Neil Young blasts the Alberta government about the Oilsands

[ranchlandsselling]

Originally Posted by ranchlandsselling

Wow, so much wrong with this. I'll simply point out that he doesn't know what he's talking about in the first bolded sentence.

Should representatives of GWL, Brookfield, Artis REIT, OMERs, Oxford, CREIT, Cadillac Fairview, H&R Reit, Mannix, Telus, Manulife, Standard Life, Sun Life, HOOP, and god knows what other CANADIAN companies that have nothing to do with the day to day operations of Suncor, CNQ, ECA, CNOOC, Cenovus, Husky, TransCanada, etc. come down to his ignorant pow wow and clean up their mess of, of, of what?

Not to mention the complete idiocy of his comment about these glass towers being monuments to their extreme wealth. WTF are you talking about Neil Young?

Tinordi, Troutman, or whoever else seems to think that objections to Neil's comments are without merit because everyone is saying "coal is worse" etc. While that's happening, it's not really the point. I think people are getting tired of these outsiders rallying against the oilsands because it makes for a nice easy target. Not only are these individuals annoying but they're also uneducated and not without bias. It's even more annoying when there are bigger issues in the outsiders own back yard that we feel warrants just as much if not more attention. The old "clean up your own back yard first". I don't think anyone in this thread arguing against what Neil has said is against good environmental practices. It's just too easy to brush off these complainants when they spew some ridiculous rhetoric like I've pointed out. Come prepared, educated, and without hollywood bias.

Just like if someone came into the flames side of the message board and started rallying that the flames are horrible and we should sign free agents and trade prospects for 30 year old guys that can score because we can't score right now. Yeah, the poster would be correct that we need scoring, and without knowing any better one could argue that the poster is indeed correct. But that's not the whole story and if anyone did post something like that they'd be ridiculed for being so out to lunch as they clearly have no understanding of what they're talking about, just a casual fan that is pretty much just looking at the standings at one point in time.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by OldDutch

I have been looking for this thread in the Off Topic main thread, but just found it here. I was wondering why no one was discussing this, so now I am glad to find it!

We've had a couple of requests- so we are moving it back.

[David Struch]

The time has come for Canada to decide if we want a future where First Nations rights and title are honoured, agreements with other countries to protect the climate are honoured, and our laws are not written by powerful oil companies.

Prominent Canadian Artists and Scientists Sign On to Stand With Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation In Oilsands Expansion Fight
Support Comes Hours After Wildly Successful Neil Young Fundraising Concert Series Nets In Excess of $500,000
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/promin...172738013.html

At the end of the day, I've heard more truth from Neil Young on the tar sands than I ever have from the Prime Minister.

10 Reasons Neil Young is Right About the Tar Sands
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mike-hu...b_4611321.html

Debunked: The Top 10 Stupid Arguments in Neil Young Debate
http://desmog.ca/2014/01/22/debunked...l-young-debate

Majority of oil sands ownership and profits are foreign, says analysis
http://business.financialpost.com/20...says-analysis/

Why Neil Young's got Big Oil worried
http://www.avaaz.org/en/neil_young_v...d/?pv=43&rc=fb

[Traditional_Ale]

I bet Neil Young has a guitar-shaped airplane that runs on the tears of angels and he flies around the world in it with Captain Planet, rocking Bon Jovi and snorting coke from Mars.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by Traditional_Ale

I bet Neil Young has a guitar-shaped airplane that runs on the tears of angels and he flies around the world in it with Captain Planet, rocking Bon Jovi and snorting coke from Mars.

To be fair, I'd global warm the #### out of this planet to get my hands on Martian blow.

[Mr.Coffee]

Can anybody explain what the alternative is for our society to abruptly depart from the use of hydrocarbons?

Tinordi? You have decent arguments to Old Dutch but what's the alternative? How do we shift society and everything that this current energy mix contributes to the fabric of our day-day life?

Seems pretty impossible to me. Shift from gasoline, still need asphalt for roads. Shift to alternate methods of transportation that don't require hydrocarbons, still need plastics, fertilizers, certain petrochemicals.

And while your premise that the argument that "coal is worse" is a hollow argument- and I overall agree with you, why aren't those industries the focus of environmentalists too? Why can't both be? Why aren't they shut down too? They are contributing to CO2 levels significantly.

