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Mordor of the North - Tar Sands premiers as “The Most Destructive Project on Earth”

February 28, 2008

Posted by Liz Barratt-Brown in Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places , Solving Global Warming

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BP, globalwarming, mordor, Mostdestructiveprojectonearth, oilsands, tarsands

 Those who visit the Canadian tar sands in Alberta often describe what they have seen as a visit to Tolkien’s Mordor – miles of open pits and lagoons of toxic waste water and a night sky lit by fires and lights of a great industrial complex where there was once an intact Boreal forest of trees, rivers and fens populated with woodland caribou and nesting birds. In the epic Tolkien tale, the Dark Lord Sauron is willing to destroy everything in his path to build his power base from his dark Kingdom of Mordor and capture the One Ring forever.

And while the exploitation of the tar sands looks frighteningly like Mordor, what may be more analogous is the tale of greed and desperation that would drive oil companies to strip mine and drill for ever harder to access fossil fuels.  With the price of oil at an all time high and profits in the billions, even a company that casts itself as “Beyond Petroleum” – British Petroleum – could not resist the dark pull of Mordor of the North and has re-entered the tar sands. As oil reserves in other parts of the world decline, the pull magnifies.   

The struggle between the quest for billions, literally scraped out of the earth, and a world fearful that our addiction to fossil fuels will be the planet’s ruin is not new.  But what is new is that this story is increasingly playing out in the media – in Alberta, Canada, the U.S. and Europe.  And even in the Alberta provincial election itself. 

In the last month, there has been a barrage of news stories.  One piece following another in such rapidity that even those of us following the tar sands issue closely could not keep up: Billions committed to develop the tar sands and the web of pipelines; pipelines  approved and purchased by major oil companies; and refineries readied to take the dirty oil, with potentially enormous increases in carbon dioxide pollution.  A piece ran last Friday in the Houston Chronicle with the title, “Canada's oil sands, open arms alluring.”  

However, just as many in Tolkien’s Middle Earth warned about the impacts of Mordor’s growing reach, there are those who warn of the repercussions of this new push for tar sands oil. Recent news stories have highlighted the high carbon future tar sands oil will lock us into. Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, ran an eight part series, starting with “An empire from a tub of goo,” evaluating the challenges and huge environmental costs of producing oil from the tar sands. Another piece from The Globe and Mail, “The Long Arm of the U.S.,” suggested that just as Canada’s exports of oil and electricity are reaching into the U.S., the U.S. is increasingly extending its environmental protections to include Canada because of a vacuum of leadership there.  It explored the role that California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard and Section 526 of the newly passed Energy Security and Independence Act (EISA) will have on limiting the flow of tar sands high carbon oil into the U.S.   

Perhaps the most startling piece of all was an editorial in The Times of London– not the more left leaning Guardian or Independent – calling on Shell, BP, and other oil companies to get out of the tar sands or risk not only being called Big Oil but Bad Oil and on the next U.S. President to make this a priority since it was unlikely that “…companies themselves could resolve to end this new filthy habit.” 

Does the peaceful hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and his heir, Frodo, stand a chance against the power of Mordor?  What it takes in Tolkien’s tales is a strong Fellowship. We may not have that yet, but the first calls for a slow down in the pace of tar sands oil development might give us the space to choose a better future for ourselves. In what can only be seen as a chink in the armor of the Mordor of the North, major tar sands oil companies have joined with an environmental group and Environment Canada, a branch of the Canadian Federal Government, to propose a moratorium on new leases based on environmental concerns. And the tar sands have become an election issue in Alberta itself. 

Yesterday’s Calgary Herald led with the story, “Most candidates in Pembina survey want oilsands slowdown.”  A majority of nearly 200 Albertan politicians who are up for election on March 3 are now on record supporting what surely would have been an act of political suicide just a few years ago.  This will further isolate the Premier, Ed Stelmach, who has refused to “touch the brake” on developments in the tar sands. The Calgary Herald piece also noted that his most serious opponent, the Liberal leader, Kevin Taft, has said that calls for a moratorium show the province needs to rethink how it’s developing the tar sands and that, if the Liberals were in power, the party wouldn’t approve new tar sands projects until a detailed plan is drafted for managing impacts on the environment, infrastructure and labor.

With the recent release and coast-to-coast pickup of the Ottawa-based Environmental Defense report “The Most Destructive Project on Earth”, a new era for the tar sands has been ushered in. When you hear politicians like Alberta NDP Leader, Brian Mason, quoted saying “The devastation on water and the environment is severe…And it’s really one of the reasons we think we need to be reforming our economy into a green energy economy,” you know the Fellowship is growing and, as in Tolkien’s story, a Fellowship can set us on a better path – this time for our energy future – one that does not carry the cost of the destruction we see in the tar sands.

The Ring is back in play.

 PHOTO CREDITS: Tar Sands pits - Garth Lenz; Crane and truck - Pembina Institute

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