US senators visit their Defense Dept jet fuel in Alberta

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach will be taking a tour of the tar sands today with three American senators, all members of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

So while the good senators might be looking at this :

they will be seeing this :

That fuzzy bit in the red portion that takes up well over half the US Department of Defense Energy Consumption pie chart says : "Jet Fuel".

Tar Sands Watch :

The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s leading consumer of petroleum, sucking up about 340,000 barrels of oil every day, more than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.
The Pentagon is the single largest institutional buyer of oil in the world, consuming an estimated 85 percent of the U.S. Government’s use of oil.

Canada is the largest supplier of oil and refined products to the US at over 2 million barrels a day, nearly half of which comes from the tarsands.

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Stelmach has been busy lately with his advertising campaign to persuade the world that Alberta's oilsands are clean and secure.

Here's a jingle suggestion for you, Ed : "Supplying jet fuel to the US military to bomb Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq - it's what we do best."

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Last night future Sun TV luminary Ezra Levant was on Alberta Prime Time touting his book "Ethical Oil", in which he argues that the oilsands are a superior ethical choice to using oil from human rights violating countries. The other guest was the remarkably unflappable Mike Hudema from Greenpeace who wasn't buying Ezra's bizarre moral equivalency.

It needn't be a false choice between two bad options, said Mike, at which point Ezra, who had introduced the country comparisons in the first place, accused Mike of equating Canada with Sudan.

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Apparently undeterred at the prospect of being sued for libel by George Soros for misrepresenting Soros' Holocaust childhood to score points for Sun TV/Fox News North in his Sun editorial "George Schwartz, the Jewish Nazi", here is some of Ezrant's response to Mike last night :

"Goddamn coward ... you're a liar, a disgusting man ... bullshitter ... a con man ... a crook ... you little coward ... you bastard."

You can watch it here if you must. Personally I can hardly wait for further arguments in support of the superior ethics of the tarsands from Ezra when Fox News North hits the airwaves.

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Rethinking Alberta : Tar Sands Disaster vs Gulf Oil Spill

Four "Rethink Alberta" billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis proclaim the "Alberta Tar Sands Oil Disaster" is worse than the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster :



There's also a vid:



Alberta Preme Ed Stelmach is pledging $268,000 to mount a public relations offensive against the ads and has settled on a most unusual strategy :

"Of 350 million Americans — 330 million of them probably don't even know where Alberta is," the premier said. "Let's not ramp this up too much because that's the kind of exposure the group wants."

Of course not all of that $268,000 in public tax money is going to be spent on strategically ignoring the ads. At the alberta.ca website, Stelmach promises to counter the ads by telling "the real Alberta story" :

"disturbed land area actually smaller than London!"

He then links to nine already previously available vids on the Gov of Alberta Oil Sands page. Some quotes from those vids :

"50% of our oil in Canada is produced from oil sands and that's going to grow in the future. We think in about 10 years it will be about 75% of Canada's oil production and a large part of our exports will be oil sands derived crude."

"Virtually no more water will be used out of the Athabasca River"

"We do extensive water monitoring quality of the Athabasca River; we take thousands and thousands of water samples. We've been monitoring since the 1960's and so far we've not been able to find any impact from the tailings ponds itself."

"Over the last 10 or 15 years the air quality has been rated good 98% of the time."

"There is the perception out there that it's the largest industrial footprint on the planet. Actually it's one-tenth of 1% of global GHG emissions."

And so on and so on.
Stelmach's vids include footage of scientists gathering snow samples along a river and that reminded me of the testimony given to the Environment Committee on March 30 by Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta. He said he had conducted the first independent research done since 1983 on airborne tar sands contaminants found in the snow pack along the Athabasca River. Testing at 31 locations he found :

"Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well."

Further, he said that although Environment Canada tests at only one location on the Athabasca, it has come up with the same numbers, as have the oil companies in their own research. Schindler contends the oil companies' reports on contaminants are duly submitted to Environment Canada, who used to do that research themselves before handing that responsibility over to Alberta and the oil companies, but he believes EC is being muzzled and prevented from making the findings public. The oil companies, whose first allegiance is to their stockholders, are of course not obliged to do so on their own.

And then the Environment Committee scuttled its own tar sands report.

Andrew Nikiforuk has an excellent article at The Tyee on what else the Environment Committee heard that it subsequently decided not to tell us about :
What Those Who Killed the Tar Sands Report Don't Want You to Know
and takes on the many claims made by the scientists and spokesies in Stelmach's vids :
Alberta Hides Dirty Truth as US Demands Tar Sands Facts

One thing's for sure in the Tar Sands vs Gulf Oil Spill Disasters comparison : our government, Environment Canada, and the Environment Committee are doing no better job at regulating the tar sands than the US Minerals Management Services did in overseeing the oil rigs in the Gulf.
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Premiers, governors endorse North American energy super-corridor

"Forget the Persian Gulf: Fort McMurray to Port Arthur, Texas is new powerhouse"

Western premiers and U. S. governors on Sunday hailed their push to develop a cross-border Western Energy Corridor.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, Alberta's Ed Stelmach, and Manitoba's Gary Doer were in Utah for the Western Governors' Association annual conference "to explore a broader energy relationship" with their American counterparts.

Stelmach said the western governors are very supportive of the corridor concept.
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer declared the oilsands--the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world--are critically important to U. S. energy security and a major component for a powerhouse energy corridor.
"The most important energy corridor on the planet is no longer the Persian Gulf. It runs from the oilsands, Fort McMurray to Port Arthur, Texas," Schweitzer said.

"A large part of energy independence is going to be dependent upon developing the oilsands."
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter agreed, saying "it's both western parts of Canada and the United States that can play a role in energy independence."

Wall and Stelmach are scheduled to meet with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today :

"Chu has also lauded the potential of the oilsands, saying recently it’s an important piece of U.S. energy security.

Happy to oblige, I'm sure.

What's this Western Energy Corridor about again?

An Overview of the Western Energy Corridor Initiative

"The United States faces an unprecedented threat to its economic and national security due to its dependence on foreign oil and gas. Given this threat, the U.S. must secure and steward itsown domestic energy supplies more effectively.
The Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves is proposing a major technical study under the auspices of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 369(i) to perform a regional analysis of the development potential of the Western Inland “Energy Corridor”.

~ Thomas Woods, Idaho National Laboratory - the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory

Last spring, the Alberta and US governments signed an agreement to jointly research the use of atomic power for tarsands development. The Alberta Research Council and the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, announced they will collaborate on "the potential application of current and future nuclear energy technology".

So to recap :
~The US Dept of Energy funds their main nuclear laboratory, the INL, to come up with the Western Energy Corridor Initiative.
~Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba sign on to it via the Western Governors' Association.
~Alberta and US governments sign an agreement for future nuking of the tarsands via the INL and Alberta Research Council.
~Stelmach and Wall are meeting with the US Dept of Energy Secretary today.

I remember when we were just worrying about the NAFTA Superhighway.
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