The Tar Sands have surpassed the Sydney Tar Ponds as
What we need is an immediate royalty on non-renewable water use. A dollar per barrel of water sounds like a good start to me. And, just to be fair about it, a refundable carrot of a dollar per barrel of water refunded to oil companies for every barrel of fresh potable water returned to the bio-region’s watershed (of course, it must be free of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and naphthenic acids).
The toxic tailing ponds hold more contaminated water than will be behind the Three Gorges dam. People downstream are dying of cancer. The highway into Fort McMurray is the most dangerous in Canada.
I take your important point about the Tar Sands. However, the notion that the Sydney Tar Ponds are, or ever were, Canada's worst environmental disaster is a myth.
ReplyDeleteSydney's problems come from turning coal into coke, one of the most common industrial processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Sydney Tar Ponds are a large site containing large quantities of very common industrial byproducts. Its contents are moderately toxic, but not unusually so. Most North American cities contain sites with similar contaminants (the result of coke production or manufactured gas plants).
The false and destructive moniker "Canada's Worst Toxic Waste Site" was invented by bureaucrats who wanted national buy-in for a cleanup they expected to be too expensive for the province to manage alone; It was picked up by the media, to make stories more exciting and important sounding; and perpetuated by environmentalists for a multitude of reasons.
Sydney is a working class city that has had more than it's share of hard knocks. The mess left over from a century of steel and coke production needs to be cleaned up, and is being cleaned up, but no good purpose is served by exaggerating the problem.
Wellmeaning people do real harm when they perpetuate the widespread sbibboleth that Sydney is Canada's worst environmental problem.
I don't mean this to be critical of you personally. The media and various environmentalists have drilled this notion into people's heads with constant repetition. But constant repetition doesn't make something true.