Sometimes environmentalists piss me off

I consider myself to be an environmentalist - I do my best to reduce my environmental impact, volunteer with projects aimed at restoring damaged habitats, walk to work, own a fuel efficient car, and so forth.  Almost always, I come out on the side of of the "greenies" in arguments.

But sometimes I wonder if the ranks of my fellow environmentalists are filled with idiots...

A recent issue, both here at home and more recently at Stockholm, is my countries tar sands.  For those of you not-in-the-know, the tar sands are the newest source of oil, and consists of tar-soaked sand.  The sand is strip-mined, and the tar removed by heating the sand.  The tar can then be processed into crude oil and other oil products.

This process is messy - there are the usual run-off issues that come with mine tailings, the strip mining destroys local habitat, and the high degree of processing needed to convert tar into usable fuel consumes a large amount of energy.  Because it is such a large and obvious target, many environmental groups have targeted the oil sands, in an attempt to get them shut down.

That is, simply put, stupid.  Despite the dirtiness of it, oil sands account for ~1% of Canadian CO2 emissions (which, in turn, account for about 2% of global totals).  So eliminating the tar sands wouldn't exactly put a big dint in Canada's CO2 output, and wouldn't even be noticeable on a global scale.  Further more, the impact would be even less than 1%, as the tar sands would have to be replaced with another source of energy.

In contrast, transportation accounts for about 20% of GHG's in Canada, as does generating electricity.  You could get an equivalent cut in CO2 simply by raising fuel efficiency or electrical generating efficiencies by 5%.

So while the oil sands make for good media optics, they are all but meaningless in terms of making significant environmental impacts.

A better option would be to push for broad-spectrum changes - industrial caps, increased fuel economy standards, improved building standards, etc.  Small increases in efficiencies, spread throughout industry and society, would create large decreases in total GHG production.  Supporting mitigation procedures - GHG capture, planting new forests, and other forms of carbon sequestration - could also go a long ways.  Likewise, beginning to move our energy base towards low-CO2 (i.e. natural gas, biogas/biofuel, etc) and no-CO2 (nuclear, wind, hydro, solar, etc) would also have a tremendous impact.

But instead the greenies focus all their energies on a minor, albeit ugly, player.

I guess it goes to show that some people prefer appearances over actually doing something.  I proudly place myself in the latter category - its unfortunate that so many of my fellow greenies place themselves in the former.