Oil sands will pollute Great Lakes, report warns
- added October 12, 2008
- 21 responses
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- JanforGore
- added this
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In a new report, the University of Toronto's Munk Centre says the massive refinery expansions needed to process tar sands crude, and the new pipeline networks for transporting the fuel, amount to a "pollution delivery system" connecting Alberta to the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S.
It warns that the refineries will be using the Great Lakes "as a cheap supply" source for their copious water needs and the area's air "as a pollution dump."
The report, which is being released today at a conference at the university, says that as many as 17 major refinery expansions around the lakes are being considered for turning the tar-like Alberta bitumen into gasoline and other petroleum products. While not all will be undertaken, enough of them will be to have a regional environmental impact.
Proposed pipeline and refinery projects around the lakes are expected to lead to total investments of more than $31-billion (U.S.) by 2015, spending similar in scale to expenditures at many oil sands projects. For this reason, the report says the various projects, when taken together, threaten to "wipe out many of the pollution control gains" achieved around the lakes since the 1970s.
The massive expenditures are needed because typical refineries can't process heavy crude derived from tar sands without costly upgrades.
"This expansion promises to bring with it an exponential increase in pollution, discharges into waterways including the Great Lakes, destruction of wetlands, toxic air emissions, acid rain, and huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions," it says.
Most of the projected spending is on the U.S. side of the lakes. Only one major refinery project has been announced for the Canadian side, but that expansion, at a Shell refinery in Sarnia, was put on hold in July because of surging costs.
However, two big Canadian companies, TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. with its Keystone project, and Enbridge Inc., with its Alberta Clipper project, are vying to build pipelines to bring crude from the tar sands to U.S. refineries around the lakes.
The report says the environmental effects in Alberta from tar sands development - from dying ducks caught in tailings ponds to massive carbon dioxide emissions - are well known, but the implications for the Great Lakes "are less well-understood and less extensively explored."
Policy makers around the lakes, in both Canada and the U.S., are largely unaware that the tar sands will lead to massive industrial development in their region, and consequently have no strategy to minimize the environmental impacts, it says.
Some of the harshest criticism is for the Ontario government, which it characterizes as "remarkably unengaged" over how tar sands oil will affect the province and "doesn't seem to even be asking the key questions, let alone contemplating the possible policy answers."
There has been one major dispute in the U.S. over a tar sands-related refinery expansion, at a British Petroleum facility at Whiting, Ind. The company proposed a $3-billion refinery modernization that would raise discharges of two pollutants by about 35 per cent and 54 per cent respectively. But it backed down and pledged not to increase the pollutants after a public outcry.
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Public outcry and pressure is the only thing that will stop this. This is nothing less than a crime against our Earth and humanity. Humans definitely need an intervention for this addiction. We are destroying the very waterways that we will need to give us sustenence in years to come, especially with a rising population. Climate change is already taking its toll on the water tables of the Great Lakes, and we will now pollute what is left?! This is pure greed and willful ignorance.
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This is what Bush and his cronies really mean when they say we must wean ourselves off "foreign" oil. That doesn't mean they are environmentalists, it justs means they will continue the status quo closer to home. This smells like a Bush-Harper deal.
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FUCK.
since when was western canada polluted as well....
Why do we need to set up refineries near the great lakes anyways?
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Until we get off oil, the remaining oil has too be pumped out sand and shale. This causes a lot of discard in the process thus more pollution. I guess that refinery's in the great lakes region is a matter of transportation via a major waterway.
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- kennymotown
- 1 month ago
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And to add insult to injury:
Report: Waterborne Disease Risk Upped In Great Lakes:
An anticipated increased incidence of climate-related extreme rainfall events in the Great Lakes region may raise the public health risk for the 40 million people who depend on the lakes for their drinking water, according to a new study.
In a report published Oct. 7, 2008 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, a team of Wisconsin researchers reports that a trend toward extreme weather such as the monsoon-like rainfall events that occurred in many parts of the region this past spring is likely to aggravate the risk for outbreaks of waterborne disease in the Great Lakes region.
"If weather extremes do intensify, as these findings suggest, our health will be at greater risk," according to Jonathan Patz, a University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health professor of population health and an expert on the health effects of climate change.
A primary threat to human health, says Patz, are the extreme precipitation events that overwhelm the combined urban storm water and sewage systems such as those in Milwaukee and Chicago, resulting in millions of gallons of raw sewage being diverted to Lake Michigan. Adding to the risk throughout the region, Patz notes, is the growing concentration of livestock operations where heavy rainfall can wash large amounts of animal waste into the rivers and streams that drain into the Great Lakes, the world's greatest concentration of fresh surface water.
"It's the perfect storm," notes Patz. "Deteriorating urban water infrastructure, intensified livestock operations, and extreme climate change-related weather events may well put water quality, and thereby our health, at risk."
