Fuelling fortress America : Report on the Athabasca Tar Sands and United States demands for Canada's energy

For Canadians, petro-rage also has important In some ways, the summer of 2005 was remi- continental implications in terms of our relations niscent of the fall of 1973 when cuts in production with the U. S. In the spring of 2004, Canada sur- and supply by the newly-formed Organization of passed Saudi Arabia to become the largest foreign Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along supplier of oil to [...] Since to extract the deeper reserves of oil from the bi- the Athabasca tar sands development is planned tumen and process it as crude oil, the plan is to to be the cornerstone of a major energy corridor build a pipeline corridor down the Mackenzie to the U. S., it provides a concrete set of projects Valley to transport natural gas from the Arctic from which to examine these issues and concerns to [...] On the one hand, the rapid development of the tar • The U. S. empire and its demands for en- sands is destined to fuel the industrial and military ergy security: The growing dependence of interests of the U. S. at a time when there are clear the U. S. on foreign oil; how Canada exports warning signals that Western society needs to rad- 10 Fuelling Fortress America its oil and natural gas to the U. [...] Since the collapse in 1989 much of the 20th century and, with its love af- of the Berlin Wall, symbolizing the demise of the fair with the automobile, plastics, and other syn- Soviet Union, the U. S. has become the sole eco- thetics, has never ceased to be the world’s largest nomic and military superpower on the planet in consumer of oil. [...] Yet, says oil analyst and The dwindling supplies of conventional oil and journalist Andrew Nikiforuk of Calgary, “no federal gas in Canada raise serious questions about the or provincial government stopped to question the high levels of exports going to the U. S. But the im- logic of rapidly disposing of a declining non-renew- plications of the rapid expansion of the tar sands able resource at mos