Canada’s Oil, the World’s Carbon | The Common Sense Canadian

Read this editorial in the New York Times about the US Department of State’s environmental assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline. Excerpt: “The climate question must be addressed, if only to give a full accounting of the range of consequences of developing the tar sands, an effort in which the United States will be complicit if it allows the pipeline. That includes the effect of destroying 740,000 acres of boreal forest (a vital sink for greenhouse gases); the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted in extracting the oil from the tar sands (a highly energy-intensive process); and the gases emitted by burning the oil.

The point was reinforced this month when 10 leading climate scientists sent a letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton asking the State Department to consider how helping to open Canada’s tar sands would affect the planet’s climate. ‘The vast volumes of carbon in the tar sands ensure that they will play an important role in whether or not climate change gets out of hand,’ the letter said. ‘Understanding the role this large-scale new pipeline will play in that process is clearly crucial.'”