Chevron made waves in the business world when it announced its October 6 sale of 30-percent of its holdings in the Alberta-based Duvernay Shale basin to Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company (KUFPEC) for $1.5 billion.

It marked the first North American purchase for the Kuwaiti state-owned oil company and yields KUFPEC 330,000 acres of Duvernay shale gas. Company CEO and the country's Crown Prince, Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, called it an "anchor project" that could spawn Kuwait's expansion into North America at-large. 

Kuwait's investment in the Duvernay, at face-value buying into Canada's hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") revolution, was actually also an all-in bet on Alberta's tar sands. As explained in an October 7 article in Platts, the Duvernay serves as a key feedstock for condensate, a petroleum product made from gas used to dilute tar sands, allowing the product to move through pipelines. 

And while Kuwait — the small Gulf state sandwiched between Iraq and Saudi Arabia — has made a wager on Alberta's shale and tar sands, Big Oil may also soon make a big bet on Kuwait's homegrown tar sands resources.

"Kuwait has invited Britain’s BP, France’s Total, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron, to bid for a so-called enhanced technical service agreement for the northern Ratqa heavy oilfield," explained an October 2 article in Reuters. "It is the first time KOC will develop such a big heavy oil reservoir and the plan is to produce 60,000 bpd from Ratqa, which lies close to the Iraqi border [in northern Kuwait]…and then ramp it up to 120,000 bpd by 2025."

In the past, Kuwait has said it hopes to learn how to extract tar sands from Alberta's petroleum engineers.

Canadian Tutelage

Back in 2007, Kuwait had much more ambitious plans for the Ratqa oil field.

Though the current goal is to suck 120,000 barrels per day of heavy oil out of the field, back in 2007 the goal was 900,000 barrels per day by 2020. And Alberta's petroleum engineers would lend their expertise to the cause, or at least that was the plan for Kuwait Oil Company at the time. 

"Unless we seek the experience of the industry here, we will not be able to reach our target," Ali al-Shammari, at the time the deputy managing director for finance for the Kuwait Oil Company, told the Calgary Herald. "We will need [international oil companies'] help in developing the reservoirs and may also consider the options of signing enhanced technical services agreements."

Kuwait's entrance into Canada depicts how important Alberta's tar sands have become for the global geopolitical landscape. And Kuwait opening its doors to the oil majors depicts the country as an emerging player in the global oil market.

Geopolitics At Play 

The Islamic State — formerly known as the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)— has established what it calls a Caliphate in both northern Iraq and large swaths of Syria.

Fueled by $25 to $60 per barrel oil sold on the black market, Kuwait has largely escaped from the day-to-day newscycle. But as the famous Mark Twain quip goes, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

The Ratqa oil field is the same geological formation as the Rumaila oil field, which sits in southern Iraq. Iraq and Kuwait fought a war over the field in early-1990s, in which the United States led the call to arms against former President Saddam Hussein: Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War. 

In 2010, Iraq and Kuwait signed an agreement — an armistice really — to share the border oilfield. 

Further, Wikileaks U.S. Department of State diplomatic cables made public by whistleblower Chelsea Manning show that the U.S. government has kept a close eye on the Ratqa oil field, as well as on which U.S.-based oil companies stood to win and lose if developed. 

Though almost two and a half decades have gone by since Operation Desert Storm and Saddam Hussein is no longer even alive, one thing remains constant: oil still runs the show in the Persian Gulf region. And this time around, it's tar sands oil — the same oil running the show in Alberta.

Photo Credit: esfera | ShutterStock

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As production in Alberta's oilsands continues to expand, waste byproducts continue to build up as well, from petcoke piles to tailing ponds. Now the energy companies behind the oilsands boom are planning to dump their growing volumes of toxic wastewater into man-made lakes, in the hope that they eventually become natural habitats.

Jeremy van Loon of Business Week writes that Syncrude Canada, Royal Dutch Shell, and ExxonMobil affiliate Imperial Oil "are running out of room to store the contaminated water that is a byproduct of the process used to turn bitumen–a highly viscous form of petroleum–into diesel and other fuels."

