Louisiana (USA). May 6th, 2010. Aerial view of the oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, the BP leased oil platform exploded April 20 and sank after burning. The picture was taken in the vicinity where the platform sank from an altitude of 3200 ft. Photo by Greenpeace USA 2010.

Even as the Deepwater Horizon spill releases an estimated 25,000 barrels of crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico—making it, in some experts’ estimates, an even greater ecological disaster then 1989 Exxon Valdez spill—Chevron Canada Ltd. is pursuing plans to create one of the deepest offshore oil wells in the world off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.  While President Obama and California’s Governor Schwarzenegger have passed a moratorium on offshore drilling in the U.S. in response to the Gulf explosion and the Canadian National Energy Board has announced a review of arctic safety and environmental offshore drilling requirements for the Canadian north, Chevron is preparing to drill 2.6 kilometers under water in the Canadian Atlantic—nearly 1 kilometer deeper then the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico.  The Chevron drill ship Stena Carron will be drilling in the Orphan Basin in the North Atlantic, 430 kilometers northeast of St. John’s; and while many have raised concerns about the dangers of another possible leak, the federal and provincial governments are doing their best to assuage those fears and press on with the project unchanged.

In a debate before the provincial legislature, Newfoundland and Labrador’s NDP leader Lorraine Michail voiced her concern: “Why won’t they put a halt to this project until we know how to deal with incidents so far beneath the ocean?” she asked, referencing BP’s inability to deal with the ongoing spill in the Gulf and their slow reaction time in drilling a relief well.  In response, the province’s natural resources minister Kathy Dunderdale has defended the project, asserting that unlike the Deepwater Horizon ship, the Stena Carron is equipped with three backup systems; “we have a degree of security—as much as one can rely on—that the proper measures and countermeasures are in place,” she said.

While the federal government is assuring those concerned that our safeguards are tougher than those in place south of the border, some analysts worry that Chevron’s backup plans are not designed for this new class of superdeep well. Ian Doig, an oil industry expert, commented to the Globe and Mail that only two rigs are located near enough to the Orphan Basin to be of any help in case of a spill, but that neither of those rigs are equipped to drill relief wells in the depths proposed. “If Chevron gets into problems at the total depth of its proposed well, neither of those two rigs in the area have the capability of going down to that depth […] They’ll just have to stand back and watch,” Doig said.

If Canada’s intractability comes as any surprise to you, it shouldn’t. I only have to point you to George Monbiot’s condemnatory Guardian article accusing Canada of representing the single largest impediment to positive environmental change on the global scale or to Zoe Cormier’s postcard from London last September in which she documents Canada’s place as public enemy number one for many environmental groups.  The reluctance or inability of our government to enforce greater accountability on the oil industry is merely the latest manifestation of an attitude that has spawned the ecological disaster of the tar sands, the world’s dirtiest oil project and the largest single industrial source of carbon emissions.

While Chevron has assured the government that the project is as safe as it can be, the question must be asked: how much of the environment is our government willing to sacrifice for the economy?

In the interest of Awareness, here’s our quick roundup of some Earth Day links and other environmentally topical reading:

Earth Day Canada has a handy guide to Earth Day events across Canada. Plenty happening today and over the rest of the weekend.

The New York Times on Earth Day as Big Business. The Globe and Mail chimes in with what seems like self-parody: “Four stock picks for Earth Day.” Really.

Carbon offsets are a scam, says the Christian Science Monitor in a new series of articles examining the industry:

They are buying into projects that are never completed, or paying for ones that would have been done anyhow, the investigation found. Their purchases are feeding middlemen and promoters seeking profits from green schemes that range from selling protection for existing trees to the promise of planting new ones that never thrive. In some cases, the offsets have consequences that their purchasers never foresaw, such as erecting windmills that force poor people off their farms.

Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and—in many cases—not worth their price.

Heather Rogers also calls foul on carbon offset projects in the current issue of The Nation.

