Mitch Potter
Washington Bureau
http://tiny.cc/XAToW
WASHINGTON-Canada's controversial tar sands industry took its first retail blow Wednesday as two Fortune 500 companies announced plans to eliminate the high-carbon Alberta fuel from its supply chain.
The U.S.-based firms Whole Foods Market Inc. and Bed, Bath and Beyond Inc. both unveiled new fuel policies designed to wean themselves off "higher-than-normal greenhouse gas footprints" inherent in feedstock from the Alberta tar sands.
The decisions are not expected to seriously hamper the southbound flow of Alberta oil, which represents a fifth of all U.S. energy imports.
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5 comments:
Forest Ethics is to be congratulated for this success, which will hopefully be the beginning of a trend. No amount of spin from the Cons can disguise the damage to the air, water and boreal forest which will result from the planned expansion of the Tar Sands.
Stunning hypocrisy.
There is no way to seperate the "dirty Alberta oil" from the other stuff.
More to the point,"organic and natural foods" are more harmful to the environment than the regular supplies. For starters they require significantly more land than conventional farming.The entire industry is a fraud.
-David
Let's boycott Walmart and companies like Heinz as well.
Oil from Alberta oil sands produces about 5% to 15% (depending on the method of extraction) more CO2 than average crude oil consumed by the U.S.
This counts everything - extraction, refining, transportation, and consumption. For this, the U.S. gets their oil from a stable, secure, U.S.-friendly source.
It's not a perfect situation, but it's not bad either.
Rabbit, that doesn't quite count everything.
In October '09, the results of a study by Global Forest Watch Canada entitled "Bitumen and Biocarbon" was discussed on the Greenpeace website as follows, under the title "Significant failure in reporting Tar Sands greenhouse gases"
"Governments and companies are working hard to downplay the impacts of Tar Sands operations, but it turns out that they don't even know the full extent of the problem...
The research paper shows that when emissions from the destruction of the Boreal Forest are factored in, greenhouse gas emissions from Tar Sands operations are significantly higher than reported. The research shows that under full development, the annual average release of carbon from the removal of natural ecosystems would be 8.7mt of carbon dioxide, with wide fluctuations over time. Current reported greenhouse gas emissions from Tar Sands operations, which do not account for these additional emissions, are about 36mt a year. Planned expansion is expected to increase emission levels from operations alone from 120 to 140mt a year."
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