A Quote by James Hansen
The carbon emissions from tar shale and tar sands would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century. We would be miserable stewards of creation. We would rob our own children and grandchildren.
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Tar sands oil is the dirtiest fuel on Earth. Because producing it consumes so much energy, a gallon of tar sands crude generates 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventional crude oil.
There's no question that tar sands in Canada are probably the largest source of oil available to the U.S. over a long period of time. There's as much oil in the tar sands probably as there is in Saudi Arabia. The problem is, there's a huge capital requirement to develop that.
Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change - they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.
And tar is washing up onto the beaches - big globs of tar. And people are saying, 'Is that going to ruin our summer at the beach?' No, of course not. You take the big blobs of tar and you use them to hold down your blanket.
Had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like a dinosaur in the tar pit - we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation.
Young people are already leading on climate action. I see it at rallies to reject the Keystone XL dirty tar sands pipeline. I see it in the push to demand justice for communities being run over by fracking operations.
What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor. It's equivalent to burning coal in your automobile.
I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it.
The oil corporations spend a lot of money to get, say, the tar sands pipeline through, but nobody's - you know, there are definitely environmentalists being paid - but a lot of people are acting for something other than financial compensation. So if the tar sands pipeline doesn't get made, it's because a huge amount of people are doing something that doesn't involve remuneration, money, etc., because we're not actually the self-interested financial instruments that economists like to imagine we are.
I suggest we take our heads out of the tar sands and look up to see the sun. We don't own it, but it provides us all with great, endless value. So, too, the wind. These free, renewable sources of 'energy currency' are perfect partners to what we own together.
My first experience with the creative was mopping tar. If you let the tar sit, it can get cold pretty quickly. And because the mops are so heavy, you've got to dip it and then ride it really fast.
If Britain was to close down altogether overnight, then China would take up the slack of carbon emissions in two years. If America closed down, just the growth in China's emissions would replace America's emissions in 12 years.
The bottom billion people don't contribute at all to climate change - maybe 1 percent of emissions, they could double or triple their emissions and the climate would not be destabilised.
Why not put a tax on carbon emissions. It would raise a lot of money, it would reduce the environmental damages in the future, it would solve so many problems, and it would be a much more constructive thing to do than to think about raising the income tax.
...if we all turned down the thermostat in our house by just one degree, we would save over £650 million worth of energy and nearly nine million tonnes of carbon emissions every year. That would be the equivalent of taking three million cars off our roads...we can bring about a Green Consumer Revolution in this country to improve our lives, enrich our economy and protect our environment.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.
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