By 2022 the monthly output of wastewater from these companies "could turn New York's Central Park into a toxic reservoir 11 feet deep, according to the Pembina Institute," writes van Loon.

To accommodate the growing volume of byproduct, the energy companies have reportedly "obtained permission from provincial authorities to flood abandoned tar sand mines with a mix of tailings and fresh water." According to van Loon, this would "transform northern Alberta into the largest man-made lake district on earth."

Syncrude's Base Mine Lake, on which work began last summer, will measure 2,000 acres when complete, and is expected by the company to "eventually replicate a natural habitat, complete with fish and waterfowl."

Non-profit environmental group Pembina describes these end pit lakes as "high-risk and experimental," noting that "historical data about using end pit lakes as toxic waste dumps are insufficient to determine whether or not they are a safe, long-term tool for reclaiming tailings waste as no example of a functional end pit lake currently exists."

There are about 30 end pit lakes planned for the Athabasca Boreal region, according to Alberta's Cumulative Environment Management Association.

"There's no way to tell how the ecology of these lakes will evolve over time," said Jennifer Grant, director of oilsands at Pembina. "It's all guesswork at this point. It's reckless."

"We're playing Russian roulette with a big part of an important ecosystem," said David Schindler, an ecology professor at the University of Alberta. "Nothing is going to grow in that soup of toxic elements except perhaps a few hydrosulfide bacteria. And all of the unforeseen events are being downplayed."

Syncrude began creating an end pit lake 30 miles north of Fort McMurray this summer, filling in a mine with fresh water from a dam to a depth of 16 feet to keep toxic tailings down at the bottom. According to company spokeswoman Cheryl Robb, trials involving "test ponds" resulted in naturally occurring ecosystems, with microbes helping to break down pollutants.

However, van Loon writes that the "largest test pond was 4 hectares–roughly 1/200th the size of Syncrude's lake."

"The big question we have is how long will it take before the water is clean, how long is it going to take before the littoral zones develop and the shoreline vegetation builds up?" said Robb. "But we're confident in the technology."

One of the major concerns surrounding end pit lakes is the possibility of contaminated water seeping into the boreal ecosystem. In October, "communities bordering Canada's Athabasca River were cautioned not to drink from the waterway after a breach in a coal tailings storage pond dumped 1 billion liters (264 million gallons) of contaminated water into an area west of Edmonton."

According to Pembina, the exact amount of seepage from tailings in Alberta is "either not known or has not been made public," but modelled estimates suggest that "11 to 12.6 million litres of tailings leak from tailings ponds each day."

Image Credit: WhitneyH / Flickr

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It was less than six months ago that a handful of energy companies resorted to selling off portions of their stake in the oil patch after failing to garner the kind of investor support they needed to fund major projects.

The costs of development in the oilsands is increasing due to material and labour shortages in Alberta and limited real estate. According to reports by the Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada, the industry is effectively innovating itself out of the labour market, expanding beyond what the available pool of skilled labour can support.

Development costs are also escalating as the environmental toll of extracting and upgrading tar-like bitumen from the region has put both policy makers and the public on edge.

Jean-Michel Gires, the former CEO of the Canadian unit of France's Total SA, says crude from the oilsands is "among the most expensive oil" in the world to produce. Yet, development continues, leading some experts to claim that the oilsands costly production still doesn't accurately reflect the true costs associated with the resource.

Rising Costs

Royal Dutch Shell's Athabasca Oil Sands Project costs jumped from an estimated $3.5 billion in 2005 to $14.3 billion in 2010 due to unforseen expenses. 

Even without environmental regulations concerning waste, companies are already spending billions on tailings reduction technology simply because they’re running out of space. Tailings ponds currently cover more than 176 square kilometres of the region.

The Kearl Mine, an Exxon-owned Imperial Oil project, cost $12.9 billion in its first phase – more than 40 percent over the expected price tag.

The mega-project is intended to produce 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day by 2020. Downgraded from three development phases to two, the Kearl project is expected to produce 110,000 barrels per day by the end of this year.