Via this Worldchanging blog post, a recent TED Talk by Catherine Mohr about the hard reality of building an environmentally friendly home, eschewing the kind of green sentimentality that fuels carbon offsets and diving deep into the actual data. It’s short, funny, and educational:

Climate fight! University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver announced yesterday in a press release that he is suing the National Post for four articles it wrote about him over the past few months. Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, says the Post “attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held.” The four articles in question are “Weaver’s Web,” “Weaver’s Web II,” “Climate agency going up in flames,” and “So much for pure science.” Suing the Financial Post op-ed page for their ridiculous environmental reporting may seem like suing the sun for shining, but Weaver is one of the country’s top climate scientists, so this bears watching.

Rabble has some suggestions for Earth Day–related things to do on university campuses across Canada.

The David Suzuki Foundation is running a series of book swaps across the country until April 24. If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you — and might save some paper as well.

Finally, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians sends a dispatch from Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she’s attending the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth:

Members of the Canadian Youth Delegation to the Copenhagen Climate Summit protest Canada's lacklustre showing at the conference. CC-Licensed photo courtesy CYD.

Nearing mid-December, I arise to Toronto’s first snowfall—though to my Christmasy disappointment, an unimpressive slop of wet snow and rain greeted the city’s drivers and transit riders with delays and headaches. The symptoms are similar for citizens rallying in Copenhagen this week, though for different reasons. An annual Christmas letter from relatives proved that November can now bring excellent golfing in Southern Ontario. The pudding comes from the World Meteorological Organization, that despite protestation from the deniers like those at the Munk Debate last week, the last decade will likely be the warmest one on record across the globe.

Checking in on the state of Denmark, where a recent leak of a new draft proposal has caused an international stir, I’ve asked two young veterans of international climate activism to help give us a better picture from the thick of it—their voices may or may not come through in commercial media over the next few days).

“The main point is that there’s a lack of trust now lingering over the hosting government [due to the leak],” said Zoë Caron, who is doing policy work at the negotiations with the Climate Action Network International.

“We should be able to move on just fine. We need to support the chair of the Council of Parties [the Kyoto agreement’s negotiating chair – this year being Denmark] in moving forward under the transparent UN process.”

According to Caron, everything is still on the table, with hope and opportunities abound. The world’s environment ministers will be meeting early next week.

Side negotiations seem to be occurring all over the place, and the citizen movement is reacting with urgency when they see something bubble up showing positive or negative momentum. A proposal by the South Pacific islands nation of Tuvalu for deeper cuts is being supported by other small nations and gained an immediate and loud response from activists which was posted to Youtube.

“We need to keep the message that Heads of State are coming here to work out issues, not deliver fluffy speeches, said Caron.

“France is saying they’ll reach their targets entirely domestically, which is great.”

Leaders in Europe’s youth movement are asking citizens to call their national leaders as they meet over the next two days. After watching their call for a deep cut, Canadian youth could support them by writing to ask for their leadership, by bypassing Canada’s weakness at the talks.

Another Canadian graduate of several annual Council of the Parties meetings, Aiden Abram is working as we speak in Copenhagen to mentor other youth in achieving their goals for a fair, ambitious and binding treaty. Despite the time difference, Facebook suggests that whenever you might be reading this, chances are he’s probably still working, as sleep doesn’t seem to be much of an option at the moment.

When I asked him what hope there is to be seen at the moment, Abram didn’t care for the premise.

“Hope is dead,” he said.

“It’s not about hope. Hope creates helplessness – we have the ability to change this process, this system.”

There are now young people from over 100 countries participating at the conference building capacity, developing skills and connecting to each other for work that will continue well past the conference according to Abram.

“That’s what it’s about, as this process will never deliver what we need,” he said.

In asking what Canadians back home should be doing to support their work – Caron and Abram were in sync: call your MP, your Premier, your Prime Minister; write a letter to the editor; raise your voice.

“Ask Stephen Harper that he prepare sufficiently to go to Copenhagen to raise Canada’s targets and commit to making reductions domestically,” said Caron.

The Canadian word on the Danish street says that despite the headaches, progress will come with hard work. There is a lot of good noise coming from the conference: the more domestic noise and the more international pressure, the greater the likelihood that Canada could display a greater willingness to either participate productively, or at least step aside.

And if the words and history of these two Canadian climate savers prove true, nobody’s going away anytime soon. This movement is in it for the long haul, because it needs to be.

