2012-02-21

Oil: clean or dirty?

The EU appears to be concerned that oil from Canada is dirty and polluting and wants to inform oil purchasers about this.

Um. So making a mess in the middle of nowhere (and, believe me, Canada has an awful lot of nowhere) is a Bad Thing, and we should instead buy oil instead from such regimes of truth, openness and human rights as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. If you say so.

Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands is an interesting contrast to the EU's opinions. His perspective is that the environmental pollution from the oil sands is outweighed by the damage to human rights perpetrated by buying oil from, and therefore funding, much of the Middle East. You can argue about the relative weights of these damages, but it would be nice to see the EU at least acknowledging that such a trade-off is being made.

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