 1,200 residents—Mikisew Cree, Athabasca Chipewyan, and the descendants of French trappers—from the effects of the oil frenzy 70 miles upstream. In fact, O'Connor suspects that the tar sands may be slowly killing them.
Founded in 1788, Fort Chipewyan is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in Alberta. Located by three rivers feeding into one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world, it was a hub of commerce at a time when waterways were superhighways. At the height of the fur trade in the 1800s, it shipped off thousands of beaver pelts to Europe. After the beaver-fur hat lost its allure in the 1840s, Fort Chipewyan languished for decades, doing without electricity until 1959 and without an airstrip until a few years later.
After O'Connor was hired as the town's fly-in doctor in 2000, he was struck by the number of people wandering the streets with serious ailments—more than he'd seen in other native communities. "Going to Fort Chip, you hit the ground running," he says as we land. "You are working from the very start."
Sure enough, as O'Connor lugs his bags across the runway, he's hailed by a man who complains of being "holed up in bed for days." O'Connor also expresses concern about Stan, the airport baggage handler, who is due for an important medical test. "Don't miss it," O'Connor chides as he climbs into a minivan. The man behind the wheel, thin and hunchbacked, confesses to skipping his own clinic appointment that morning. But he feels healthy enough. "Boy, I hope it's a good day tomorrow," he says. "I want to go kill my moose."
We drive past mossy hillsides of birch and aspen to the lakefront, where we turn into a row of modest homes and trailers, passing oil drums fished from the river and repurposed as trash bins. The minivan stops at the small wood-plank community center. Inside, O'Connor adds his fruit tray to a spread that includes beef, pasta, and salad but little of the abundant wild meat and fish that many locals traditionally subsisted on. John Michael, a trapper and fisherman with a red, leathery face, says he has a stack of caribou and walleye in his freezer but is afraid to dig into it too often. Groceries are expensive, he says, "but fuck, I don't eat food anyways. I just buy my beer."
Ten years ago, as the tar sands boom was just getting under way, Michael and other commercial fishermen began to haul in unusual numbers of deformed fish from Lake Athabasca. Walleye came in with humpbacks, crooked tails, pug faces, and bulging eyes. In 2002, an elder named Raymond Ladouceur, who'd been fishing the lake longer than anyone, dropped off 200 pounds of freakish-looking walleye at the doorstep of the Fish and Wildlife Division in Fort McMurray. Instead of testing them, officials left the fish outside to rot. With no official word on what was wrong with the disfigured fish, fishermen who pulled in whitefish and northern pike with red scales and large lumps on their sides and emaciated, jug-headed trout simply tossed them back into the water. Michael tells me, "We don't like talking about 'em."
In the past few years, a tide of serious illnesses has passed through Fort Chip's tiny health clinic. In a period of a few months, O'Connor treated half a dozen people with thyroid disorders. He's diagnosed multiple cases of lung, colon, bladder, and prostate cancer—many more than he'd seen in other First Nations communities in Alberta. In 2003 he determined that a man with jaundiced skin and weight loss was suffering from cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and virulent bile-duct cancer that normally afflicts 1 person in every 100,000.
O'Connor knew just how devastating this form of cancer could be because his father, an encyclopedia salesman in Limerick, Ireland, had been diagnosed with it 10 years earlier. "Six weeks later," O'Connor recalls, "he was dead."
At first, O'Connor shared his budding concerns about Fort Chip's health with only a handful of friends and colleagues—until he learned of Shell's proposal to expand its mining operation near the banks of the Athabasca. The oil company wasn't required to mitigate the $10 billion project's effects on the people and wildlife living in Fort Chip, because, officially, there were none. O'Connor became the first medical doctor in Alberta to publicly suggest otherwise.
In late 2004, O'Connor diagnosed a second case of cholangiocarcinoma in a 60-year-old school bus driver who died a few weeks later. Shell was deadlocked with the locals over how to study its project's impact, so O'Connor suggested to a friend who worked for the national health agency that it perform its own studies. By then, a study by Suncor had found elevated levels of arsenic in some local moose meat. The company's scientists also found that lifetime exposure to arsenic in the moose meat could result in as many as 453 additional cases of cancer for every 100,000 residents.
The anecdotal evidence that something was wrong was mounting: Fort Chipewyan's hunters complained that their duck and muskrat tasted watery and bland, that moose livers were enlarged and spotted white, and that when they boiled river water it left a viscous brown scum on the pot. "It's got so bloody many chemicals coming down in that water system today," says Ladouceur, who's stopped drinking straight from the river as he'd done since childhood. Many Fort Chip residents have even forsaken the town's purified tap water, struggling to afford the bottled kind, which sells for $8 a gallon. The clinic often treats the elderly for dehydration.