Also I'm not certain it's so "out there" that US interests and profitability is protected by charitable donations to First Nations and environmentalist groups to protest pipelines and delay alternate distribution markets which would lead to rising prices for those companies. That isn't really an "out there" theory.

[MelBridgeman]

Originally Posted by David Struch

Prominent Canadian Artists and Scientists Sign On to Stand With Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation In Oilsands Expansion Fight
Support Comes Hours After Wildly Successful Neil Young Fundraising Concert Series Nets In Excess of $500,000
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/promin...172738013.html

10 Reasons Neil Young is Right About the Tar Sands
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mike-hu...b_4611321.html

Debunked: The Top 10 Stupid Arguments in Neil Young Debate
http://desmog.ca/2014/01/22/debunked...l-young-debate

Majority of oil sands ownership and profits are foreign, says analysis
http://business.financialpost.com/20...says-analysis/

Why Neil Young's got Big Oil worried
http://www.avaaz.org/en/neil_young_v...d/?pv=43&rc=fb

At the end of the day, I've heard more truth from Neil Young on the tar sands than I ever have from the Prime Minister.

Shocking that Mike Hudema would say such a thing...shocking..

[SeeGeeWhy]

I did some calculations with my business partners this week ahead of a business plan pitch at the energy new ventures competition hosted at the bow.

If we used the existing CANDU waste in Canada to fuel molten salt nuclear reactors generating steam and electricity for the oilsands - we'd be able to recover 50 billion barrels, conserve 64 Tcf of methane, and prevent 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.

All this while turning Canada into the worlds largest oil producer and eliminating what is currently an estimated 24 billion, 100,000 year legacy issue for the nuclear waste management organization.

Thats close to 40% of the currently posted recoverable reserves - there is much more than that in place. After that, we could extract about 3 barrels of oil for every 2.5g of naturally mined uranium (pre-enrichment), so this method is entirely sustainable using resources found entirely within Canada's borders. The miracle of the commons, we live in a truly blessed nation and we need to be doing something meaningful about the problems we are facing today.

Yes, it is possible to dramatically reduce the atmospheric impact with technologies that work. And yes the trade off is greater impact in the two other pillars of water and land disturbance (through sheer volume of projects), but the reality is that those impacts are much more reclaimable than what we do to the atmosphere.

What upsets me about this debate is that it appears the true issue Neil is taking up is supporting FN bands in defending their treaty rights, a noble cause; but proposing the that the only solution is to stop development outright is a huge distraction and a mistake.

This is not logical. Our society is entirely based on abundant, low cost energy. The most marginal oil sands plays, most extreme conventional sources and renewables ALL share in common extremely low and rapidly declining energy returns on energy invested (EROEI); even esteemed professors at the U of C who have made a lot of personal and academic gains from working in the oil patch are beginning to publish evidence that some SAGD plays are a net consumer of energy! (Meaning the bitumen recovered does not produce more energy when combusted than the energy it took to extract, upgrade and transport the fuel).

Combine that with a slowly converging consensus of the true economic cost of environmental externalities such as carbon emissions, and we start to see a true cost of energy emerging.

THIS is the issue that everyone on earth should be taking up, and with great concern. Without widely available, scalable, low cost energy, societies slip into widely separated classes which leads to declines in quality of life which leads to conflict and eventually collapse.

The oil sands are a tremendous resource not only because of their sheer size; but because they signal (to me, anyways), that we need to find our "new way" more than ever, and represent a true gift in giving us the opportunity to usher in a second nuclear age whose technology acts as an exceptional bridge to better ways ... Safely and Reliably backstopping distributed grids supplied by a large component of renewables; building exciting and practical fusion-fission hybrids as we push our controls to the point that sustained fusion may be possible...

People need to engage in energy literacy and policy discussion because status quo is leading us down a path that could blow up in our lifetime. That is OUR issue - we need to recognize it, and take it on now.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

If we used the existing CANDU waste in Canada to fuel molten salt nuclear reactors generating steam and electricity for the oilsands - we'd be able to recover 50 billion barrels, conserve 64 Tcf of methane, and prevent 3.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.

All this while turning Canada into the worlds largest oil producer and eliminating what is currently an estimated 24 billion, 100,000 year legacy issue for the nuclear waste management organization.

How do you transport said nuclear waste? If you have just one accident, wouldn't that be so much worse than the damage being done today?

