by GEOFF DEMBICKI
Syncrude Tar Sands Mining Operations. PHOTO/David Dodge, The Pembina Institute
Tom Corcoran watched incredulously late last February as political turmoil in Libya shot global oil prices skyward. The situation was “intolerable,” he said at the time, sipping coffee at a member’s only club for Republican legislators and their supporters in Washington, DC.
Corcoran, a former Congressman from Illinois turned oil industry lobbyist, refused to accept that the “lifeblood” of the U.S. could be so vulnerable – that panicked international investors, speculating on civil war in North Africa, were driving up the cost of crude oil.
“I think that’s a dangerous situation and one which the United States should address,” the 71-year-old Corcoran explained in a slow, gentlemanly drawl.
The multinational oil companies he helps represent on Capitol Hill include descendants of the most powerful corporations in global history. Over the past few decades they, too, have been forced to reckon with events far beyond their control including depleting oil fields and state-led power grabs that now push them ever deeper into the frigid petroleum reserves of the Canadian province of Alberta.
Oil sands – or tar sands – from this western province have enabled Canada to become the largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S., shipping roughly one million more barrels per day than Saudi Arabia. Yet even as concern mounts that fossil fuels are damaging the climate, this rapidly growing industry is producing some of the most emissions-heavy gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel on the planet.
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