As things got worse, O'Connor grew tired of waiting for the government to take action. In March 2006, he went on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program and announced that five people had died from bile-duct cancer in tiny Fort Chip—what one would expect to see in a metropolis more than 400 times its size.
In early 2006, as George W. Bush declared his intention to "make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past," Canadian officials met with the Department of Energy in Houston to discuss increasing tar sands oil production fivefold. "We certainly are very anxious that oil sands development be as swift as possible," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman told visiting Canadian officials that March. He followed up with a trip to Alberta, telling energy executives there that the United States was committed to reducing its oil imports from overseas and that "no single thing can do more to help us reach that goal than realizing the potential of the oil sands in Alberta."
With several daily nonstop flights linking Calgary and Houston, and an ExxonMobil pipeline that had once pumped Texas oil to Illinois being retrofitted to send Canadian synthetic crude to the Gulf Coast, Alberta's envoy to Capitol Hill cheered, "We are seamless with Houston." The province has opened an office in the Canadian Embassy in Washington to promote its oil interests (the only provincial office of its kind). In the summer of 2006, a giant tar sands dump truck was parked on the Mall for the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival, a symbol of "the living traditions that make and sustain Alberta's unique culture."
In Fort Chipewyan, the tar sands hold both promise and peril. Young people grumble about the oil companies' practice of "consulting" with elders, currying favor by handing out payments and "door prizes" such as propane lanterns and microwaves at public meetings. Raymond Ladouceur wonders if fears of contamination could cause the market for the town's walleye—white-tablecloth restaurants in New York City and Boston—to dry up.
But more than that, he wonders who will keep fishing. The town is aging, while the young—including his daughter, three sisters, and a brother—have set off to seek their fortunes in the tar sands. "We are going to destroy everything, we as human beings," he says. "Our greed is going to kill us. And in the end, with all the money we are going to have, and nothing to eat, no water to drink, no air to breathe—what is the good of it? It's just a lousy piece of paper."
On a chilly autumn evening, Ida Stepanowich finishes a 12-hour shift at the Suncor mine 15 miles north of Fort McMurray and stops to pick up her 15-year-old son from his after-school job at a video store. He climbs into the back of her extended-cab pickup clutching a copy of Night of the Living Dead. Inside her home on the sprawling edge of town, she walks past a living room that resembles a page from an Ikea catalog and sits down in her pearl-white kitchen.
Stepanowich, Raymond Ladouceur's 48-year-old sister, grew up with her 10 siblings in a cabin on the Athabasca River, splitting firewood, hauling water, and eating only what they could grow and catch. "The way Raymond lives today, we wouldn't be able to live like that," she tells me in the soft tones of a yoga instructor. "My grandma used to say in Cree that money would mean a lot one day. It would mean everything to the world. And that's so true."
The influx of fortune seekers and roughnecks has transformed Fort McMurray into a place that longtime residents barely recognize. Gone are the days when one might see caribou from the back yard. The town has doubled in size over the past decade to more than 64,000 people. With a median single-family home price of $550,000, it's now among the highest-priced towns in Canada. (The average two-story home price in Toronto is $485,000.) It sports a full-service casino, restaurants with names like Fuel, an Oil Sands Discovery Centre for tourists, and a new nickname: McMoney. Inexperienced truck drivers can earn $100,000 a year in the tar sands, welders twice that. On the only road leading into town, known as the "Highway of Death," oversize rigs are passed on blind curves by workers flush with cash and booze.
Stepanowich moved to Fort McMurray in 2000, seeking better schools for her two children. For six years her husband has piloted a crane at the Syncrude mine and she's driven dozers, graders, haulers, and tankers. Although she bought a home and banked a college fund, Stepanowich wonders if the jobs have been worth it. "When I work out there," she whispers, "I always say, 'Grandmothers, forgive us for destroying your Earth.' I don't say that out loud to people I work with—they'll probably think that I'm crazy. But if I have tobacco, I'll sprinkle a little bit along the way someplace and ask for forgiveness."
Photo: Edward Burtynsky
As if Canadians *don't* know that the 'Sands' is a nightmare? Do you think we don't know what happened to IRAQ isn't a cautionary tale of what happens when a resource becomes spotlighted by 'what is best for American Interests'?
wake up. The entire nation sat upright & began gophering when Ann Coulter announced, "Canada is "lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent";
Carlson: "Without the U.S., Canada is essentially Honduras"...
