Its’ not every day you see a polar bear on Vancouver’s famous Sea Wall. Especially one raising awareness about the environmental impacts of the Alberta oil sands operations.
This is part of DeSmog’s Arctic Front initiative.
Check out the our Arctic Front Flickr photo group where we are documenting polar bear sitings from New Delhi to Sydney to Vancouver that are out raising awareness about the nasty impacts the Alberta oil sands are having on our planet.
Here’s a few factoids about the Alberta Oil Sands:
- Oil Sands operations could eventually cover 149,000 square kilometers of pristine forest – that’s an area roughly the size of Florida.
- Each day the oil sands use 600 million cubic feet of natural gas to, in effect, melt the tarry sludge into a usable form – that’s enough natural gas to heat more than 3 million Canadian homes.
- Producing a barrel of oil from the tar sands produces three times more greenhouse gas than a barrel of conventional oil.
- Oil sands operations use about the same amount of freshwater in a year that the entire City of Calgary uses (population 1 million) – 90% of this freshwater ends up in toxic tailing ponds.
- Toxic tailing ponds already cover more than 50 square kilometers and are considered to be one of largest man-made structures in the world.