Waterborne diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria, viruses and parasites are among the most common health risks of drinking water. In 1993, Milwaukee experienced an outbreak in city drinking water of the parasite Cryptosporidium that exposed more than 400,000 people and killed more than 50.
Patz, who is also affiliated with UW-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies' Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, conducted the study with Stephen Vavrus, a climatologist and director of the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research, also part of the Nelson Institute.
Changes in regional weather patterns and, in particular, an increase in the number and intensity of severe rainfall events are predicted to accompany global warming. Climatologists have already cataloged a decades-long trend toward more tempestuous weather, says Vavrus.
"We have seen an uptick in the incidence of severe precipitation events in the last couple of years, but this has been a trend for decades," says Vavrus, noting an increased frequency of both major storms and total precipitation in the late 20th century. "And we are expecting climate (in the Great Lakes region) to change significantly in the future, so we'll very likely see an increase in these extreme precipitation events."
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Just what are we doing? The last thing needed in this region are refineries.-
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- JanforGore
- 1 month ago
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More information on the refineries and activism from the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
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- JanforGore
- 1 month ago
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On the Matter of Tar Sands & Indigenous Lands
This video examines the impact of the Alberta Tar Sands on First Nations communities in the region featuring an interview with Clayton Thomas-Mueller. Thomas-Mueller, of the Mathais Colomb Cree Nation (Pukatawagan) in Northern Manitoba, is an activist for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice. -
Dharmadogpics,
your video is partly true, and extremely misguided.
People like myself would buy into your's and Jan's ideas if you were'nt so politically bent, and facutally incorrect with these videos that stretch the truth for your own adgenda.
God bless big oil
God bless americaIf you people have actually been to a working well site your eyes would actually open up and see the harm being done to the envoirment. I have read you garbage over the last 9 months and you have no idea of the damage being done. This is why your arguments are just empty hollow talking points.
God bless big oil (b/c is feeds tha family)
God bless america -
so as if our states didnt have enough to deal with trying to keep people from stealing our water we now have to contend with oil sand...great
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- SilenceNoMore
- 1 month ago
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25% of the worlds freah water this can't be good!
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Not only that, but private companies like Nestle are also pumping the Great Lakes water out for profit. This should be stopped as well. This is also why I was not fully in favor of the Great Lakes Compact being passed, though it was just recently with Bush signing it. The loophole in it will give industry more power for expansion in this region. We are giving away this country piece by piece.
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- JanforGore
- 1 month ago
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Oil Sand?
Bullshit
Makes it sound nicer though. There is no oil in the sand but there is lots of TAR! Bituminous thick and a god damned long way from being oil.
So why exactly is it that what was always called the TAR sands is now being called the oil sands?
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- AntiFacistCanuck
- 1 month ago
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More on the Compact and the coalition emerging to protect the Great Lakes from private exploitation.
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- JanforGore
- 1 month ago
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I agree. It is filthy bituminous sludge.
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- JanforGore
- 1 month ago
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Will we ever learn?
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- iamforchange
- 1 month ago
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drill baby drill!!! We need to responsibly develop our own oil while we work on alternatives. YES WE CAN!!
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For The Mr. Burns of the WORLD
another movie for your intellectual mind"Before criticize me or my posts, remember it's due to my hard work that allows you to hate your country. It is only through my hard working sweat that powers your cool air conditioned house and microwave that heats your hot pockets. . .GOD BLESS BIG OIL"
Mr. BurnsGod bless big oil????
Just offering other views of possibility. VBS produce ths show your beefs with them.
DOG-
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- dharmadogpictures
- 1 month ago
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Lots of us are working hard Mr. Burns, not all of us work at global destruction. Many people are focused on reducing waste, energy use and consumption. While we need energy, the consumption of petrochemicals has been artificially promoted and protected beyond what was necessary for decades. While we have had the technology to run more efficient cars and public transportation, global exploiters have forced consumers into having to pick from a range of poor choices.
We could have had petrochemicals for many more years into the future instead of consuming like gluttons now. There is lots of production work to go around, even if you don't work in destructive ways, you could be contributing to energy production that does not threaten to destroy the earth.There are no "America Haters" here, though that is what you think you see. The people who share here are trying to protect America and the rest of the planet from imminent destruction.
Alas, you cannot see the disease rates growing in the people as man made chemicals wash through our food chain and our bodies, our water and our air. You don't see our ozone disappearing, our food sources disappearing, air supply poisoned.
It's ok if your world view requires you to hate those who would try to protect the environment-our collective nest-the numbers of your peers are diminishing and hopefully will soon be insignificant.
If not, if your impact on the planet does not diminish, if the environmentalists (and that's everyone who wishes the planet and the human species to survive)do not prevail--we die. That simple.
So go ahead with your arrogant quest for cash. We know another world is possible, and we work hard to make it so.
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- uppityprogressive
- 1 month ago
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