COULTER: "There is also something called, when you're allowed to exist on the same continent of the United States of America, protecting you with a nuclear shield around you, you're polite & you support us when we've been attacked on our own soil. They [Canada] violated that protocol."...
"They better hope the United States doesn't roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent."
"If we were not the United States of America, Canada -- I mean, we're their trading partner. We keep their economy afloat."
- http://mediamatters.org/items/200412010011
Get the picture?
We're not scrabbling oil because we CHOOSE to sell oil & destroy the ecology (oh, you mean AMERICANS want the Athabasca River water, 'enough to supply a city of 2 million"!, p.66, oh I'm sorry... YOU want it, so *we're* squandering it... right?)
We're selling oil because: its one of the few things **we're permitted** to do.
American industry has *crushed* Canadian industry & labour, via American funding & government policies. Our unions are gutted because American unions act not out of international worker Solidarity, but as if they are in competition with Brotherhood (notice: how many American unions are protesting for the abuses of Iraqi oil workers? not as many as a LIBERAL would expect. ILWU Canada received brotherhood solidarity request from *abused* Iraqi union organizers ("play by our American rules & we'll give you *our* democracy! no, ignore our PSA demands!" http://www.itfglobal.org/solidarity/solidarity-1148.cfm )
Do you think Canadians are blind? What you think we don't **listen** to David Suzuki? we'd LOVE to implement Kyoto Protocols. Have you asked why international corporate lobbyists (not a traditional Canadian institution, BTW) inundate Ottawa? Why did I spend a wedding reception last Summer in Bermuda listening to a woman shriek at me that I was a 'terrorist' because I mentioned David Suzuki, as well looked at the beach? corporate PROPAGANDA.
We're not blind, we're desperate. This isn't about a pack of ignorant savages in the Wilderness, or a a lone doctor. The entire nation knows what is going on... but nobody is in a position to help make it stop. The millions being dumped from abroad into developing the Sands does an effective job of creating an illusion of stability in the economic centres & eases social burdens on traditionally disenfranchised areas of economic disparity.
1. American institutions are dumping **millions** of dollars into Canada's 'ReichWing' agencies to promote
- 'pro-Americanism',
- 'pro-Life',
- 'pro-gun' worship,
- pro-privatized healthcare...
...if its ugly & American, its being funded as a 'personal prosperity & freedom' program in our nation.
2. oil companies are engaged in a massive orgy of their own... & hiring everyone they can get their hands on & throwing money around to 'ecological impact consultants' who tell economic centres & First Nations groups that the impact isn't as massive. While vacationing in Cuba this Feb, I was stunned to meet a young Canadian woman who wrote reports for US oil companies to downplay First Nations concerns. She was a graduate of an *environmental* program.
3. NAFTA pillaged the Canadian economy. It wasn't enough that we were sold out by our own gov't. Nah, American agencies also negotiated in bad faith, forcing Canadian industries to return again & again to renegotiate that which had already been agreed upon. Over & over, in & out of negotiating rooms... as our industries died.
Need an example? This should cover it for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Uj-nw3XUk
3. Ecological decline... ever wonder why the waterways of Canada's East Coast are acidified? gee... out of sight, out of mind... we get it... trust me. we get it.
4. KBR is currently going to the Supreme Court of Canada to **CHANGE LABOUR & PRIVACY LAWS** in Canada. Seems if you're raped in Iraq, you're a menace. If you have a private life in Canada? you're a menace to your co-workers during work hours.
SO:
this article is truthful but shallow.
... most offensively, written as if those poor ignorant & greedy Canadians are completely oblivious to the hazards of our ecology & social platforms. Surprise. we're not. We're freaking desperate because our economy has been -& continues to be!- pillaged by corruption.
You think *Americans* suffered under NAFTA? you've gotta be kidding.
I love how Americans write articles about leaving their nation as if they're suddenly wandering amongst the Great UnWashed or uneducated.
WE KNOW its bad... its not like American institutions leave us many alternatives...
..& we've got 'we love the "NAFTA on Steroids"-cum-"Security & Prosperity Partnership" *Harper*. (nuff said on *that*)
http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/
Meanwhile... we *know* you're panting over the Border demanding we cough up water we can't afford to be polluting. We know this.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/01/maude_barlow.html
So, basically the story reads to a Canadian like this:
a. Canadians soooo dumb.
b. Canadians soooo cruel.
c. Canadians soooo polluting the water that should be rightfully commodified to American corporate interests.
d. Canadians have substandard social mores
e. why can't those Canadians be more like AMERICANS?