The mine is already connected to Enbridge’s Cheecham Terminal by the Woodland Pipeline and will begin to test capacity before long. Enbridge quietly received regulatory approval in August of last year to build a $1.3 billion extension of the Woodland Pipeline to accommodate the expected increase in production at Kearl. The project is set to be complete in 2015, the same year Imperial plans to move an additional 110,000 barrels of bitumen per day out of Kearl.

Inflating Investments

According to investment analysts, the solution to the problem, both in terms of money and morale, is to greenlight the various pipeline projects currently under consideration, including proposal to modify existing pipelines such as Enbridge’s Line 9 to eastern Canada. But those pipelines themselves are projected to cost billions of dollars to build.

Moving ahead with such projects has been made easier with a flood of outside investment used to artificially prop up the industry.

One such surge of investment recently came from Warren Buffet. This summer marked the first time one of the world’s largest investors plunged billions into Canadian resource development. Buffet, head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, has thrown his weight behind Suncor, Canada’s largest oil and gas company.

Ironically, this kind of large-scale investment serves to drive costs up even higher by contributing to inflation.

Counting the Real Costs

It’s unlikely the rising costs of development, no matter how severe, will investment in the oilsands to an end. Yet when it comes to realistic cost accounting for large-scale carbon projects, there are people working on pragmatic solutions.

In spite of the environmental movement’s push for a shift in values, some experts say it’s more likely carbon policy will make the difference.

Dr. Andrew Leach, professor at the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta says the rising social cost of tar sands development, as well as meaningful environmental policy changes are contributing to the higher price tags on new projects, but it’s ultimately consumer choices that will determine whether projects in the tar sands remain viable.

To illustrate, Leach uses the example of the car-driven suburb model of living.

“In order to meet at 450 ppm target, we can’t have people living out in the suburbs and driving big cars, but people are still living in the suburbs and buying big cars.” The analogy applies to dirty oil development. It’s not that developers don’t know what’s going on; it’s that they won’t stop until someone makes them.

“That’s sort of at the heart of carbon pricing to say let’s let the market decide what activities make sense given a particular carbon budget.”

From a policy perspective Leach, who spent a year working on policy initiatives with Environment Canada, believes the best thing we can do it is force the industry to internalize the social costs of extracting oil from the ground.

“The social cost of a carbon future, reclamation expenses, water and air pollution – those need to be internal to company decisions, and that can be done in any number of ways,” he said, adding that this is a standard view among economist, despite how popular media portrays the issue.

Matt Horne, Director of Climate Change at the Pembina Institute, says industry regulation and policy changes are already making renewables more competitive. Combined with success stories from various fields within the green energy, the gap between oil and renewable energy is getting smaller. It’s just the policy piece that’s missing.

He says the combination of solid economics and strong environmental policies will make renewables the norm rather than “a few leading examples.” The goal is ultimately to make it cheaper to produce clean energy than it is to extract oil from the ground.

“I think policy can change quickly and change the economic playing field quite quickly.”

Mark Jaccard, professor in the School of Resource Management at Simon Fraser University and author of Sustainability Suspicions, believes that with more attention on those leading examples—particularly the ones closest to home like California and British Columbia—we can make that change sooner rather than later.

“I am amazed that environmentalists all over North America are not talking about California's policies every day and focusing strategic efforts to effect voting support on vulnerable politicians where they do not push for similar policies,” he said in an email interview.

He cited the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, the Renewable Electricity Portfolio Standard and the Vehicle Emissions Standards among others as examples of economic and environmental success.

Jaccard also believes the movement needs to shift its focus from individual projects to the broader issue of the climate. When it comes to particular projects, such as the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, he says the benefits for the people in power will always outweigh the environmental costs. To create the critical mass necessary for change, we should be focusing on climate change as a global issue, something no one can ignore.

“When did we get good policies implemented? Never when talking about oil sands and oil spills. But yes when we got enough people (probably less than 10 percent of the population) very concerned about climate change. Politicians, ever watchful of swing voters, had to pay attention.” Environmentalists should also be fighting for trade penalties on imports from jurisdictions that are still using the atmosphere as a dumping ground, he adds.

