Tar Sands Dead? The Upside Of Economic Collapse

So Says Gwyn Dyer:

"I was up in Fort MacMurray recently to give a speech about climate change. About half the audience was from oil companies. None of them were the least surprised by anything I said. They are watching this like a hawk. They know the Americans are moving towards banning the imported tar sands oil.

"The tar sands are probably dead anyway, but if Harper's gone, they're dead for sure. The day Obama got elected he came out with the offer of a joint Camadian-American emissions control treaty, with a small clause about not touching the tar sands.

"This is now going to move very fast over the next few years. The log jam has broken because the Americans are now on board. When they weren't, countries were bending over backwards to try to soften Kyoto to get them to sign on. Now we're stuck for the next 15 years with this watered down, badly mutilated treaty. A lot of wasted time. Now Obama's up to his ass in alligators, and he knows he has to drain the swamp. He'll be looking for low-cost initiatives that show America has its heart in the right place, and the tar sands are low-hanging fruit."

A bit of wishful thinking Dyer's part, I think. What will kill the tar-sands is under-40$-a-barrel oil.

In fact the current economic collapse is having all sorts of salutary effects on carbon emissions. Get a load of this graph of Chinese power generation.

Remember, for every three starving peons you can save a polar bear.