1 – They’re Oil Sands, not Tar.
2 – 20% is close enough to the surface to be mined. The other 80% is drilled (in Situ)
3 – The land is reclaimed and may end up in even better shape that the original condition.
4 – The Oil Sands represent between 5 and 6.5% of Canada’s Greenhouse gas emissions.
5 – That equates to…get this….. Point One per cent of Global GHG’s
6 – More and more water is recycled. in 2009 the Oil Sands used Point Five per cent of the average total river flows. (3.4% of the lowest weekly winter flow)
7 – I would prefer that most of the oil be refined in Alberta.
http://www.capp.ca/getdoc.aspx?DocId=191904&DT=NTV

Surfer Dave says:
August 22, 2011 at 12:08 am
“…………..
Gosh, the level of the “sarcasm” (that tag is being used to cover the inherent unkind attitude of the writers) is like being in a high school yard at lunch. Petty, trivial, it lowers you all to the level of school children.
I understood these shales oils were taken by excavating vast swathes of land, not tiny pin-pick oil wells. Even if fossil fuels have minimal impact on the atmosphere when burnt, the terra-forming from the harvesting of shale oils and the short- to medium-term degradation from spills and leaks from “ordinary” wells can be significant. What happened in the Gulf of Mexico, or are you all okay with coastlines ruined? And do we not all agree that “peak oil” has been reached? Surely these methods of harvesting fossil fuel should be avoided and we should be trying to develop other energy sources with long lives, eg thorium-cycle nukes, ever more efficient solar, tidal, hydro, geothermal, etc?”
============================================================
lol, Surfer, there is no amount of sarcasm we can heap upon those people that could ever come close to what we’ve endured as skeptics. So, don’t begrudge us of a bit of fun at their expense. Comes around, goes around.
I’m wondering what you think is being torn up? This is sandy dirt saturated with oil! Have you visited the gulf lately? One of the best things about that spill, is that it became known that nature leaks more oil into the ocean than any spill we’ve ever had….combined! A better question would be why were they forced to go so far out to sea in deep water? And no, we haven’t reached “peak oil”. Texas continues to increase its oil production. As does any other place that is allowed or desired. OPEC nations intentionally throttle production to keep pricing. As far as alternatives, yes, they need developed. But, that doesn’t take care of the here and now, though, does it? This is something that just boggles my mind. How is it that otherwise intelligent people don’t understand the need for fuels and energy today? Dave, the reality is we need oil in our current socioeconomic condition. And it isn’t going to change in the near future. Are you wondering why the world is in economic upheaval? Look no further than your mirror. Any modern nation’s economic activity can be measured by fuel and energy use. To throttle either is to throttle that nations economy. I’ll repeat and embolden so it can soak in. Any modern nation’s economic activity can be measured by fuel and energy use. To throttle either is to throttle that nations economy. This is why the western world can’t raise itself out of the economic doldrums we’re experiencing today. Show me a nation that isn’t touched by this obsession over CO2 and enough resources for growth and I’ll show you an advancing economy. History shows us that all conditions of humanity improve with prosperity. Conversely, poverty kills, poverty is the cause of crime, disease, wars, morbidity, and early mortality. Ecologically, there isn’t anything worse than a poverty stricken nation. Go visit a third world nation or squalor infested slum for proof of my last assertion, or any of my other ones.
We need more energy use, not less. We need more fuel use, not less. Everyday that passes without the western world acknowledging this reality is another day of damning countless people to a shortened life of hardship.

AllenC
Are you sure about that statistic… that would mean that if you went to virtually an wind mill you’d see a new dead animal there everyday. (50000/84 = 595 dead animals per wind mill per year).
I very much doubt that…