Eventually oil sands discussions turn to nuclear. Your option sounds the cleanest so far, but like you said- the 100,000 year storage of nuclear waste seems like a much worse option. At least with CO2, the planet already has a large scale method of dealing with it. Even in the far shorter term than 100,000 years; if you found a bunker under your house with toxic waste in barrels constructed in the 1700's, would you trust it?

[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

Can anybody explain what the alternative is for our society to abruptly depart from the use of hydrocarbons?

There is no one alternative less of a silver bullet more like silver buckshot. And we don't necessarily need to turn away from them on a dime, we still have about 3 or 4 decades of determined transition away from fossil fuels where we consume about 60 to 80% less than we do now. Sure it's a huge task but it isn't insurmountable.

Tinordi? You have decent arguments to Old Dutch but what's the alternative? How do we shift society and everything that this current energy mix contributes to the fabric of our day-day life?

It's just a huge range of alternatives. And there is no real best optimal pathway. Ultimately what needs to happen is that the politics need to change for us to actually get anywhere. We need to make it acceptable to invest significant amounts of money in research and developent to make these technologies significantly cheaper and better performing. We also need to swallow down those costs of fossil fuel use that we aren't paying for through stuff like carbon pricing. Above all we need to reward politicians who act on climate and punish politicians who don't. And we need to accept the inevitable inconvenience of action.

What does this mean? Well the City of Calgary urbanisation agenda rings well here. Many of the drivers of fossil fuel use are decisions being made outside of the traditionally defined realm of energy system actors such as utilities and energy ministries and energy companies. Stuff like vehicle dependent city design has an important effect in making people drive. Therefore we can design cities that do not promote so much vehicle use. We can stop making freeways and make toll ways, we can densify. All of this will be an inconvenience to our current way of thinking about ourselves in the world but I would argue it's necessary and after the inconvenience is gotten over we'd see that it would be a better system to live in anyways.

Seems pretty impossible to me. Shift from gasoline, still need asphalt for roads. Shift to alternate methods of transportation that don't require hydrocarbons, still need plastics, fertilizers, certain petrochemicals.

Thing with asphalt is that you don't burn those fossil fuels you sequester them in a physical format. But yes, there are some very resilient GHG emissions, thankfully the easier ones to substitute are energy based emissions. But if all we used fossil fuels for was to make plastics, asphalt and some steel then we'd be below planetary thresholds to avoid the worst of climate change.

And while your premise that the argument that "coal is worse" is a hollow argument- and I overall agree with you, why aren't those industries the focus of environmentalists too? Why can't both be? Why aren't they shut down too? They are contributing to CO2 levels significantly.

Environmentalists are focusing on coal and are having success in doing so. Every new coal export terminal planned in the U.S. has been scuttled. The last feasible option is through Vancouver where there is a strong anti-coal port movement. It's important not to blame environmentalists for our problems of inaction here. Blaming environmentalists is like saying "we've failed on climate change because environmentalists haven't convinced me to stop driving so much." Environmentalists are a reaction to the problem not a cause of the problem.

Also I'm not certain it's so "out there" that US interests and profitability is protected by charitable donations to First Nations and environmentalist groups to protest pipelines and delay alternate distribution markets which would lead to rising prices for those companies. That isn't really an "out there" theory.

That is out there. It makes no sense. U.S. energy companies aren't donating to the Rockefeller foundation to put them at a competitive advantage. This is just branch plant psychology of a long subservient Canadian psyche. Utterly depedent on the U.S. for gain and completely willing to blame once we #### things up.

First Nations are opposed to oil sands because they don't like them. Not because some U.S. Foundation is telling them not to like them.

There's so many ways to attack this ridiculous conspiracy theory. If the U.S. energy companies are so keen to stick it to Canada then why are the Republicans so hell bent on seeing Keystone passed? Energy companies donate to the Republicans more than the Democrats and Republican consituencies love the U.S. energy industry. U.S. industry wants keystone, bottom line. There are some bit players in the Bakken that may want Keystone to fail but up until two years ago they were nothing and certainly not organized enough to start an 8 year old campaign to stop the oilsands.

It's effing ridiculous, take off the tin foil hat.

[SeeGeeWhy]

Originally Posted by ken0042

How do you transport said nuclear waste? If you have just one accident, wouldn't that be so much worse than the damage being done today?

