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Shale oil/tar sands really are a truly disgusting and ongoing environmental catastrophe for which there can be no reasonable explanation in 2020, and about which Canadians should be ashamed. If there were any justice in the world Canada would have sanctions applied to it over this years ago.

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Many are, the oil is being produced for the US market where it is refined. In any case, blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects. Notice US tariffs against Canada for softwood lumber, aluminum, steel, dairy, but NEVER OIL. Makes sense though, the US fund and develop the projects.

So the price of oil is the explanation (trillions of dollars), but everything about the tarsands is insane. The CO2 emissions are probably #3.

The man who invented the technology was horrified, then he died of cancer. Many dangerous chemicals in the mix are being processed and stored beside major rivers in tailing 'ponds'.

The tailing ponds that are actually very large lakes of toxic sludge kill countless birds each year. They installed scarecrows probably 10 years ago.

The natural gas (methane) being burned to extract the tar from the sand with heat is the actual emission of CO2. They were thinking about building nuclear power plants to generate heat instead. This would solve the emissions issue that everyone complains about, but then there would be nuclear waste being generated to create bitumen. This seemed a little too crazy and didn't go anywhere.

Finally, this bitumen needs to be processed, but it doesn't move in a pipeline. So yet another petroleum product is shipped in from the middle east to dissolve it, so it will flow through pipelines to the US for refining and let's face facts here, consumption.

Construction of pipelines, and the ongoing risk of a spill are all added to the list.

But people need to commute to their office job and they can't afford to do that if the price of oil is too high, and it is a hedge against a major disruption in production in the middle east which is only a few Iranian nukes away from reality.

It's all insane, but the CO2 is just lower on the list.

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> blaming the supplier will never solve the problem, everyone's consumption of fossil fuels is the problem as it drives a high price of oil that funds these projects.

Up to a point - but the UK for example deliberately destroyed its own coal industry partly due to concern over carbon, so I would say it's not completely reasonable to give countries a pass for merely responding to fossil fuel usage generally. Nations can and do take the better choice sometimes.

It's the contrast between the incessant virtue signalling from the Canadian government with the wanton destruction of the environment and harm inflicted on indigenous people that is really sickening.