US Pledges To Buy Dirty Canadian Oil

The United States has a new source of oil. Last Thursday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton inked a deal with our neighbors to the north to build the "Alberta Clipper", a pipeline that, when finished, will send up to 800,000 barrels a day of Western Canadian oil south to the USA.

The problem is where this oil comes from. Environmental groups urged Clinton not to sign the deal because the oil is a product of Canada's vast tar sands (also called oil sands) deposits in Alberta. Like you might guess from the name, the oil that comes from this region, instead of being trapped in pools deep underground, is locked into sand banks at the surface. This makes getting oil from the tar sands a complex, and dirty process: instead of being drilled, tar sands oil is mined - strip mined from huge pits in the Alberta prairie - the sand is then cooked to release a sludge that is then refined into a kind of crude oil that THEN can be refined into gasoline and other petroleum products.

As you can imagine, it's a long, dirty process that sends chills down the spines of most environmentalists. But the people most directly affected by the tar sands industry are members of Canada's 'First Nations', the native tribes that lived on the Western prairies long before the arrival of the first European settlers. The Cree First Nations' ancestral home is near Fort Chipewyan, now the center of Alberta's tar sands industry. They claim that the mining of the tar sands is destroying the prairies and forests, polluting the air and water, and, according to George Poitras, a former chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the tar sands mining/processing has led to a sudden, dramatic spike in cancer among the Cree.

The First Nations Cree are aggressively trying to fight back. Members of the Cree First Nation traveled to London last week to join in environmental protests against BP and the Royal Bank of Scotland - two companies that through their investment in dozens of smaller companies are largely bankrolling the tar sands industry in Alberta, hoping to bring more attention to what they call "the biggest environmental crime on the planet."

So was Clinton right to sign the Alberta Clipper deal? Even if the United States whole-heartedly started today the process of getting all of its energy needs only from renewable sources, it would still be decades before we used our last barrel of oil. And a lot of the oil we use today comes from places that aren't very stable or are places that don't like us very much, so the opportunity to buy more oil from one of our closest allies seems like a no-brainer. But at the same time, you don't spend billions of dollars to build a pipeline only to use it for a year or two. The Alberta Clipper then will commit us to buying oil for decades to come from the dirtiest, most destructive source in the entire petroleum industry. There has to be a better way to meet our oil needs.