The Lash or the Pipeline

In, Saudi woman's lashing drives home differences in oil, a Calgary Herald writer supports the mining of tar sands to produce synthetic oil by leveraging sympathy for the powerlessness of Saudi women.

... Sheima Jastaniah was sentenced by a Saudi court to 10 lashes for driving her car in July. In Saudi Arabia, it is against the law for women to drive, or to leave their homes without the permission of their husbands or other male relatives. What's really sad about Jastaniah's story, besides the obvious fact that she is a woman living in Saudi Arabia, is that she took part in a similar act of civil disobedience in, get this . . . 1990! A full 21 years have passed and not a thing has changed for her or any other female in that woman's maximum security prison called Saudi Arabia.

After dismissing Canadian protests against the TransCanada Keystone XL project, she states her case:

Saudi Arabia has the largest conventional oil reserves in the world. Alberta has the largest unconventional oil reserves in the world. Shutting down the oilsands wouldn't stop the flow of oil, it would only make the corrupt house of Saud even richer and more able to keep its women under their burkas. These protesters, who flew and drove to the protest, won't use less oil in their daily lives if the Keystone pipeline were not built. They would still drive and fly around from protest to protest, spewing their hypocrisy. They present a false choice. It's not a question of shutting down the oilsands and turning to fairy dust to propel their bus or car. It's ship in more oil from Saudi Arabia, or Nigeria, or Syria. Those are the options.

But who is actually presenting the false dilemma here? Leaving aside the dubious assertion that not buying Saudi oil will somehow change their society, are buying oil from the authoritarian Saudis or submitting to the environmental destruction http://agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2009/01/16/03043.html that accompanies mining the tar sands our only two options?

• The Tar Sands can single handedly prevent Canada from meeting it’s international obligations under the Kyoto protocol. By 2020 the tar sands are expected to release over 141 megatonnes of GHG – twice that produced by all the cars and trucks in Canada.

• An area the size of the state of Florida (149,000 km2) can be leased to oil sands development in the future.

• It takes 3-5 barrels of fresh water to get a single barrel of oil from the tar sands. 350 million cubic metres is the volume of water currently allocated to the tar sands, the equivalent to the water required by a city of two million people.

• Cumulatively, the environmental impact of the tar sands has made Alberta the industrial air pollution capital of Canada, with one billion kilograms of emissions in 2003.

• 600 million cubic feet of Natural gas is used every day – that’s enough to heat more than three million Canadian homes.

• First Nation communities downstream of tar sands operation have been experiencing unprecedented rates of bile and colon cancer, lupus and other diseased that they believe are attributable to tar sands.

• 70% of the crude oil being extracted from the tar sands is exported directly to the United States mostly for use in transportation.

Could we not instead use less energy, and responsibly build alternative power sources?