Post Carbon Red Deer

See no evil; Hear no evil; Speak no evil

Protestors questioning the mainstream Albertan approach to tar sands 'development'

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A blog post at Oil Change - "Welcome to Mordor"

"Oil Change’s Kenny Bruno has just visited the region as part of a delegation of environmental groups. Here is his first dispatch, which is the first of three posts from Kenny..

Kenny writes: 'As we approached the tar sands area in a small plane coming from the First Nation community of Fort Chipewyan in Northern Alberta, an experienced visitor tried to scare me: 'You Are Entering Mordor.'

For those unfamiliar with the Dark Lord Sauron’s dwelling place in The Lord of the Rings series, imagine the landscape He Who Shall Not Be Named might choose if he could vanquish Harry Potter and retire to Brobdingnag. Or just think of Hell.

'There are a lot of polluted places on this planet, but the nightmare vision presented by Athabasca tar sands is unique, because the area is a complex of three types of polluting facilities, all on colossal scale.'

There are the monstrous open pit mines, where the 'overburden' (aka forest, plants and soil) has been removed to get at the bitumen underneath. Nearby are the 'upgrader' plants, which look and smell similar to giant refineries you see in New Jersey, Louisiana, and Texas, though the material they process is much thicker. Finally, the 'tailings ponds' which might be better thought of as Tailings Seas, since they are veritable oceans of toxic glop.

All in all, the tar sands cover an area the size of Florida, which is therefore the area proposed for sacrifice by the Alberta government and the oil companies investing $100 billion in the 'dirtiest project on earth.'"

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"Mordor" in a Google images search -
http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&q=mordor...

(As for the above reference to hell in the Harry Potter series, that meant next to nothing to me. I assume that it will resonate with others out there though.)

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Kenny Bruno's follow-up posts about the Albertan tar sands -

“I Wouldn’t Dare Do That Now”
This post is mainly about what Kenny learned from Steve Courtoreille, a Cree councillor

The “You’ve Got To Be Kidding” Department
Some of the post is about public relations greenwash

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At Joanne's Marginal Notes there are responses to the
'See no evil; Hear no evil; Speak no evil'
photo at the top of this post

(I left comments on the post at Marginal Notes, but I doubt you'll find them to be worth reading.)

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Portions of the documentary The Refugees of the Blue Planet (which I highly recommend) address poisonous sour gas 'development' in Alberta. These fossil fuels are a form of natural gas that some describe as gas from hell.

The Refugees of the Blue Planet was brought up in this previous blog post -
Socio-environmental refugees --
almost all of which was lifted from Joanne's blog

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Another relevant post at my main blog -
U.S. protestors; Canadian oil and tar sands?

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Toban Black
http://tobanblack.net/blog/?p=526