Follow Zoe Caron on twitter at http://twitter.com/zoecaron

Follow folks tweeting on the conference (1,500 new tweets since I started writing this article) at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23cop15

Follow the Canadian Youth Delegation on their blog at http://cydcopenhagen.org/

A member of an environmentalist group pretends to be dead during a protest demanding a real climate deal during the first day of United Nations Climate Change Conference on December 7, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — The negotiations have begun over our climate future here in Copenhagen. Global leaders may decide in the next two weeks the most important choice to be made in our lifetime—even, arguably, in the history of the human race: will we change course?

“This is an extremely important moment in history,” said May Boeve from 350.org. For the first time in history all the major world leaders are trying to tackle the issue of climate change. Each of them is offering targets to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions and planning to finance developing nations who will be the most impacted.

Even more importantly in some ways, never before in history has the world paid so much attention to our climate crisis. Here in Copenhagen, thousands have descended on the Danish capital this week to attempt to make change from inside the conference halls—and outside on the streets.

Yet with so many people affected by the decisions made here—all of us in fact—why is it that so few get a say? Despite it being everyone’s issue (nearly seven billion of us) it is essentially eight men and a woman (the G8 and China) who get to deicide. That seems rather risky, especially when it’s questionable whether they truly have our best interests at heart.

There are so many that are voiceless here in the conference and so many that these decisions affect beyond the G8 and China. Like the Maldives, which is losing land to sea level rises every year: at the current rate, the country is in serious danger of disappearing altogether. The Maldives’ President, Mohammad Nasheed, said himself this week that the decision in Copenhagen will either be heroism or suicide: “The choice is that stark.”

In Copenhagen myself, there is an uneasy feeling of powerlessness in the most terrifying and important challenge we face. As a young person, it is my future that is being decided here and now, and I feel muted, despite all my best efforts at trying to make my voice heard.

The reason I care is because by the time I am in my 60s, in the year 2050, I will be living in a vastly reshaped world due to our lack of response to climate change. If nothing happens in Copenhagen, it will be a new geo-political world I will be living in with 150 million climate refugees. The arctic sea ice at the North Pole and much of Greenland will be gone. And we will be well on our way to passing the crucial 2ºC warming threshold.

Even if the deal does happen during the next two weeks, the world will still never be the same as we know it, as a deal in Copenhagen doesn’t mean success. The deal that is likely amounts to a suicide pact for many countries, since the targets aren’t ambitious enough and the funding for mitigation is well below what we need. The U.S. is only offering a 3 percent reduction by 2020 relative to 1990 levels, when scientists now argue that it should be well over 40 percent. The Obama administration said last week that nations will likely offer US$10 billion for a climate aid fund. Meanwhile, the World Bank (hardly a radical source of information), says that Industralized nations need to offer US$75 to US$100 billion annually.

So is this summit Hopenhagen or Flopenhagen? I’m not sure if I see much hope other than greeenwashed hope here on the conference grounds. But I do see hope from the movement that is trying despertly to make the voiceless—young people, Indigenous people, the Global South—heard.

For example, the students that organized the 350 event last October are here in big numbers, working on the inside to get the voiceless heard and holding a global vigil for survival that all of us can take part of. KlimaForum09, the Danish anti-conference, is writing an alternative climate declaration, made by the people, to let the public be heard. They’ve called the COP15 negotiations a “fraud” and are planning civil disobedience actions in the city and around the world to let their displeasure be known.

This deal may be settled in two weeks time, but the battle for a choice that needs to be all of ours is just beginning.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

Stephen Harper's grim, digitally aged face stares down at travellers passing through the Copenhagen airport. Greenpeace is pressuring world leaders to take decisive action at the Copenhagen climate summit Dec 7–18.

Greenpeace predicts world leaders will be making a big apology in 11 years if they don’t step up at the Copenhagen climate summit next week.

A new line of giant ads in the Copenhagen airport features Harper, Obama, and 6 other serious looking, digitally aged world leaders saying, “I’m sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… we didn’t.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s billboard appears next to an advertisement informing travellers of the efforts the airport has taken to reduce their CO2 production. At least someone’s trying.

The project is a partnership between Greenpeace and tcktcktck.org, a hub for mobilizing individuals and groups to urge world leaders for a binding agreement to take bold action on climate change.

