Canadian environmental groups looking to help from Obama on tar sands

Hopefully his environmental team will be able to benefit the U.S., as well as the rest of the world, after getting up to speed on their Green Machine to figure out where we stand climatically & what we need to do in order to minimize any future - or manmade - natural disasters. I'd like to see NASA's climate change & global warming data published & then dissected for the info we haven't been given in order to take the most appropriate ecological path.

Unfortunately the environmental groups have a very small voice in Canada.

i asked myself that same question many times.

We have some of these "tar sands" in Missouri. They decided it was not worth it to use about as much energy to extract the oil from the tar, as you ended up with as a marketable product. Not to mention the destruction to the environment the mining process causes. Why can't the Canadians figure this out?

The tar sands should be closed simply for the amount of poisonous pollution they spew!

From the article:

Canadian environmental groups are ratcheting up their attacks on the Alberta oil sands, asking U.S. president-elect Barack Obama to reject special treatment for the developments under a proposed climate change accord.

With the Alberta economy reeling from slumping oil and gas prices, the environmentalists stepped up their anti-oil-sands campaign with a direct appeal to the president-elect, who has announced he will visit Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa soon after his inauguration.

The federal government launched an effort days after Mr. Obama was elected in November to persuade the Democratic standard-bearer that the U.S. and Canada should enter into a climate change accord that would also protect U.S. energy security by ensuring the oil sands development isn't derailed by tough new emissions regulations.

However, the environmental groups supported the concept of a continent-wide approach to climate change regulations, but said it would be undermined by any special treatment for the oil sands.

"The integrity of such a system would be entirely compromised should it somehow give a 'pass' to the production of high carbon oil from the tar sands, which many believe is the intent of the overture," said the letter, which was signed by a half-dozen groups, including the David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute and the Sierra Club of Canada.

Copies of the letter were also sent to Mr. Obama's cabinet designations, including soon-to-be secretary of state Hillary Clinton, incoming energy secretary Steve Chu, and the president-elect's special adviser on energy and climate change, Carol Browner.

The federal and Alberta governments have worked hard to reassure the Obama team that Canada is moving aggressively to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and that the oil sands producers will be required to reduce emissions as projects move forward.