It's not everyday you encounter a polar bear on Vancouver's famous Sea Wall. Especially a really cranky one raising awareness about the environmental impacts of the Alberta Oil Sands industry. [2]
You can check out the latest pictures we have uploaded to our Flickr account [3]as part of DeSmog's Arctic Front initiative. [4]
We have polar bears deployed all over Canada and since the initiative has become so popular, we now have polar bears deployed all over the world, including: Colombia, India, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, Israel, and the United States (LA, Texas and DC).
If you're interested in joining up (and dressing up), please drop us a line at: desmogblog[at]gmail[dot]com.
We also have a very active Facebook group [5] if you would like to join up.
Here's a few factoids about the massive environmental impacts the Alberta Oil Sands [2] are having on our environment:
- 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.