Obama to meet with Canadian Prime Minister to discuss climate, tar sands

Obama is set to make one of his first offical trips abroad to Canada tomorrow (eh?) to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss climate change and US use of tar sands for oil production.

Canada is actually our largest source of our foreign oil. We import more crude oil and petroleum from Canada than we do from Saudi Arabia. Whoa, really? Really.

I didn't think it could get worse than production of coal (see mountaintop removal). But it turns out that production of oil from the tar sands creates three times the global warming emissions of conventional oil. Obtaining tar sands is one of the most environmentally damaging processes in the world. And a majority of the oil we import from Canada is from tar sands. In fact, the US imports over 60% of Canada's tar sands. Uh-oh. No me gusta!

Obama has not ruled out the production of tar sands in our energy strategy. This makes me a bit nervous, and by nervous I mean that it is time to take action to convince the Obama Administration to exclude the use of tar sands as a source of oil for the US.

Obama believes that the production of oil from tar sands can be an option for the US energy strategy by developing carbon capture and sequestration technology. Hmm. Carbon, capture and sequestration (CCS) is not a great idea (let's stick all the carbon under the ground and hope it doesn't leak!), nor is it exactly feasible (we've already dumped loads of money into R&D for this technology). Don't get me wrong, I think that CCS will become an important aspect of our energy strategy, but more to help capture greenhouse gas emissions from the already existing coal-fired power plants that are in place. We shouldn't rely on CCS to solve all of our problems.

Technology will not save us from climate change unless we change our ways of consuming energy. This means that we must discontinue our use of producing oil from tar sands, and make a commitment to switch to clean energy, such as wind, solar, geothermal and even ocean power.

If Obama is serious about combating climate change, then he must realize that tar sands are not a viable option for the US. Instead of relying on dirty fossil fuels, we can switch to clean energy sources (such as wind, solar & geothermal energy) that are already available to us. The switch to a truly green, clean energy strategy (not one masked under CCS) will create jobs in the US, make us more energy independent, and stimulate the economy.

UPDATE:

President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn't talk any specifics about climate change on his visit, they mainly both committed themselves to an "open climate dialog" and delegated the task of sorting through the dirty specifics (literally, since we're dealing with tar sands, oil, and coal here) to their senior officials. Bummer.

Obama and Harper agreed in investing in tech fixes to transform these dirty forms of energy into "clean" energy. Hmm. I'm not very pleased. Read more here on my fav enviro blog, Grist.org's Muckrucker