“Only in this way can environmentalists put together a coherent argument for action. Only in this way can we effectively counter the fossil fuel arguments like, one, we need the Chinese to act, two, our emissions are only a small percentage, three, we won't stop needing oil tomorrow, etc.”  

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When it comes to strategies for changing the world, storytelling isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind. Things like conviction, advocacy, mobilizing and building networks of supporters seem like more obvious candidates. Adam Kahane isn’t saying that the conventional repertoire doesn’t work. But in his experience, the stories we tell about ourselves, our opponents and the kind of world we want to live in can have transformative effects.  

Kahane is a specialist in “transformative scenario planning,” a kind of dialogue technique that aims to bring together allies and enemies alike to map out new ways of resolving seemingly intractable problems. Although the name sounds like a bit of business school esoterica, the method is actually quite straightforward. Instead of coming to the table with a collection of demands, a transformative scenario planning process invites the parties involved to put their demands aside in order to focus on figuring out what’s actually possible in the first place. 

 “The method in its simplest terms involves bringing together actors from across a given system, whether that’s a community or a sector or a country, or a larger system, and working together to understand what’s possible in this system,” explains Kahane. “That turns out to be the surprising key, that to talk about what’s possible rather than what we want (or what we don’t want) opens up a whole different kind of conversation.”

Kahane first tried his hand at scenario planning while working at Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1980s. Shell had begun using scenarios in the 1970s in an attempt to maintain a competitive edge over the other major oil companies. Still the corporate world’s leading practitioner of scenario planning, Shell claims that scenarios allowed them to anticipate the oil price shock of October 1973 and “recover more quickly than [their] competitors.”

“The key point about scenario planning in the Shell context is that it’s a tool for being able to adapt to a future that you can’t predict and can’t control,” says Kahane. Planners at Shell map out different variables such as political instability and resource constraints and flesh them out into plausible descriptions of the future. Rather than seek to change the world, scenario planning at Shell is an adaptive method for ensuring future corporate profits in the face of instability.

The transformative component of scenario planning first came into play in 1991, when Kahane was invited to South Africa to participate in a process known as the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise. Bringing together politicians, ANC activists, trade unionists, economists and business executives, the aim was to foster dialogue about possible futures for a country in the midst of a tumultuous transition from apartheid to democracy.

The exercises in South Africa were distinct from previous uses of scenario planning for two reasons. “[Mont Fleur] was the first time, at least the first major time, that scenario work was done not as an expert activity, or as a staff activity, but as what we now call a multi-stakeholder activity,” he explains. Whereas corporate or military strategists had previously used scenarios to plan for the survival and success of their respective organizations, Mont Fleur brought together a diverse range of people, each with a stake in the future development of South Africa. The discussions that took place there were not negotiations, but rather a kind of imaginative exercise that worked to find common ground between groups from opposing ends of the social spectrum.

“The second and even more fundamental difference, which has really been the motivating or the key point I’ve been working on for these 20 years since, is that they were telling stories about what could happen, not in order to adapt, but in order to influence what would happen.” By creating multiple possible narratives from a diversity of perspectives, Kahane argues that the process helped to open up new pathways into the future.

Kahane’s work has evolved in the two decades since the South African experience, and he now works as a partner at Reos Partners, a global consulting firm using techniques such as transformative scenario planning to address tough social problems. When he comes to Vancouver on October 21 to deliver a public lecture at the Stonehouse Institute, one of the themes he’ll be discussing is the application of transformative scenario planning to the daunting task of confronting climate change.  

There may be more than just a passing irony in the fact that Kahane hopes to use a technique developed by a major oil company in an effort to address climate change, a process driven in large part by the burning of fossil fuels. While Shell publishes the results of its scenario planning exercises in glossy reports on climate change and the stressing of planetary systems, it continues to invest heavily in extreme energy like fracking and Arctic drilling. Despite the inspiring language in their reports, Shell remains a major multinational oil company whose sole reason for being is to extract oil, stay ahead of the competition and deliver higher profits to its shareholders.

