Eliminating oil sands would increase global GHG emissions

[rustled]

when we went from horse and buggy to cars was there a big world debate? thats absurd and un human. adventure and advancing is our destiny

Show me a single country where the government used public policy to force people off their horses and out of their buggies and insisted they must use cars instead. One. Just one.

How about a government that taxed horse feed and tack at such a high rate it forced people off their horses and out of their buggies and into taxpayer subsidized automobiles instead.

Failing that, perhaps you could show me where in this thread anyone has actually opposed adventure and advancing. Pretty sure you'll find we're all in favour of that.

[vegas1500]

noone is saying over night just steady progress towards that goal

Not in your lifetime.....or anyone who's reading this....

[bold]

The trouble with alternate energy is this, it's a BIG problem for oligarchy as well as all Government's ultimately run by these oligarchy's to control/extort alternative energy on the masses.

Solar/wind energy both rely on good sun/wind exposure, these are still great and VERY popular for households in Europe now, my family have a wind turbine on their farm in England, putting power back into the grid and it's great but initial investment is big, even with available grants at the time. Then there is far more advanced safer Nuclear technology.... BUT wait, there's more! The most important but suppressed no matter what to keep from the masses is electromagnet generation working solely from the earths magnetic field, also anti-gravity technology, it is not a myth, it's science.

Patents for alternative energy's are mandatorily bought up from innovators large/small by oligarchy/gov/deep-state-military no matter what. Been going on for over a century, buried deep in vaults to never see the light of day, deep state military around the world get to play with it though, lots happen with in the DUMB's . Most ideas all relate to the same principle.
These technology's can and have been developed to use in sinister ways too.

A child could convert a fan to turn freely under it's own momentum by strategically fixing small positive/negative magnets in the right locations as a fun experiment.

You have one side fighting to keep oil, the Green side for solar/wind/geothermal. But what about the alternative?

Fracking oil/gas has to stop, this is causing all sorts of small shallow quakes. USGS in the states are glossing over this issue with pixie dust.

[hobbyguy]

The tar sands production is NOT going to be eliminated. It will, most likely, die a natural death as other forms of energy push it further and further towards being financially inviable.

Bloomberg forecasts that is likely to happen around 2025-2027 as they are predicting that is when electric cars could reach 35% of new sales the price of oil will crash again. Not sure if that is a reasonable forecast, but certainly electric cars are becoming a practical reality for commuter/in town vehicles and for shorter trips with vehicles like the Chevy Volt and the new Bolt. Costs are still a problem, but they are coming down. The Bolt all electric (price aside) would be very practical for a two vehicle family.

There certainly is a lot of caution in new projects in the tar sands. http://www.albertacanada.com/files/albertacanada/AOSID_QuarterlyUpdate_Winter2017.pdf

What appears to be happening is only existing facilities being updated to improve efficiency and therefore financial viability.

The wild card, of course, is external factors that could throw the world oil markets into turmoil (hypothetically something like a war between the Saudis and Iran). One of those factors that could change things is Trump's anti-AWG stance. If the EPA, for example, is prohibited from classifying CO2 as a pollutant, then that's makes Venezuelan heavy more cost effective than Canadian tar sands production.

[Merry]

I agree that the oil sands will eventually cease to be the huge driver of the Canadian economy that it is today; although I disagree that we'll all be driving electric cars in as little as 11 years. I'd guess it'll be more like 20 or even 25, but I do agree that it will come, eventually.

But, in the meantime, this world of ours has mainly oil based economies, and it is true that our much maligned oil is less environmentally harmful than some of the alternatives out there (notice I didn't say not at all harmful, just less so).

So, if we accept that the world is going to continue to rely on oil for the next 20 years, and we accept that our oil is a better choice than oil from places like Venezuela, we now have to consider the safest way to get that oil to market. And, while no method is perfect, I think we can all agree that pipelines are better than shipping it by rail.

[Dizzy1]

I've never understood why the environmental movement puts so much of it's energy into mainly this one issue, while ignoring all kinds of other environmental issues

Because its hip and trendy.

[rustled]

...

The wild card, of course, is external factors that could throw the world oil markets into turmoil (hypothetically something like a war between the Saudis and Iran). One of those factors that could change things is Trump's anti-AWG stance. If the EPA, for example, is prohibited from classifying CO2 as a pollutant, then that's makes Venezuelan heavy more cost effective than Canadian tar sands production.

Consider this in the context of the carbon tax and all its cascading costs.

You asked in another thread what the problem is with fighting CO2. I won't cross-post my response, but here's one of the counterproductive results of continuing to misidentify the problem we most want to address.

[hobbyguy]

I honestly believe that the market costs of electric cars will crossover within the foreseeable future.

