There’s pro­testers occu­pying two dump trucks at the Albian plant, hanging a banner off Niagara Falls, and pick­eting the Canadian embassy in Washington. All this to cel­e­brate Prime Minister Harper’s visit to President Obama. Let’s hope this activity marks some kind of tip­ping point in con­ti­nental aware­ness of the tar sands and their spe­cial place in the canon of global-​​scale envi­ron­mental mistakes.

Here’s a couple of rea­sons why:

1. Tar sands don’t threaten habitat, they replace it. They’re huge. Never mind for the moment the release of toxic byproduct into the Athabasca or the apparent increase in dis­ease inci­dences in down­stream first nations towns, the tar sands are actu­ally a hole in the sur­face of the earth. I would sug­gest looking at them in Google Earth, but the tar sands are also one of the few places on earth where the very topog­raphy of the planet is reshaped on a fast enough schedule that Google Earth’s ele­va­tion data is nec­es­sarily out of date.
2. (and this is the big one) Tar sands is per­haps the most climate-​​destabilizing method of taking petro­leum out of the ground that humans have invented. It takes a lot of effort to get those hydro­carbon chains out of that greasy black gunk. Effort means energy. We put energy in to get the energy out. The exact figure of how many bar­rels of oil you get out for each barrel worth of energy you put in is hard to come by, pre­sum­ably because it’s so polit­i­cally fraught. Pembina insti­tute says the pro­duc­tion of tar sands crude dumps about 3 times as much carbon into the atmos­phere as other Canadian sources of oil, which is hardly a high stan­dard. Oil prices will con­tinue to climb as avail­ability shrinks, so burning up some non-​​renewable resources to get some more of them faster will con­tinue to be an eco­nom­i­cally fea­sible trade-​​off (as long as we don’t require the petro com­pa­nies to cover the wider costs gen­er­ated from cli­mate desta­bi­liza­tion). We have to decide for our­selves that envi­ron­men­tally, socially, this is not an accept­able trade-​​off. Today seems like a good day to make that call.

Write your gov­ern­ment! If you’re in Canada, Dogwood Initiative has some tools for you. In the States swing by Rainforest Action Network. Canada sells the tar sands as a polit­i­cally stable, domestic source of pre­cious petro­leum. Let’s demon­strate that having domestic oil means that it isn’t polit­i­cally stable, because people here still have some say in how and when their dirt gets dug up.

A little Q&A:

Tar sands or oil sands? Kinda like note­books or lap­tops. If you’re in the industry or directly engaging with them you say oil sands, oth­er­wise you say tar sands. Both sound ugly and are.

What about the ducks? Yes, a whole bunch of ducks died when they landed on the giant tail­ings pond in the Aurora site, were coated in petro­leum by-​​product and sank. 500, oh no wait, 1606 of them. In fact, Syncrude picked today to plead not guilty in the court case, even as they apol­o­gize and re-​​iterate the un-​​acceptableness of the duck’s deaths and their firm com­mit­ment to pre­venting fur­ther loss of duck life. 1600 ducks is sad, but not the issue. The simple pres­ence of the pit mines will have driven down the local pop­u­la­tion levels of of animal and plant com­mu­ni­ties by plenty more than 1600. Who knows what the tar sand’s con­tri­bu­tion to plan­e­tary cli­mate de-​​stabilization will do to pop­u­la­tions of species world-​​wide. I think the thing about the ducks is that they’re a clear symbol of iden­ti­fi­able harm, so we’re all hung up on them.

Can you occupy a dump truck? Occupation is nor­mally reserved for build­ings, it’s true. But these dump trucks are bigger than my house.