Britain to Oppose EU Vote against Tar Sands Extraction

Written by Geoff Collard Tuesday, 29 November 2011

This Friday 2nd December the EU votes on whether to effectively outlaw tar sands oil for use in the EU. Tar sands are recognised as one of the most polluting of all oil and other fossil fuels. The EU wants to outlaw highly polluting fuels, which would include tar sands.

Opposition to the proposed EU Fuel Quality Regulations is being led by, surprise surprise, that 'greenest government ever' - Cameron's and Clegg's Britain.

Oil from tar sands is particularly hard to extract because of the nature of tar sands - the oil is in the sandy shale soils and can only be extracted by 'crushing and washing' the shale, which needs far more energy than conventional oil extraction. Coupled with the fact that most of the tar sands lie under Canada's vast virgin forests, the emissions from the felling of the forests and the degradation and loss of these forests will be nothing less than an environmental disaster, both locally and globally.

Canada has been pushing Britain hard to vote against the new Regulations on Friday, because Canada has huge quantities of oil tar sands which it wants to exploit, but if the EU votes against their use, a large part of Canada's market for these dirty fuels, the EU, would be off limits. Canada has been in cahoots with David Cameron, asking him to lead opposition to the new regulations in the EU, which of course Cameron is willingly doing. British company BP has been lobbying hard against the regulations, as has Dutch owned Shell; needless to say Britain and the Dutch are opposing the Regulations.

This is yet another example (if any were needed) of how Cameron's claim to be green is just hollow rhetoric. We urge everyone to write to their MP and to Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat minister in the Department of Transport with responsibility for the tar sands issue warning them of the dangers of oppsing the EU Regulations in the vote this Friday in the European Parliament. 

You can see more on this in the Guardian report of last weekend: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/27/canada-oil-sands-uk-backing