“If leaders like Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel and Brown don’t deliver at this summit their legacy will be mass starvation, mass migration and mass famine. If that happens sorry might be the hardest word, but it won’t be enough,”

“Now is the time to act on climate [change] in order to save our future. Not next year – and not the year after. If we want to have any chance of stopping climate chaos, global emissions must peak by 2015.”

Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International and Chairman of tcktcktck.org.

Another project allied with tcktcktck.org is Love Letters to the Future. The site asks people around the world to post letters, tweets, pictures, or videos with their thoughts for the people of 2109. The love letters voted into the top 100 will be put in a time capsule in Copenhagen on December 13, to be opened in 100 years.

The messages apologize for environmental destruction, promise to do more, and share images and descriptions of snow, trees, slow loris, and blue skies – just in case the time capsule out lives them. A scary thought indeed.

Participants in the International Day of Climate Action in Ciudad de Mexico spell out the "world's most important number."

Being responsible for “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” is nothing to sneeze at. Who could have the charisma, intelligence and ability to inspire such an important global movement? Of all the names that might come to mind, perhaps Bill McKibben would not be the first, particularly if you haven’t yet been acquainted with 350.org. But it is no surprise to us, as he is the man who first captivated our attention on what he has known for two decades is one of the most serious issues of our time.

We first had the opportunity to hear McKibben speak three years ago at a breakthrough campus sustainability conference in Arizona, back when climate change was still known as global warming, and global warming was just beginning to gain widespread attention. Yet his fervent call to action remains firmly planted in our minds, and we find ourselves once again captivated by the impassioned call from this mild-mannered writer and professor.

Three years sounds like a long time, but it can go by in the blink of an eye leaving us with very little time to waste. And if we take the name of McKibben’s organization seriously, we haven’t a spare moment. 350, he says, “Is the most important number in the world.” It’s that number which scientists say is the parts per million of CO2 the atmosphere can possibly withstand before runaway climate change causes the most dire planetary and human health conditions. And what are we at right now, you might ask? A frightening 387 parts per million.

While that’s definitely past the point of safety, we may have not yet reached the point of no return. McKibben started 350.org based on the idea that we — and young people in general — desperately need to act in unison to make the drastic changes required to wake the world up to our new reality. On October 24, over 5,200 events in 181 countries echoed McKibben’s call to action, asking our national leaders to take notice as they prepare to decide how life on this planet will look in the coming years.

With two months left to define an international agreement in Copenhagen, we will be closely watching our government’s action and inaction on climate change. We will follow the youth climate movement in Canada and around the world as we try to find a reason to be optimistic about the outcome of the discussions.

But if the unassuming Mr. McKibben can prompt an underwater rally on the Great Barrier Reef, and high on the slopes of Mount Everest, inspiring Desmond Tutu to call 350 “the same kind of coalition that helped make the word ‘apartheid’ known around the world,” then he is definitely the man whose example we want to follow. After all, some things have changed in the last three years, and perhaps we have enough collective energy to turn one day of global action into ten days of effective decision-making in Copenhagen.

Last week, our Prime Minister skipped a day at the UN Climate Summit in New York for a photo-op at a donut shop in Oakville. Outraged by his obvious sense of priorities—a double double at Tim’s over our global climate crisis—two youth activists founded a Facebook campaign called “Donuts Over Planet,” with thousands of Canadians demanding an apology, and the chirps have been busy on Twitter.

One Tweeter, OldScot, said Harper is the new “Donut King.” While Greenpeace tweeted that perhaps there were “more important donut innovations to address.”

Donuts over Planet founder, 26-year-old Jamie Biggar said: “I think for the majority of Canadians, especially the young, this was hugely offensive. I can’t remember ever seeing so many young Canadians so angry about what’s being done to their future, so sad about what’s being done in their name, and so determined to tell the world that Harper does not represent them.”

Harper said the visit to the Tim Hortons’ Innovation Centre was his chance to welcome the return of the company to Canadian soil, after running as an American operation for over a decade, reported the Toronto Star.

Critics say it is because Harper is not very found of the UN, or multinational organizations, having bailed out on other UN talks in the past.

But there is more to it than that. The Copenhagen Climate Conference is 69 days away and our Prime Minister is not even at the drawing board, choosing dough over tough talks we need. This is not apathy, but denial over climate change.