The case of Shell points to a limitation of the transformative scenario planning model: there are some problems for which narrative and dialogue are not up to the task. We know that the majority of remaining global fossil fuel deposits need to stay in the ground if we are to stay below a 2°C temperature increase. For that to happen, Shell would need to write off untold billions and likely cease to exist as a corporation—a fate it would no doubt resist. With stakes that high, it seems unlikely that Shell or any fossil fuel company could meaningfully participate in a scenario planning exercise together with anyone serious about stopping climate change.

Kahane recognizes the fact that some issues simply can’t be resolved through discussion and forging shared narratives. When political conflict rests not on a lack of mutual understanding but rather a genuine, unresolvable antagonism between conflicting interests, then the more traditional tools in the activist’s toolkit come into play. “If you think that your opponent’s interests are such that they will never do what you think they need to do, what you think they ought to do, then you’re back to the other strategy, which is advocating and mobilizing and pushing,” says Kahane. “You always have that as an option.”

For more information on Kahane's talk in Vancouver on Monday, October 21, visit the Stonehouse Institute.

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Following a trip to the Netherlands to speak at the Royal Dutch Shell Annual General Meeting, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) has released a short documentary film detailing the struggle against tar sands development.

Narrated by Indigenous rights activist and ACFN communications coordinator Eriel Deranger, the film gives a brief history of the nation’s conflict with Shell Oil, including broken impact-benefit agreements dating back ten years, and residents of Fort Chipewyan explain in their own words why they fight for their land.

Yet another test of Treaty 8 and section 35 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms will come at the end of this month. Shell’s proposal to expand the Jackpine Mine in northern Alberta is currently under review with the Alberta regulatory body, the Energy Resources Conservation Board, with a decision expected by next Friday, May 31.

Since the ACFN filed its constitutional challenge against Shell in 2012, the company has also proposed a new open pit mine project, the Pierre River Mine, that will likely go under review before the end of this year.

Deranger says the time has come to draw a line in the sand. “If we don’t put our foot down somewhere, it will never stop.”

Image Credit: Creative Commons via mark(s)elliott

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Yesterday, members of First Nations and environmental organizations from both Canada and the United States attended Royal Dutch Shell’s Annual General Meeting in The Hague, Netherlands, to speak out against the company’s high-risk energy projects.

Eriel Deranger, communications coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN), attended the meeting on behalf of the nation and spoke directly to Shell’s board of directors, focusing on the duty consult on the Jackpine Mine expansion project.

Deranger addressed the chair of the board to ask why a company that purports to put so much emphasis on stakeholder relationships has failed to address the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s concerns regarding tar sands development. The chair responded that the company felt the hearings for the Jackpine project were successful, but that it would open discussion on the issue with the president of Shell Canada, Lorraine Mitchelmore.

Other organizations, including Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), UK Tar Sands Network and members of the Inupiat community of Alaska attended to question Shell on plans such as offshore drilling in the Arctic.

Deranger said she's pleased with the response from the chair of the board, but will continue to demand accountability. “We have a longstanding relationship with Shell that ties to business ventures and programs and projects Shell has run over the last ten years,” she said, adding that concern over the impact of tar sands has been growing over the last decade, causing the relationship to deteriorate.

She said the ACFN believes the only way the relationship can continue in a positive way is for Shell to make the nation a partner in all future development. She added that the nation’s demand to work with Shell has nothing to do with encouraging development or with revenues. “We want to be partners in the development so we can create a baseline for environment protection and protection of our treaty rights.”

ACFN has been pushing for Shell to agree to work with their traditional knowledge holders to do a full analysis of the impact of what the nation has termed extreme energy projects, but the company has refused. Shell has argued that there was no need to collect that kind of information because the data already exists. Deranger said that’s not good enough. “The data that’s been created has been inefficient and was not created by us.”

While she doesn’t have much faith in Shell’s promises, she’s heartened by the change in tone she saw between last year’s meeting and today’s.

“Last year they just really tried to brush me off, and this year they seem legitimately sympathetic.” Last year, Deranger asked similar questions about projects and the company’s failure to adequately consult First Nations. The board told her that her nation was an anomaly and that they should take up their issues with their government.

Deranger said the next step is to give Shell a chance to follow through on its promise to connect the ACFN with Shell's Canadian president.

