bitumen

As Washington is abuzz today with the introduction of the Senate's version of a climate and energy bill, 25 Greenpeace activists have taken climate action into their own hands in Canada.

Slipping past tightened security by floating stealthily downriver, they gained access to Suncor's massive tar sands facility and shut down two bitumen conveyor belts. The conveyors receive bitumen from the open pit mines along the banks of the Athabasca River and transport it to the upgrader for refining.

The action is being broadcast live on the web. The images being captured on cell phone video show activists scattered in positions across the large industrial construction with the conveyor stopped.

"We're sending a message to international leaders with Copenhagen less than 70 days away," said Bruce Cox, the Executive Director of Greenpeace Canada, who spoke to SolveClimate while watching the action from an inflatable boat on the Athabasca River. "This is not just about Suncor, or Shell but about our global addiction to dirty energy."

Cox said the activists are prepared to spend the night, equipped with food and safety gear. A growing international audience is tuning into the live stream to see what the police will do.

An environmental catastrophe is underway in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada -- home to the most energy-intensive and dirtiest industrial enterprise on Earth. And it’s about to infect the Great Lakes Basin and the US Midwest, too.

That's according to an excellent new report out of the University of Toronto, How the Oil Sands Got to the Great Lakes (pdf).

Here's the short of what happened. Demand for the sticky, dirty-to-extract crude of the tar sands (called bitumen) soared. The sector exploded. The pressure to develop kept mounting, with no political will to curb it, despite the serious climate and financial risks involved.

That triggered the need/greed for more capacity out of the tar sands and into the destination markets of the US Midwest. And it led to this idea. The building of a continent-wide network of pipelines, some thousands of miles long, to transport the crude, as well as refinery expansions on the US side of the Great Lakes to process the raw goo into gas.

It's a massive infrastructure change, the advent of a whole new fossil fuel supply chain, or a "pollution delivery system," as the author calls it. And it's well on its way.