Critics say he has known climate denier friends, including John Weissenberger. He has appointed ‘climate critics’ to federal scientific institutes. He is a man who believes tar sands expansion is conducive to the fight against climate change. And let’s not forget how the Canadian government has obstructed global climate progress before, such as last year’s Bali climate talks.

With 69 days to go for the global climate negotiation, if Harper is going to be absent for preliminary talks or just obstruct them, then “maybe he should just stay home for Copenhagen,” says Lauryn Drainie, a youth activist. “It’s not our voice he is representing. We don’t need him there.”

Wal-Mart: paving paradise and putting up parking lots since 1962.

In Salmon Arm, B.C., there’s been a long-standing fight over plans to build an enormous shopping centre directly on the floodplain of the Salmon River. Last fall, the city voted not to allow mall developer SmartCentres to build big box stores on this ecologically sensitive tract of land. Well, now we receive a report that a few days ago, SmartCentres started building anyway.

Warren Bell writes:

In essence, a giant developer (SmartCentres, based in Vaughan, ON, if you want to look them up) wants to build a giant Walmart-anchored shopping centre on a giant parking lot planned for the middle of the floodplain of the Salmon River, which enters Shuswap Lake within the boundaries of Salmon Arm, and supplies most of the water to the Salmon Arm of Shuswap Lake (which has 4 arms, like a giant chromosome), from which the town draws most of its water. The floodplain/wetland complex filters and cleans the water. And yes, there are several species of salmon slowly returning to the Salmon River, after nearly 20 years of local volunteer restoration work.

Last fall, SmartCentres came at this project, and were defeated narrowly by a vote of City Council. Now they’re back with a vengeance. Two days ago [on Friday, September 4], without waiting for government approval, they began dumping fill all over the floodplain.

I’m president of a small group of local citizens, called WA:TER (Wetland Alliance: The Ecological Response) leading a resistance movement against this proposal — not against development, but against development there. We’re struggling along in more or less “David and Goliath” mode, and now have our backs to the wall, because the developer is moving ahead before Dept of Fisheries and Oceans has said they can.

You know the story: wreck the ecosystem, pay the fine (the “cost of doing business”), and carry on building.

Warren Bell
Past Founding President, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment
President, WA:TER (Wetland Alliance: The Ecological Response)

If this story weren’t so sad, it would almost be funny—it features so many clichés of real-estate development hell: the Wal-Mart rolls into town, dumps landfill all over a fragile wetland, and paves the whole thing with a parking lot. The only thing they’re missing here is a moustache to twirl while cackling in the shadows.

I’ve got a call in with SmartCentres to confirm that construction has started. I’ll update this post with their response if and when I hear back.

[Original creative-commons photo by Jadel Menard]

Toronto-based physician Ken Walker—perhaps better known as nationally syndicated medical columnist Dr. Gifford-Jones—points out in a recent article that life’s cards are unfavourably stacked against those with a Y chromosome, and he attributes social conditioning to be a primary culprit.

Males live an average of 5.3 years less than females and are generally more likely to die from diseases. They are also three times more likely to be murdered and four times more likely to commit suicide. Walker attributes these figures to the dismissal of preventative medicine in favour of a John Wayne-swagger of macho immortality, combined with the emotional repression that comes along with such a demanding persona.

Walker does acknowledge the stats that can’t be explained by the “boys will be boys” hypothesis, such as the higher occurrences of infant mortality rates in prematurely born males, as well as the elevated rates of developmental disabilities, autism, and colour blindness. He fails, however, to suggest a possible cause. For that, we turn to the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community near Sarnia, Ontario.

Beginning in 1994, the percentage of male births in the community began to drop dramatically; between 1999 and 2003, males represented only 41.2 percent of births, compared to the roughly 51 percent global standard. Male fetuses are much more frequently, and inexplicably, snuffed out through miscarriages and stillbirths than their female counterparts. The environmental contamination of hormone-mimicking or “endocrine disrupting” chemicals is increasingly believed to be the culprit behind the community’s “disappearing males,” as the reserve sits in a polluted river valley immediately adjacent to several large chemical industrial plants.