“I think it’s a little bit of a wait-and-see, will they live up to their word,” she said. “I don’t have a ton of faith they will but if they don’t, they’ve just given us a bit of an upper hand by basically lying to us in front of their shareholders.” The AFCN have shown on more than one occasion that they aren’t afraid to take action if Shell doesn’t hold up its end of a deal.

“They’ve made promises in the past to our community that haven’t lived up to that resulted in us suing them.”

Any shareholder is permitted to attend the AGM and ask questions. Shareholders can also act as proxies to allow other groups to come. Friends of the Earth Netherlands acted as a proxy for the ACFN.

Deranger said it’s common in Europe to see activist organizations buying shares in companies who goals are otherwise at odds with their own as a means of accessing meetings like this one. Shareholder questions ran the gamut from environmental concerns to issues with remuneration, boom-and-bust scenarios and the fracking industry.

Deranger said attending the AGMs of corporations has long been a part of the nation’s strategy. “It’s always been a part of indigenous delegations at Shell to bring awareness to Shell’s bad reputation within indigenous communities,” she said. “We’re just one of many different indigenous communities globally that have been facing issues and damages from Shell’s projects.”

Image credit: Creative Commons L.C. Nottaasen, 2009

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With Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project still in the assessment phase and the Keystone XL pipeline proposal awaiting approval from down south, the government of Alberta is considering the possibility of sending its tar sands bitumen north via a pipeline through the Northwest Territories.

With a view to exporting the estimated $30 billion worth of oil left in the ground every year due to the transportation bottleneck, Alberta has hired Calgary consulting firm Canatec Associates International to determine the feasibility of transporting tar sands crude to the Arctic before sending it on tankers to Asian and European markets. The province has already invested $50,000 in the process.

This northern pipeline would move oil through the Mackenzie River Valley to Tuktoyaktuk, a town off the coast of the Northwest Territories.

A pipeline north through the Arctic Sea could prove more dangerous than any of the pipeline projects currently proposed to travel across Canada or down to the American Gulf coast. Shallow waters off the Alaskan coast would pose significant challenges, requiring either dredging of the waters or extending the pipeline offshore so tankers could load up.

With no deepwater port in the Arctic and little in the way of spill response infrastructure, an accident would be even more devastating to the fragile northern ecosystem.

The history of industrial disasters in the region—most infamous among them the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill—paints a clear picture of what’s at stake.

Royal Dutch Shell demonstrated earlier this year the risks associated with drilling in the Arctic when its Kulluk rig, working out in the Beaufort Sea, came loose from its escort tugboat on route to Seattle and ran aground on Sitkalidak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. The company also suffered embarrassment when a routine spill response test failed after an underwater spill containment dome was inexplicably 'crushed like a beer can' during the exercise.  

The US Environmental Protection Agency also deemed that both the Kulluk and a second drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, were in violation of air pollutant permits during the 2012 summer drilling season. Both vessels allowed the release of excess nitrogen oxides into the air.

After conducting an emergency review of Shell’s operations, the US Interior Department demanded the company demonstrate to both government and an independent third party that repairs had been made and adequate safety measures were in place. A spokesperson for Shell indicated the company would work to renegotiate the terms of its permits rather than work to meet the standards the EPA has set for it.

The Interior Department also placed blame on government agencies such as the Coast Guard for failing to anticipate problems, an assessment that has left some to question Canada's preparedness as the Alberta government looks northward.

At the moment, no rigorous spill-response legislation is in place to protect the Arctic waters. However, in February, Greenpeace obtained a leaked copy of the Arctic Council’s long-awaited spill response plan, set to be adopted at the Arctic nations meeting this month.

Ben Ayliffe, head of the Arctic Oil campaign for Greenpeace International, says the document requires so little of the countries who share the Arctic waters—Denmark, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the United States and Canada—as to be all but meaningless in terms of policy.

“No oil company has ever proven it can clean up an oil spill in ice. The agreement offers nothing whatsoever in terms of identifying how a company would stop and clean up a Deepwater Horizon-style disaster,” Ayliffe said in a press release. The document also failed to address how oil companies would be liable for damages should an oil spill occur. According to Ayliffe "serious questions" remain concerning how much input oil companies had in drafting the agreement.