This is the article worth looking at when considering the issue: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-ev-oil-crisis/

Their prediction is that a similar glut as to what drove the oil prices down, 2 MBPD, could occur as early as 2023. Tar sands oil is expensive to produce, ship, and refine. That makes tar sands oil really vulnerable even to that relatively minor shift in world oil markets.

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/04/06/tesla-rivals-may-kill-the-petrol-car-as-early-as-2025/

“When digital cameras disrupted film cameras, it didn’t just happen with low-end cameras,” Seba says. “It happened with all cameras. It’s the same dynamics with vehicles.”

[rustled]

It will be interesting to watch this evolve.

I won't be game to buy an electric vehicle until I know the batteries are being responsibly manufactured (cradle to grave), and have some assurance they are not going to cost more than the car's worth to replace (several times over the useful life of the car).

I'd look at what charging would likely mean for my household power bill, and if that looks reasonable I'll need to see whether or not I even have a sensible place to plug it in. Most of the cars in our neighbourhood park on the street out front, and this winter their block heater cords were something of a tripping hazard snaking across the sidewalks, particularly after a bit of snow.

Oh, and from what I understand, if several of my neighbours decide they want an electric car, too, the city would have to install more electrical infrastructure to service my neighbourhood. If that's true, I'm sure there will be costs to all of us for that as well. (To me, this is too much like the communities where folk who could afford the solar panels forced the utility to buy power they didn't need, driving up the energy costs for their neighbours.) Hm. Not sure I want to do that to my neighbours.

And I'll still need a car I can rely on to get me 12 hours up the highway in a single day, that I can sleep in if I need too. From what I understand, the technology's not there for distance yet, and the batteries take up a good deal of space.

There's no point giving up having a vehicle that still has a lot of good years left in it for one that only meets some of my needs. So, all things considered, so far it's looking like my best hope is that I continue to have access to responsibly sourced gasoline. I expect mine to take me well past 2023. I wonder how many people are in the same boat I'm in?

If people are relying on their vehicle to get them to work each day, electric probably makes more sense for them. But is this really what we want to encourage? There was a time when we thought it was important to promote living near where they work, and we worked toward better public transit systems. No matter what's providing the energy to move a car, it's still an environmentally costly thing to own (manufacturing, maintaining, disposal) and there's a lot of infrastructure cost (asphalt, roads, parking lots).

To me, this is a lot like the recycling program. It helps people feel so much better about doing the wrong thing, they don't try to do the right thing. As to the digital camera comparison, let's think about how quickly those were being disposed of for "better" ones. Ugh. We used our film cameras for years before recycling them.

Cleaner air in our cities would be a plus, though.

[stuphoto]

The key to it all is offering better alternatives, and they are fast coming.

I was watching "Wheeler Dealers" and they had a guy with an old VW split window bus, converted to electric drive. His greatest fun is to pull up beside a Porsche 911 at a stoplight, hammer the accelerator, and blow them away

Not all that long ago I was doing some research into DIY electric car conversions, and they were saying that the VW van is one of the best choices for conversions.
This is partly because of it's big interior size, relatively light weight, and the strength. The thinking was that you can install several batteries to power it.

However in my own personal opinion I would want something more aerodynamic.

[d0nb]

It's nice that the carbon footprint of extracting bitumen from the oil sands is shrinking, even if for no reason other than to deflect some of the more apocalyptic anti 'tar-sands' rhetoric.

I bought my last auto thinking that it would be tide me over until electric alternatives would be less harmful to the environment. That was seven years ago and unfortunately, a convincing case for electrics remains elusive.

[hobbyguy]

Watching the news today I see a guy in a Nissan Leaf who went for Christmas dinner in Chilliwack from Vancouver - barely made it. But, if he switches to the new Chevy Bolt, he will get there and back with enough left over to go there again. So in a mtter of a year or two, EVs have gone from barely feasible to readily feasible for local traffic/short haul.

That makes them a really good fit for two vehicle families, one gasoline, one electric for commuting. IF the Chevy Bolt price was more in line, then I could see it really changing the game. But it isn't yet. 60% price premium, $15,000 buys a LOT of gasoline.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/20/us-electric-cards-gas-demand/

Lots of speculation as to when the cost crossover and feasibility thresholds will be passed. But one thing for sure - the big auto companies are jumping in with both feet.

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/01/25/china-electric-car-sales-demolish-us-european-sales/

But in China the picture is changing more rapidly. Over 44,000 electric cars sold in China last December.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tychodefeijter/2016/11/25/check-out-these-five-new-electric-cars-from-china-worlds-largest-ev-market/#1671ce58106d

It looks to me like the Chinese government is committed to electric cars. In that context their aggressive nuclear power plant building program makes sense - 35 plus new reactors to go into service.