Joe Oliver is right about oilsands, his critics are wrong

[Anonymous]

http://www.torontosun.com/2013/04/26/fighting-the-canada-bashers">http://www.torontosun.com/2013/04/26/fi ... da-bashers">http://www.torontosun.com/2013/04/26/fighting-the-canada-bashers

Federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver comes in for a lot of unjustified criticism for doing his job.

 

His job is to stand up for Canadian resource development in the face of absurd and politically-motivated attacks from all the usual environmental suspects on both sides of the 49th parallel.

 

What's been going on is a concerted effort, led by Canadian and American environmentalists, know-nothing "celebrities" and some Democratic politicians south of the border, to falsely portray Canada's oilsands as the great bogeyman of climate change.

 

This in order to stop the Canada-U.S. Keystone XL pipeline .

 

This ongoing propaganda effort is utter nonsense.

 

Canada accounts for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the oilsands for 0.1%, or one-one thousandth of global emissions.

 

Meanwhile, China, the U.S. and India, the world's top three emitters, are responsible for 42% of global emissions, mainly due to their heavy reliance on coal to produce electricity.

 

China gets 80% of its electricity from coal, the U.S. 40% to 50% and India, 70%.

 

By contrast, 75% of Canada's electricity comes from clean energy sources led by hydro power, less than 20% from coal.

 

In the real world, coal is the great bogeyman of climate change, not the oilsands and not even global oil reserves.

 

Last year, respected Canadian climate scientists Andrew Weaver — a lead author for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and his colleague, Neil Swart, estimated the future impact of burning global fossil fuel reserves and published their findings in the respected scientific magazine, Nature.

 

A computer modeler and certainly no fan of the Stephen Harper government or its climate policies, Weaver estimated if we develop the oilsands that are today commercially viable, the global temperature increase would be an insignificant 0.03 degrees C.

 

Develop all the oilsands and it's 0.36 degrees C, about half the global temperature rise in the last century.

 

Burn all the world's oil and the increase is under 1 degree C. (2 degrees C is considered the "safe" upper limit).

 

By contrast, burn all the world's coal and the increase is 15 degrees C.

 

Burn all the world's natural gas (which is beginning to replace coal in the U.S. due to cheaper prices resulting from hydraulic fracturing technology) and the increase is 3 degrees C.

 

These numbers raise the question of why, given that America's use of coal to generate electricity is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is there so much contrived hysteria south of the border about Canada's insignificant oilsands?

 

The real reason isn't hard to understand.

 

Weaning the U.S. off its heavy reliance on coal will result in significant job losses and higher electricity prices, hardly politically popular ideas in the U.S.

 

How much easier then, to falsely portray Canada's oilssands as the great bogeyman of climate change, which doesn't cost U.S. politicians and environmentalists a thing?

 

The hypocrisy of the U.S. on this has been astounding.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, which keeps stalling on issuing regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired electricity plants because of the huge controversy they're going to cause, has now taken to vilifying Canada's oilsands.

 

It's challenged a second major assessment by the U.S. State Department, which has once again raised no major objections to the completion of the Keystone pipeline, arguing the State Department underestimated the impact of Canada's oilsands on climate change.

 

This is just more U.S. propaganda and diversion.

 

If the EPA was genuinely concerned about climate change, it would issue its regulations for U.S. power plants now, instead of delaying them and gratuitously bashing Canada.

 

Meanwhile, every time Oliver rightly defends the oilsands, he gets attacked by all the usual suspects for telling the truth.

 

Don't be fooled. It's his critics who are out to lunch.

Let's ignore retards like EU.