Alberta

On Thursday morning 11 Greenpeace activists entered Syncrude’s Aurora tar sands operation -- just north of Fort McMurray, Alberta -- to deploy a massive banner that read "World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands".

I recently came across a new website featuring a product called GLENSOL, which is short for Global Envirokleen Solution.

Not only does it seem like they have created a oil remediation additive that works, but it's enviromentally friedly too. The byproducts of this remediation process are all natural which can be re-used or released into the environment with zero pollutants.

The part I enjoyed the most was the video about the oil remediation process, even though it took a little while to get going.

1. Residents of communities living downstream from tar sands operations are experiencing unusually high rates of rare cancers and auto-immune diseases. Dr. John O’Connor spoke out on the occurrance of rare cancer clusters in the community of Fort Chipewyan.

2. The Alberta tar sands are the fastest growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Canada at approximately 40% of the country’s emissions.

Water conservation helps us adapt to a future with less secure water supplies. Fortunately, there is lots of room for improvement in the average Alberta household.

Net-metering provides many incentives for residential micro-power. Alberta's system uses an approach called "net billing."

Researchers at the University of Alberta are working on a system to send signals through power lines to enhance the electrical grid to betterhandle distributed power generation.

The Alberta Greens, in the middle of the oil patch, are high in the polls - without even fielding a full slate of candidates! This is incredible and shows that people want change, including people who rely on oil for their jobs. Help the Alberta Greens by voting up this story. (Even better, get in touch. But we all do what we can.) Thank you.

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, discusses the lack of action taken by the Harper government on global warming, especially in light of tar sands development.

Stephen Harper refuses to show leadership and put hard caps on Canada's global warming emissions -- all so the tar sands can keep growing. No matter how much Canadians clamor to join the global fight against climate change, we are being held hostage by the tar sands.

A guide to 5 hiking trip reports from hikers who hiked the Skyline Trail in Jasper National Park at different times throughout the year. Jasper Park is one of the biggest national parks in Canada.

The average production and downstream emissions of Alberta synthetic crude add up to around 638 kg of carbon per barrel.

When all the Alberta oil sands have been extracted, upgraded and burned, they will result in the release into the Earth's atmosphere of around 112 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is equivalent to all fossil fuel and industrial emissions worldwide combined over a period of more than four years.

As the Middle East has become more unstable, as Iraq has boiled into chaos, other, more unexpected places have flourished, and none more so than Fort McMurray. Five hours' drive north of Edmonton, in Alberta, it has always been a frontier town.  The trouble has always been that it's not conventional crude, easily liberated from the earth, but tar sands (also known as oil sands) - a mixture of sand, water and heavy crude which is much more difficult and expensive to extract.