Eventually oil sands discussions turn to nuclear. Your option sounds the cleanest so far, but like you said- the 100,000 year storage of nuclear waste seems like a much worse option. At least with CO2, the planet already has a large scale method of dealing with it. Even in the far shorter term than 100,000 years; if you found a bunker under your house with toxic waste in barrels constructed in the 1700's, would you trust it?

Good questions ken, the answer is that the risk is is very low - the nature of an "accident" is much different from what most people imagine when they think of nuclear disasters today... Ie Fukushima (thank LWR technology for that). PM me with your email address and I can send you a good paper on a simple
Process that would allow us to utilize candu waste for this purpose.

And I totally agree... It's a very tough sell to think we can engineer something that will last 100,000 years in a secure state.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by fotze

I do like Youngs arguments about all the oil sands being owned by foreigners. This country was founded by Christians and should be owned by christians.

Exactly what does religion have to do with anything?

Should I not own my company because I don't believe in your "GOD"?

And...I AM CANADIAN

[oilyfan]

Originally Posted by T@T

Exactly what does religion have to do with anything?

Should I not own my company because I don't believe in your "GOD"?

And...I AM CANADIAN

I think the joke went over your head.

[ernie]

Originally Posted by ken0042

How do you transport said nuclear waste? If you have just one accident, wouldn't that be so much worse than the damage being done today?

Eventually oil sands discussions turn to nuclear. Your option sounds the cleanest so far, but like you said- the 100,000 year storage of nuclear waste seems like a much worse option. At least with CO2, the planet already has a large scale method of dealing with it. Even in the far shorter term than 100,000 years; if you found a bunker under your house with toxic waste in barrels constructed in the 1700's, would you trust it?

Canada is working on a long term waste disposal solution. It will likely be akin to the salt domes used to dispose of defense waste in the states in new Mexico (fascinating place the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. If you ever get the chance to go on a tour as part of a conference I highly recommend it). The only radiation free lab in the world so they do a lot of wacky experiments.

Transport of waste isn't that big of a deal when it comes to casks. The casks used in transportation quite simply will not fail. I know you'll say never say never but well the number of engineering controls and systems in place really means never. And honestly no I don't believe one accident is worse than what currently goes on.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

Can anybody explain what the alternative is for our society to abruptly depart from the use of hydrocarbons?

Tinordi? You have decent arguments to Old Dutch but what's the alternative? How do we shift society and everything that this current energy mix contributes to the fabric of our day-day life?

Seems pretty impossible to me. Shift from gasoline, still need asphalt for roads. Shift to alternate methods of transportation that don't require hydrocarbons, still need plastics, fertilizers, certain petrochemicals.

And while your premise that the argument that "coal is worse" is a hollow argument- and I overall agree with you, why aren't those industries the focus of environmentalists too? Why can't both be? Why aren't they shut down too? They are contributing to CO2 levels significantly.

Also I'm not certain it's so "out there" that US interests and profitability is protected by charitable donations to First Nations and environmentalist groups to protest pipelines and delay alternate distribution markets which would lead to rising prices for those companies. That isn't really an "out there" theory.

Converting to metric is too much an upheaval for the US and it will be a very, very long time before they move away from consuming fossil fuels. Likely a better chance of national gun control being implemented.

[killer_carlson]

Originally Posted by ernie

Canada is working on a long term waste disposal solution. It will likely be akin to the salt domes used to dispose of defense waste in the states in new Mexico (fascinating place the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. If you ever get the chance to go on a tour as part of a conference I highly recommend it). The only radiation free lab in the world so they do a lot of wacky experiments.

Transport of waste isn't that big of a deal when it comes to casks. The casks used in transportation quite simply will not fail. I know you'll say never say never but well the number of engineering controls and systems in place really means never. And honestly no I don't believe one accident is worse than what currently goes on.

and that was the standard line by oil pipeline co engineers in surface rights hearings for years and years and years. Doesn't hold so much weight these days.

[ernie]

Originally Posted by killer_carlson

and that was the standard line by oil pipeline co engineers in surface rights hearings for years and years and years. Doesn't hold so much weight these days.

Completely different industry with completely different standards. I'm not going to go into details as to the controls put in place on design and proving that design. They are far far far far far far far more extreme and rigorous than a pipeline.