The oil industry, long criticized for its disproportionate contribution to climate change, is now ironically reaping the benefits of new arctic drilling and oil transport opportunities emerging in the wake of unprecedented ice melt. With global temperatures steadily rising, routes in the far north that were once frozen year-round will soon be open during peak season.

A study by climate scientists at UCLA titled “New Trans-Arctic shipping routes navigable by mid-century” suggests rapid sea ice melt is causing major changes to Arctic geography. The two scientists combined multiple climate projection models and climate change scenarios and compared them to shipping routes.

The results predict new routes through the Northwest Passage, the Northern Sea Route and straight across the North Pole will be available between 2040 and 2049.

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By David Suzuki

The Arctic may seem like a distant place, just as the most extreme consequences of our wasteful use of fossil fuels may appear to be in some distant future. Both are closer than most of us realize.

The Arctic is a focal point for some of the most profound impacts of climate change. One of the world’s top ice experts, Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, calls the situation a “global disaster,” suggesting ice is disappearing faster than predicted and could be gone within as few as four years.

“The main cause is simply global warming: as the climate has warmed there has been less ice growth during the winter and more ice melt during the summer,” he told the U.K.’s Guardian.

Over the past 30 years, permanent Arctic sea ice has shrunk to half its previous area and thickness. As it diminishes, global warming accelerates. This is due to a number of factors, including release of the potent greenhouse gas methane trapped under nearby permafrost, and because ice reflects the sun’s energy whereas oceans absorb it.

With all we know about climate change and what’s happening in the Arctic, you’d think our leaders would be marshalling resources to at least slow it down. Instead, industry and governments are eyeing new opportunities to mine Arctic fossil fuels. Factoring in threats to the numerous species of Arctic creatures – including fish, seabirds, marine mammals such as whales and seals, and polar bears – makes such an approach even more incomprehensible.

Royal Dutch Shell has been preparing to drill in the Arctic, spending $4.5 billion on operations and lease purchases. But its record shows how risky this is. First, a spill containment dome failed a routine safety test and was crushed by underwater pressure. More recently, a drilling rig, which was being towed to Seattle so Shell could avoid paying some Alaskan taxes, broke free during a storm and ran aground on an island in the Gulf of Alaska. The disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 showed how dangerous ocean drilling can be even in relatively calm waters and how bogus the claims of the industry are that it can contain or even clean up a spill.

Responding to climate change and vanishing Arctic ice by gearing up to drill for the stuff at the root of the problem is insane. Unfortunately, many fossil fuel companies and governments are engaged in a mad rush to get as much oil and gas out of the ground – no matter how difficult – while there’s still a market. The ever-increasing devastation of climate change means we will eventually have to leave much of it where it is – or at the very least, substantially slow the pace of extraction and use the resource more wisely – if we want to survive and be healthy as a species.

In Ecuador, knowing that exploiting the country’s massive oil reserves will fuel climate change and cause massive environmental destruction in one of the world’s most biologically diverse rainforests, leaders are taking a different approach. The government plans to leave oil fields in Yasuni National Park untouched if other countries help compensate for some of the lost revenue. So far only about $300 million has been raised toward the $3.6 billion over 13 years that the government believes would make up for half the oil’s value, but the idea is gaining momentum.

The Guardian notes the money won’t go to government but will be “held in trust funds and administered by the UN Development Programme working with a board made up of indigenous peoples, local communities, academics and others.”

Ivonne Baki, head of the negotiating committee of the Yasuní-Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini, told the Guardian Ecuador does not want to become overly dependent on oil. “Oil countries are cursed,” she said. “Developing countries depend on it so much that they do not develop anything else. It breeds corruption and the poor pay the price.”

With Arctic ice melting, Australia on fire and increasing droughts, floods and extreme weather throughout the world, it’s past time to get serious about global warming. It remains to be seen if a plan like Ecuador’s will work, but surely a developed country like Canada can at least learn that wastefully exploiting precious resources as quickly as possible isn’t the only option.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Manager Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

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