This week, the Canadian government will be in Bonn touting Canada's climate plan. It will be joined by Canadian oil companies working to put a green hue on Canadian tar sands – but the world shouldn't be fooled.
The truth is, Canada cannot yet meet its own arguably weak climate targets. The country plans to expand oil and gas production despite
evidence that this is inconsistent with Paris goals. Then, there is the issue of the toxic sludge of waste products from Canada's tar sands destruction, which form what are known as tailings ponds.
As of this year, these ponds hold 1 trillion litres of sludge that is unlike any other industrial byproduct in the world. They contain a unique cocktail of toxic chemicals and hydrocarbons that will remain in molasses-like suspension for centuries if left alone.
These open, unlined ponds currently cover 220 sq km, an area of land equivalent to 73 New York Central Parks. A single tailings pond – the Mildred Lake Settling Basin – has been identified by the US Department of the Interior as the world's largest dam.
'These ponds hold 1 trillion litres of sludge that is unlike any other industrial by-product in the world.'
These tailings ponds made international headlines in 2008 when 1,600 ducks flew into one of them. The resulting imagery of animals coated in oil was a powerful reminder of the costs of our global oil addiction.
Since then, the issue has slowly faded from public memory as the Alberta government's strident promises to clean up the ponds left
Canada and the rest of the world under the impression the problem was being seriously dealt with.
Yet, last month the government of Alberta approved a tailings management plan for Suncor Energy Incorporated, the oldest mining company in the Canadian tar sands. By approving this plan, Suncor will get an additional 70 years after their operations shut down to clean up the environmental mess that they have created over 60 years of oil extraction.
These open, unlined ponds currently cover 220 sq km, an area of land equivalent to 73 New York Central Parks
To be clear, Alberta has a new progressive majority NDP government which has made some great, long overdue strides in addressing social and environmental issues such as a coal phase-out and a cap on emissions from the tar sands.
However, even under this government, the cumulative impacts of this fossil fuel development are growing and industry continues to obtain sweeping approvals that are shocking for their lack of environmental rigour.
The history of the government's weak attempts to address tailings are shocking. A couple of years ago a directive was put into place to require companies to reduce tailings. Not a single company complied. Rather than fining the companies or refusing permits, the government simply removed the directive.
This recent Suncor approval highlights the staggering and growing cumulative environmental footprint of the Alberta tar sands. Mining the tar sands for oil produces over 3,600 tonnes of CO
2 emissions per hectare, consumes freshwater at a rate that rivals the daily water use of several major Canadian cities combined, and has destroyed a New York City-sized chunk of boreal forest and muskeg habitat.
For these reasons, the tar sands have been dubbed the largest (and most destructive) industrial project in human history.
Unfortunately, the now full-blown environmental crisis of tar sands tailings ponds has only gotten worse in the last decade. In Canada, provinces and territories have jurisdiction over resource extraction, and the implementation of a new tailings regulation by the provincial regulator has resulted in a recent review of all tar sands operations tailings management plans.
Suncor's plan is the first to be approved, but represents a typical submission. For this reason, the approval decision has now set the precedent for what will be considered acceptable by the regulator in the sector, and it isn't pretty.
While Suncor's mine will close down in 2033, they have been granted until after 2100 to figure out how to clean up their tailings and reclaim the land. Moreover, they will be "treating" their tailings by dumping them in the bottom of pits and covering them with freshwater to form a permanent "lake".
The long-term ecological risks this creates extend far beyond Alberta, and even Canada. Several of the tailings ponds are now decades old. A failure of a single tailings dyke could result in contaminated waterways from Alberta's Athabasca region through to the Arctic Ocean, that would make even the Exxon Valdez disaster look mild by comparison.
In addition, government data shows that these tailing ponds are leaking and indigenous leaders have repeatedly called for health studies and noted that the expansion of the tarsands is violating their Treaty rights
The dire state of this situation is compounded by the very uncertain economic future for tar sands mining. The tar sands industry's approach to tailings management since 1967 has been to procrastinate on cleaning up the mess until a silver bullet technology is found to deal with them.
Now, 50 years later, technologies to clean up tailings that have been discovered are not being implemented because they are expensive and government is not requiring them.
Meanwhile, the buck is being passed even further into the future. In 2015 the auditor general estimated that tailings liability now surpassed $20bn, a figure many say is conservative. Mining tar sands is one of the most expensive ways to produce crude oil in the world, and with the International Energy Agency assessing 21st-century peak oil demand to be around the corner, it will be among the first oil industries to face bankruptcy.
If they are not dealt with now, tar sands tailings could become a permanent toxic legacy of the most reckless forms of 20th-century fossil fuel extraction.
Fortunately, however, there is still time to shine a light on Canada's most shameful environmental secret and force the polluters to pay up today before they are no longer around to do so.
- Tzeporah Berman is a Canadian policy adviser on climate and energy issues and an adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University
