Canada

The amount of greenhouse gases to be unleashed in converting Alberta's tar sands into useable energy has been seriously underestimated, according to a new report by environmentalists.

Out in the last hour or so on the Edmonton Journal's site is a seven-paragraph story by the Financial Post on a report that says official estimates of the emissions fail to take into account that oil companies are knocking down a whole lot of boreal forest in the process. The forest stores tons -- literally -- of carbon.

The Financial Post says the report was done by Global Forest Watch Canada, and we were able to located a Sept. 23 report (PDF) that appears to be the subject of the story. Quoting from page 13:

 The bituminous sands Surface Mineable Area totals 488,968 (hectares) of northern Alberta's boreal ecosystems. In addition to surface mining, in situ bitumen production will occur over a projected area of 13,553,246 ha (Oil Sands Administration Area minus the Surface Mineable Area), although the availability of the entire area for bitumen industrial activities may change. Few, if any, of the biocarbon emissions resulting from land use change caused by the bituminous sands industrial activities in these areas are reported.

The whole report pretty much reads that way. It looks like a well-documented review of all the greenhouse gas emissions to be expected from mining the tar sands, aka the oil sands. It goes on to blame the counting rules of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among other factors, for the undercounting.

No response from the industry in what's on the web so far.

Recalling Western Exposure's posts earlier this summer on the various bear attacks in the Rocky Mountain West, we wonder if the bears of Canada and Alaska have heard about the Bear Wars coming their way:

• In southern Alberta, a three-year-old bear with no apparent fear of people, which had been living in and among the people of Canmore, was killed in downtown Fort St. John by the RCMP. "A lot of us were pretty discouraged," Alberta senior wildlife biologist Jon Jorgenson told Canwest News Service. "We worked with this bear quite a bit. We knew the bear quite well. He didn't seem to mind being near people."
• Hiking upslope in the dark through a thicket of hemlock near Sitka, deer hunter Karl Wolfe ran smack into a grizzly that promptly gave him two chomps on the arm. Wolfe smacked the bruin with his rifle and, while lying down, chambered a round and fired it. Then he managed to escape. Wildlife officers on Baranof Island in southeast Alaska are on the lookout for a brown bear, possibly wounded. Wolfe isn't sure if his shot hit the bear.

-- Robert McClure

Thank goodness for non-profit journalism again. On the web page of The Tyee is an opinion piece by a Canadian environmentalist with some astounding news about how Canada severely undercounts its contribution to global warming.

The column by Sierra Club campaigner Jens Wieting finds that a huge chunk of the Great White North's greenhouse gas production is not counted and is acknowledged in what amounts to a footnote: the carbon dioxide coming out of Canadian forests because of logging and slash burning.

Wieting closely examines a report catalouging British Columbia's greenhouse gas emissions, although he says the same approach is used at the national level:

According to the report, total greenhouse gas emissions in British Columbia in 2007 were 67 megatonnes. These mainly originate from the use of fossil fuels (80 per cent) as well as waste (six per cent), agriculture (four per cent) and deforestation (five per cent). So far, all correct. But it's the innocuous-sounding item "emissions from forest land remaining forest land" that hides the real bomb: a whopping 51 megatonnes of CO2. This figure appears only as a "memo item" in the report and is not counted as part of B.C.'s total emissions. B.C.'s carbon emissions would be 77 per cent higher if emissions from forests were included.

Normally forests are carbon sinks, places that suck up carbon dioxide. It turns out that emissions from forests are outpacing the uptake because the pine beetle infestation left the forests in such tatters.

Tyee, btw, is a localism for the king salmon.

More than just ice is heating up in the Arctic. U.S. and Canadian ships embarked on a joint exploration to map the sea floor in early August, an effort to determine how far the continental shelf extends from shore and possibly increase each country's claims to resources, reports Elizabeth Bluemink in the Anchorage Daily News. Traditionally, countries hold rights to areas within 200 nautical miles (about 230 miles) of their coasts, but those claims can be extended if they can prove the continental shelf goes beyond that point.

As the ice cap has melted over the years, Canada and the U.S. have waited to explore the Arctic sea floor in search of massive amounts of suspected gas and oil reserves. A third of the world's undiscovered gas and billions of barrels worth of oil could be below the surface, according to Bluemink. If the new data gathered on this exploration proves the shelf extends beyond the 200-nautical-mile-limit, the U.S. could lay claims to the underwater land and all creatures and resources associated with it.

