Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
grimy sludge buried underground. And it takes more than sticking a straw in the ground
to drink this particular kind of milkshake. It takes the world's largest shovels, digging vast
canyons out of what was once Alberta's primeval forest; and the world's largest trucks, de-
livering huge quantities of the sticky, black sand into massive separators that need insane
amounts of heat and water to boil the sand until the oil floats out of it, leaving behind—not
incidentally, if you're a duck—unfathomable quantities of poisonous wastewater, which
are then stored in tailings ponds of unusual size.
Got it? Environmentalists call it
dirty oil,
as if the stuff that comes out of the ground in
Kuwait were somehow clean. But oil sands oil isn't dirty just because it requires strip-min-
ing on a terrifying scale, or because it generates entire lakes of waste. It's also energy-in-
tensive: you have to spend a lot of energy to separate and process the oil, much more than
if you were simply pumping petroleum out of a well. So if you're passionate about carbon
dioxide emissions and climate change—passionate about avoiding them, that is—oil from
oil sands should give you the creeps. When you burn it, you're also burning all the energy
that was used to produce it. The technical term is
double whammy.
Engineers in the audience may argue that in terms of CO
2
emissions, oil sands are at
worst a 1.25 whammy, depending on how you run the numbers. Nevertheless, a movement
has coalesced around the goal of stopping oil sands development, with environmentalists
determined to make Canada stop digging new Grand Canyons in its backyard. Leave the
sticky stuff in the ground, they say, reasoning that, with the world already suffering for our
overuse of fossil fuels, this is no time to be developing a new source.
But it's hard to hear that argument over the incredible grumbling sound coming from the
collective stomach of the United States. It sees Canada's oil as a possible route to so-called
energy independence, which is another way of saying “oil without Muslims,” and it wants
nothing more than for Canada to rip the green, boreal top right off the entire province of
Alberta and shake all that black, sandy goodness directly into a refinery. And that drives
environmentalists batshit crazy with rage.
Fort McMurray lies in a splendid isolation of forest and swamp, nearly three hundred miles
north of Edmonton, the provincial capital and nearest major city. As with most boomtowns,
it's tempting to call Fort McMurray a shithole, but its attempt at wretchedness is half-
hearted. For every corner of town that is dingy or low-rent, there is one that is tidy and
clean. For example, Franklin Avenue: there is the Oil Sands Hotel, its yellow sign illus-
trated with large, orange oil drops. A narrow marquee boasts,
CHEQUES CASHED, LOW RATES,
RENOVATED ROOMS 99.00, ATM IN LOBBY, EXOTIC DANCERS MONDAY-SATURDAY 430-1AM.
Across
the way, as counterbalance, are the city hall and provincial buildings, a pair of sleek brick