Ever since last year’s shelf ban of bisphenol A-laden hard plastic water bottles, endocrine disrupting chemicals with futuristic-sounding monikers have attained an unprecedented level of notoriety. The long-term devastation of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) is an undeniable truth nowadays, with multiple generations of usage beginning to show tangible, measurable effects. Males, it seems, are on the short end of that stick.

Aamjiwnaang girls play ball (photo courtesy of cbc.ca)

Now, a report published in today’s PLoS Genetics reveals that the Y chromosome itself is in danger, stating that: “[The] rapid evolution of the Y chromosome has led to a dramatic loss of genes on the Y chromosome at a rate that, if maintained, eventually could lead to the Y chromosome’s complete disappearance.” While the article assures readers that this occurrence will not necessarily be the end of males, but rather the catalyst for a new pair of sex chromosomes, the news is nonetheless difficult to digest.

The good news? Males, you’ve still got one sturdy X chromosome to rely upon.

Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine site near Fort MacMurray.

[This is the first in a three-part series on the Alberta tar sands. Also note: EcoChamber will be moving to Mondays starting today.]

There is a sense of progress in the air. For the first time in over a decade, G8 countries and developing nations, including China and India, have agreed to reduce their emissions in absolute numbers. But as this global parade marches on, Canada is being left behind as our emissions continue to climb.

The G8 Summit, lead by President Obama, last week finished talks in Italy with industrialized nations and emerging economies agreeing to an 80 per cent emissions cut by 2050, as well as a 2° C threshold. There is still much work to be done, including establishing the essential base year for reductions, the debate ranging from 1990 to 2006 levels. However, for the first time there is American leadership on our climate peril that is driving change not only domestically, but internationally.

“I know in the past, the United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities. So, let me clear: those days are over,” said Obama last week in L’Aquila, Italy.

In the United States, since Obama took office, C02 has been declared officially a danger; $60 billion is being pumped into renewables; and the House recently approved the Waxman-Markey climate bill that will change American fossil fuel reliance, as well as spell out action internationally at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. Which is not to say there hasn’t been criticism of the Obama administration and the climate bill itself, but these are the first signs of action by a political leader on our global meltdown.

But where does all this political change in climate change leave Canada? According to the WWF’s 2009 Climate Scorecards, dead last.

Canada ranked last out of all the G8 countries for its climate performance. In 2008, the U.S. held this spot. But since Obama took the lead in climate initiatives, Canada is now the one stalling progress.

“Canada’s per capita emissions are among the highest in the world (next to Russia)” states WWF.

We currently emit 24 tonnes of C0₂ per capita and, despite being one of the first countries to sign the Kyoto Protocol, we are one of the furthest from our Kyoto target. The Kyoto Protocol required a 6 percent emissions decrease by 2012. Since the Accord was established, we have increased emissions by 26 percent. One of our biggest emitters is the Alberta Tar Sands project.

“The Alberta Tar Sands are becoming Canada’s number one global warming machine,” says Tony Clarke, Polaris Institute Director, in his book Tar Sands Showdown.

With Middle East and African oil presenting problems of price fluctuations and political uncertainty, Alberta’s unconventional but secure sources of oil are looking increasingly attractive to global markets. However, production of one barrel of oil from these bitumen deposits produce three times more greenhouse gases (GHGs) than conventional oil. The project pumps out 27 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year, or 16% of the total emissions of Canada.

And the government only has plans for expansion. The project is expected to multiply as much as four to five times by the year 2015 to meet growing demand. That’s 108 to 126 megatonnes of GHG poured into the atmosphere annually. That would make the tar sands the single largest industrial contributor of greenhouse gases in North America.

Reducing GHGs by 80 percent, as Canada pledged last week to do, while planning to expand the tar sands project, is simple math that does not add up. We can’t have our cake and eat it too – or in this case, have our bitumen cash crop and claim sustainability. Even if our only emitting producer were the tar sands project and we lived in some eco-utopia otherwise, we are still overextending our GHG emissions with further development of this project.

Singlehandedly, the tar sands sabotage any possibility of Canada fulfilling a Copenhagen climate agreement.

Yet in last Saturday’s Globe & Mail, in an interview with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he said: “A realistic commitment (in the battle against climate change) is consistent with growth in the oil sands.” Frankly, no, it’s not.

[Next week in Part 2 of 3: why carbon-capture and storage is no silver bullet solution for the tar sands]

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.