I’ve got an undergrad degree in Physics and have worked in public policy in Europe and now in New Zealand for around ten years.
Well that explains much . Then one has also to add that you seem to be new to the climate issue in general and to this web site in particular .
So for your education – many posters here are scientists with a PhD degree as well as active and retired engineers with extensive experience in energy matters .
Many of the posters have been interested in climate science and/or did active research in this field for more than 10 years . This is for instance the case for A.Watts to just give an example .
So to stop you making waste our time , I would like to make a short list of things that we ALREADY know , so please avoid beating those dead horses over and over .
1) Hansen is an unhinged political activist . His real scientific work is too far in the past and his predictions were all proven wrong . Nobody trusts Hansen today and even the green activists take distance from his radicality .
2) We know that there has been no variation in the frequency of storms , hurricanes etc in the last century despite a “global warming” . Most scientific papers show that there is no reason to expect a correlation with temperature . (Reminder : Hansen and Al Gore are not relevant scientists , see 1)
3) The climate has been changing for billions of years ; sometimes at an impressively high speed and will do so for the next 5 billions of years . Better get used to it and teach your children to get used to it too . Despite your wishful thinking , a “stable climate” that would happen to be the climate of 1975 (fill in your own year if you don’t like the 70ies) doesn’t exist and will never exist .
4) We are actually in an interglacial . That means we are just getting out of the last glaciation what happens cyclically . Expect for the next thousands of years “global warming” . Whether you like it or not , this will happen . Temperature will get MUCH warmer , sea levels will rise and polar ice will melt . Get used to it . When it will turn around and begin the cooling towards the next glaciation THEN our great great … children will REALLY have ground to worry . In the meantime we might have accelerated this warming a very little bit . But be very sure that it will slow down again once we have burned all carbon we could . The nature is a carbon SINK – left to its own devices it tends to remove all CO2 from the atmosphere what is of course an unpleasant threat for all life on this planet.
5) Spare us the whining and arrogant “Think of your children” meme . Your children are not more important than ours and I certainly don’t want that my children have to live in an economy destroyed by lunatic environmentalists and their pathological doom&gloom prophecies . You are perfectly free to live in a cave , wear “bio” clothes , drive a bicycle (will be fun to see how you manage with 80 years) and eat grass (of course strictly without fertilizers , pesticides etc). But you are absolutely NOT free to impose on anybody to share your middle age preferences . You will learn that most skeptics are people who just want to be left alone and don’t take kindly to all these deranged activist preachings .

AllenC
Ok just read that report that says 6.99 birds were killed in a 6 month period per turbine adn there’s 86 turbines. That makes 1200 birds a year, slightly less of an alarmist number don’t you think?

Maria
As another Kiwi I am wondering what you are smoking.
World population is growing but the rate of growth is slowing and will continue to do so.
The rate of population growth will slow faster and population growth will halt earlier if we ensure all Countries can enjoy a first-world standard of living. This is a complex issue invovling development, education, finance, law, government etc. This goal will not be served by reducing consumption of fossil fuels. An increased use of fossil fuels is necessary.
The length of the pipeline is entirely irrelevant. There are so many terrorist targets already that I find it hard to imagine why you think this one would be in any way interesting to a self-respecting terrorist. And being Kiwis it is hardly any of business anyway.
The mining and petroleum industries are pretty well-behaved most of the time these days. Yes there are some risks. But oil spills are expensive and the companies work hard to prevent them ever occuring. These industries are far more responsible now than you give them credit for. You should be embarrassed by your little rant.
By the way water is a reuseable resource. It can be recycled. Thats what miners do these days. SO although a mining or industrial process may need lots of water, often the same water is used hundreds of times over. Perhaps you should wake up and smell the Roses for once. The world is not going to hell in a hand basket. The environment is improving in almost all modern westernised countries, though naturally we should all remain vigilent (esp re the Dairy industry in NZ). The primary enviromental worry at present is that we are exporting environmental damage to pooer parts of the world by over-regulating ourselves in the developed world. This largely unintended leftist agenda needs to be turned around.