But... wouldn't it be nice if Americans published articles about Canada that didn't act as if the American standards were the ONLY global standards? What is 'normal' for Americans, isn't 'the norm' for the Rest of the World.
People talk about the 'horrors' of the Sands. Damn right. They're horrible, much like what happened in Russia.
But the *article* was downright laughable, if it hadn't betrayed that quintessential American hubris, "if you're not us, you're peasants".
I'm disappointed with the Mother Jones editorial staff. really. I am.
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http://thiscanadian.typepad.com/thi s_canadian/2008/05/crude-jolt-for.html
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"The SPP keeps U.S. tanks full"
May 7, 2008, Brent Patterson, an op-ed by the Council of Canadian
http://www.canadians.org/integratethis/energy/2008/May-7.html
"The following op-ed by Brent Patterson, director of campaigns and organizing with the Council of Canadians, appeared in today’s Windsor Star:
In 2006, the Security and Prosperity Partnership called for a fivefold expansion of tarsands oil production.
While right-wing pundits are claiming the SPP is dead, the new pipeline network announced by TransCanada Corps last month to connect Alberta oil to southern U.S. markets shows that plans for North American energy integration are going full steam ahead.
But the federal Conservatives and the Alberta government are worried that the rising call to reconsider the existing trade model to ensure that the environment and workers' rights trump corporate interests will affect the U.S. appetite for Alberta oil.
Ron Stevens, Alberta's deputy minister and minister of International and Intergovernmental Relations, is heading for Washington this week to promote oil from the province's tar sands as "environmentally sustainable."
The Alberta government is investing millions of taxpayer money in a U.S. ad campaign bearing the same message.
At the news conference that wrapped up the recent North American Leaders' Summit, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated, "Canada is the biggest and most stable supplier of energy to the United States in the world. That energy security is more important now than it was 20 years ago when NAFTA was negotiated, and will be even more important in the future."
This was a clear warning from Mr. Harper to hopeful Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as the American people, that they should stop any consideration of the idea that NAFTA be renegotiated.
Mr. Harper's strategy here seems to be informed by comments made by US Ambassador David Wilkins in November 2006. At that time, Mr. Wilkins said, "Secretary Bodman told the Alberta oil executives that if they could produce five million barrels per day they would have the United States' attention. I believe that the investors and producers in the oil sands and the government of Alberta and Canada have every intention of meeting that goal in the future. So stay tuned."
Canada is already the biggest supplier of crude oil to the United States. In 2007, Canada shipped an astonishing average of 1.848 million barrels of oil a day to the United States. But the United States wants even more, and Mr. Harper seems determined to provide it to them -- at whatever the cost to our own energy security and the environment -- and in spite of public opinion.
In terms of our own security of supply, Canada is increasingly importing oil for our own needs from countries that are not as "stable" or "secure" as Canada, as Mr. Harper might put it. In fact, Statistics Canada reported in February that while Canada remains a net oil exporter, our imports have increased to 851,000 barrels of oil per day. About half of this amount comes from Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Additionally, a November 2007 National Energy Board report found Canada will become a net importer of natural gas by around 2028 if production and price trends continue, with the shortfall being met by liquefied natural gas from overseas.
The same day that Mr. Harper made his comments in New Orleans -- which was also notably Earth Day -- Statistics Canada released a report saying Canada's greenhouse gas emissions from the production of exported energy jumped by 146 per cent since 1990. And in order to get this oil to the United States, we are now hearing that Kinder Morgan Canada is constructing a pipeline through Jasper National Park and Mount Robson National Park in order to ship some 40,000 barrels of oil a day from the tarsands to them.
And while Mr. Harper likes to describe Canada as an "energy superpower." Canadians are feeling the pinch. The latest national price survey shows the average price for gasoline in Canada is now $1.23 a litre. This is approaching an all-time high for Canadians to be paying at the pump.
So it should be no surprise that Canadians reject the course that Mr. Harper and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach want to take us on. Recent polling conducted by the Environics Research Group for the Council of Canadians demonstrates that 89 per cent of Canadians agree Canada should establish an energy policy that provides reliable supplies of oil, gas and electricity at stable prices and protects the environment, even if this means placing restrictions on exports and foreign ownership of Canadian supplies.
Canadians and Americans are telling their leaders that they want a debate on NAFTA and our energy future. Mr. Harper should take these concerns seriously instead of continuing to cling to NAFTA and a vision of Canada that is seemingly limited to being America's gas tank."
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Brent Patterson is director of campaigns and organizing at the Council of Canadians"
http://www.canadians.org/integratethis
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Spread Love...
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~~~
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"Do no harm"