Those favoring conservation of the Arctic rather than drilling don't have to hold their breath yet. Because the U.S. has not ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty, any claims they make to the area will not be recognized internationally.

Researchers are analyzing the data collected on the venture. One find is a massive underwater mountain almost 3,600 feet high that scientists say may help explain the Arctic Ocean's history.

Other researchers are more concerned with the Arctic's future. As the climate warms, many areas in the Arctic are changing rapidly, reports Randolph E. Schmid of the Associated Press. Faster melting ice means changes in growing seasons, which affects many species' ability to find food.

Today brings another fascinating development in the saga of the Alberta tar sands, which is becoming one of our favorite topics here at InvestigateWest and shows signs of becoming a major geopolitical dispute as well as a massive fueler of global warming.

[caption id="attachment_3469" align="alignright" width="252" caption="Developing the tar sands leaves behind huge lakes of toxic waste, like this tailings pond. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace."][/caption]

The big news today is that a Chinese state-owned company, PetroChina, has purchased a 60 percent stake in the Athabasca Oil Sands Corp.'s MacKay River and Dover projects for nearly $2 billion.

This is likely to boost the case for building a pipeline across the Rockies to unload oil-sands petroleum on the west coast of British Columbia, a  prospect completely unwelcome to native First Nations living in B.C.

For more on the environmental implications of the tar sands, see this recent Dateline Earth post. Or, just suffice it to say the impact is huge. 

The Calgary Herald's editorial writers missed a comma in the following excerpt, but it conveys the apprehensions some are feeling in Canada and the United States about PetroChina's move: 

Canadians should be deeply concerned about the relationship that would evolve, in which a foreign government increasingly makes important decisions about a premier Canadian industry and not necessarily with the free market in mind.

For the second day in a row, we have some really disturbing news coming out of the Far North regarding the pace at which climate change is hurtling forward. (The first was this Western Exposure post.)

Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press reports that in Canada's Northwest Territories, the permafrost is melting and the Earth is burping out huge slugs of methane, one of the most potent of the greenhouse gases.

This methane has the potential to drive extremely rapid warming. It's known as  a feedback loop: As more methane escapes, it traps more heat in the atmosphere, which in turn melts more permafrost, and so on.

It's not that the earth has never gotten as hot as it apparently is about to get -- there were once balmy beaches and tropical vegetation in Alaska, for instance.

But the pace at which this warming is occurring is giving scientists serious pause, Hanley reports:

Researchers say air temperatures here in northwest Canada, in Siberia and elsewhere in the Arctic have risen more than 4.5 degrees Farenheit since 1970 -- much faster than the global average...

In 2007, air monitors detected a rise in methane concentrations in the atmosphere, apparently from far northern sources.

As Vancouver, B.C., watches Fraser River stocks of sockeye fail, the count of steelhead passing the Bonneville Dam in Vancouver, Wash., is soaring. And while low Alaskan Yukon runs of king and chum salmon predict a devastating winter for subsistence fishermen, salmon are even making a comeback in the Seine, as InvestigateWest reported last week. What differences could account for these drastic population changes?

Multiple environmental factors could be affecting populations. Warmer weather can heat up rivers, especially those overdrawn by humans, and discourage the cold-water-loving fish from heading upstream. Shifting ocean currents or other predator influences could be altering food sources. Pollutants from stormwater can accumulate in the fish. Overfishing can deplete numbers. Sea lice from farmed salmon could be transferring to wild salmon, weakening them and increasing the likelihood of succumbing to disease or predators. Even superb returns from previous years could be problematic, as too many fish spawning and then decomposing could produce excess bacteria, possibly resulting in disease.

A first nations group says B.C. forest fires could have been prevented if the federal government had removed wood killed by pine beetles, reports Richard J. Dalton Jr. in the Vancouver Sun. Hundreds of millions of dollars normally reserved for the pine beetle program were used instead to improve infrastructure and help those who lost jobs in forestry, and the government did not set a dollar amount for dealing with the pine beetle infestation. Trees killed by pine beetles burn more readily and quickly. The B.C. First Nations Forestry Council says had the government used the funding to clear dead wood, fire breaks would have been created that kept the fires from coming so close to communities, minimizing the overall damage.

– Emily Linroth