Simple analysis.
First they're comparing reserves not resources. That wont change much but if you developed the entire oil sands resource you're in trouble climatologically.
But yes, sure, compare the known coal reserves of the whole world to the oil reserves in one country.
What Weaver is saying is that coal is a much bigger problem for the climate than oil. He isn't saying that oil is fine though. Burning oil is still a huge problem.
The other thing he doesn't look at are the upstream emissions from the oil sands extraction which typically are one quarter of the combustion emissions. So for ever 4 molecules of emissions that come from burning oil sands, one emission is released from extracting it. That paper made no mention of that.
As an aside, if we continued the current rate of the development for the oil sands and if we also thought that constraining our emissions to achieve only 2 degrees of warming was a good idea, then by 2050 we would use up over 80% of our per capita emissions quota on oil sands extraction alone. That means for the rest of the economy, we would have only 20% of emissions remaining which is not possible to meet.
So to summarize, oil sands are still a problem, it's just how you relate it.
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