Living on Canada's OilMust we really choose between energy security and a climate disaster?

Thank you for a well-researched and balanced article. I'm Alberta-born, but not involved in any part of the oil industry - and as some posters have noted, we get very little from the resource exploitation except jobs.

I bike to work and pay extra for household electricity to have it (notionally) come from Alberta's many wind farms. But I have a sense of proportion about the impact of the oil sands.

The factoid that came out in Maclean's (Canada's Newsweek/Time) was that the oil sands are currently about 1.1% of Canada's carbon emissions - slated to go up to 3% if all the projects are built out to completion.

The big Carbon Culprit is coal, not oil; calling it "the world's dirtiest oil" is an insult on par with "world's fattest high-fashion model."

On the local-environment issue, I can only recommend that people wanting a balanced view, take a view - go up there and see how staggeringly much of that environment there is - the oil sands part of the biome is relatively the size of a postage stamp on a kitchen table.

Lack airfare, or the time for a 3-day drive? Try google maps with satellite view.

You can see the town of Ft. McMurray (30,000), and the much larger scar on the earth that are the oil sands projects north of it. THEN ZOOM OUT. Keep zooming until you see other cities creep into the picture. Understand that an area half the size of Texas was populated (before Ft. Mac started growing) by a few tens of thousands of people - well under one per square mile.

-- rbrander
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