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Canada's Oil Sands To Keep Polluting
Ottawa (AFP) Feb 26, 2007 Greenhouse gas emissions from mining Canada's booming Alberta oil sands would continue rising dramatically under a proposed climate change plan obtained by local media, and published Monday. The Toronto-based Globe and Mail and Quebec's French-language Le Devoir said the Conservative government's draft plan calls for a reduction in the "intensity" of emissions from all industries of 15 percent by 2015 and 26 percent by 2020. Thus oil companies would have to reduce emissions from the production of each barrel of oil, but if they sell more barrels each year, as is the trend, overall emissions would continue rising. Citing leaked documents, the papers said the oil sands would be required to reduce carbon emissions intensity by 40 percent or 12.2 megatonnes by 2020. But if all planned multi-billion-dollar oil sands projects go ahead, total carbon emissions would still rise 248 percent higher than 2000 levels, environmentalist Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute told the Globe and Mail. "The federal government's proposal for industry regulation on greenhouse gases is a fraud," Louise Comeau of the Sage Foundation told the Toronto-based newspaper. Canada had agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions to 6.0 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but a 2006 government environmental audit found emissions had instead increased by 26.6 percent. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has maintained that the Kyoto targets, agreed to by a previous Liberal government, are unattainable. His government introduced a bill in mid-October to reduce Canada's carbon emissions by 45-65 percent by 2050, based on 2003 emissions. But it was widely panned for allowing emissions to continue to rise until 2020. A second environmental plan is expected by the end of March. At an estimated 179 billion barrels, Canada's oil sands rank second behind Saudi Arabia in petroleum reserves. Since 2000, skyrocketing crude prices and improved extraction technologies have lured significant foreign investment that could push oil sands production to 3.5 million barrels per day by 2015, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in its annual report in June 2006. But a government environmental audit released in September 2006 found the oil patch, already Canada's worst polluter, would also double its harmful CO2 emissions by then, if left unchecked.
Source: Agence France-Presse Email This Article
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