Maria,
May I, an aging and mostly polite Brit, apologise should any of the other comments on yours have caused you offence. Yes, commenters here do often tend to levity, as they do in almost any community of like-minded folk, but mostly the butts of the worst of them are regular “trolls” who simply post some fragment of the AGW Testament and disappear, unlike yourself. I hope you call by again and read this.
FWIW, I’ll mention also that I have spent more decades than I want to think about reading every scientific mag and paper I could find, just for the raw pleasure of finding stuff out. Also, I’ve spent most of those decades as one or another flavour of technician or engineer – one of those weird geniuses who can make almost anything work because we understand the processes behind it. The real world has a way of completely disregarding your personal preferences as to how it “should” work!
Truly, though, there’s nothing in your comments so far which hasn’t been torn to bits here more times than Anthony has had hot dinners. “NASA Chief Scientist James Hansen” is merely one among many megaphones who clamour for us all to believe the outputs from their “climate models” rather than the actual, physical evidence – and, to be blunt, the folk here have seen rather too much of the real thing to give those “models” any credence at all.
Think for a moment. If there’s one thing which shines forth in this debate, it is that nobody, Hansen included, could give you an even halfway complete list of what factors influence Earth’s weather systems. If you can’t even list the influences then how can you possibly claim to have modelled them? You can’t. Indeed, spend awhile paging back through WUWT (an excellent and time-consuming way of achieving climate information overload, IMO!), and you will find the revelation that most of these models simply assume (a) that CO2 is the main driver of the planet’s climate system (it’s not) and (b) everything – CO2, temperature, you name it – will just increase forever in straight lines (no way – climate, like everything in Nature, is the result of cyclical processes).
You believe that “the climate change we are seeing right now is faster than any in the known history of Earth”? … but it’s not. You doubt that? I can only recommend that you read through “A Chronological Listing of Early Weather Events” – okay, not a “peer reviewed paper”, but a collection of actual historical records of conditions which will make a chill run down your spine and make you profoundly glad that you weren’t there to live through – or die in – them. The present day is nothing to write home about in comparison.
You say “if the climate continues to warm” … don’t worry, it won’t. It’ll just go on following its multiple cycles:
Roman Climate Optimum (ca. 0 AD) warm,
Dark Ages (ca 550 AD) cold,
Mediaeval Climate Optimum (ca 1100 AD) warm,
Little Ice Age (ca 1600 AD) cold,
Present Climate Optimum (now!) warm
… or,
1880 – 1910 (cooling),
1910 – 1940 (warming),
1940 – 1970 (cooling),
1970 – 2000 (warming),
2000 – 2030 (cooling)
… never mind the granddaddy of them all, the ice age cycle. That, when the Earth next decides to flip into its cold state, will cause social disruption far beyond anything a bit of life-giving warmth could. Why worry about “the warmest (whatever) since records began, when the records began in the cold conditions prevailing in the Little Ice Age?
If there’s anything I, or most of the others here, really fear, it’s the dark political manipulation which is behind all this climate alarmism, and much else besides. There are mentions of that too in previous WUWT posts and comments, and far, far more hard evidence of it than there is – or could be – of “manmade, unprecedented climatic disruption”.
No, Maria, we may be a bit offhand here sometimes, but I promise you we care very deeply about handing a working world to our descendants. Of course the human race needs to clean up its act – particularly “homo economicus”, the vile jellies behind the political plans. All that needs saying on that front is, “Shell, Nigeria” – just the pictures wil make you weep. Of course we need to work out ways of providing ourselves and our descendants with cleaner energy – but not because of some fairy story about CO2 being “pollution” which “is destroying the environment”, and not by stupidly closing down the best civilisation we’ve got. Again, it’s all here (somewhere) on WUWT. For a start, check out thorium reactors – astonishingly clean, cheap, safe nuclear energy which is so benevolent that it can even eat the dangerously radioactive wastes from uranium reactors. We want to hand down a world where science aims at an accurate assessment of reality, not one where people are bamboozled into believing whatever tosh is the political flavour of the day.
(Sigh) Another long diatribe. Like Mark Twain, I never can find the time to write a short one … but truly, please, take us seriously. Should anyone actually produce hard evidence in favour of the CO2 conjecture, I think you’d find that most WUWTers, at least, will accept it, even if it does shatter our previous convictions. Hell, I’m only here because I went looking for the evidence and found absolutely nothing that didn’t come out of a monstrously simplified “model” – I’ve already had my convictions shattered once. It would have been so much easier just to “keep taking the Kool-Aid” (what is that stuff? – we don’t have it in the UK AFAIK) – but in all honesty I simply can’t.
Read, Maria – endlessly. Mark. Learn. Inwardly digest. The more you do, the more you realise that, like Socrates, “all that we know is that we know nothing”. And do please forgive us – though we’re still a darn sight kinder to “dissenting” views than some (ahem) “Real” Climate sites I could mention.
Best wishes,
Steve

Some European says:
August 22, 2011 at 4:29 am

…
I’m totally serious. I really know what I’m saying. I’m one of the most skeptical persons on the planet. I’ve thought about this a lot and I doubt about my own opinion every day.
When you take a close, objective look at the science of climate change, you’ll see where the truth lies.

Oh puuuhhhlleeaasseeee…. Enlighten us. Outline what you know, not just a statement that you know it.
Because when I “take a close, objective look at the science of climate change” as you suggest, I see a bunch of people like Hansen and Gore and Mann and Jones… all psuedo scientists, ideologues, or grant chasers than don’t dare debate or show their data. When their papers are challenged, they want to sue or obfuscate or throw temper tantrums or go picket some power plant that provides them electricity.
That’s what I see. And that’s what a majority of people are now seeing also. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/22/al_gore_goes_on_a_tirade_111039.html

According to a Harris poll in July, only 44 percent of us now believe carbon dioxide emissions are warming the Earth, down from 51 percent in 2009 and 71 percent in 2007.

It really doesn’t look good for the pseudoscientists I call “climsci”.
But continue with your expose` of “scienct of climate change” because the more you sound off, the lower go the poll numbers of people who belive that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the Earth. You’re killing your own cause.

Scottish Sceptic,
You say that we’d all be a lot happier with a lower GDP, less consumption and more time to “spend with our children,” without realising the contradiction.
It is the fact that GDP is higher today that has given us: hospitals, life saving drugs and hip replacements for the elderly; dry, warm homes built to a standard of comfort unimaginable a century ago; free education for all children up to age 18 and free university education in your home Scottland; a vast array of cheap and nutritous food that was unheard of 50 years ago; a global telecommunications network that allows us to keep in touch with our friends and loved ones; freedom from back breaking physical toil; afforable leisure of all kinds; and most notable, the higher productivity gives us more leisure time to spend more time with our children.
In truth, we would not be happier with a lower GDP – quite the contrary.