Chapter Three
Our race is called Homo Sapiens in Latin which literally translated into English means Man who Knows or, if you prefer Man who Thinks, or Man who has the capacity to Think.Allow me respectfully to disagree. Homo Sapiens is a misnomer. We do not think – at least not logically!
Consider this:
The “Canadian Oil Sands”, North America’s largest recoverable oil deposit, a 54,000 square mile patch of oily sand (popularly referred to as ‘tar’) in the Athabasca basin of Alberta contains between 1.7 trillion and 2.5 trillion barrels of oil. With today’s technology, recoverable reserves stand at 178.6 billion barrels.
That makes it the world’s second largest oil reserve, second to Saudi Arabia.
Currently, there aren't enough pipelines to supply hungry markets in the U.S. and Asia. That lack of pipeline capacity is holding back full-bore oil sands production. But last week, the U.S. State Department gave its approval to the Keystone XL pipeline.
This giant, 1,700-mile pipeline would run from Alberta, across the Great Plains to Houston, Texas. It would double the volume of oil we currently export to the US to 4 million barrels per day. That's about 44% of U.S. oil imports.
Unfortunately, the process of extracting the oil from the tar sand involves pumping steam – lots of it – through the sand. The steam then turns into contaminated water that, in turn, poisons the Albertan aquifer.
Not to worry: water is a renewable resource – right?
This assumption is false. At some time in the near future, water bankruptcy will result. A United Nations study says that by 2025 – only 14 years away – two-thirds of the world will be "water-poor."
The consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, twice the rate of world population growth.
The underground aquifer that supplies one-third of the water for the continental United States is being depleted eight times faster than it is being replenished.
Saudi Arabia is a net exporter of wheat using non-renewable water reserves. Saudi Arabia is expected to exhaust its water reserves in 50 years.
Meanwhile what are we Canadians doing?
Depleting our non-renewable oil reserves to ‘help’ our economy while, at the same time, poisoning our precious non-renewable water reserves – that’s what.
We will be hearing much more about water in coming months and years. And if wars of the future will be fought over water – which they will be – Canada will be in the thick of the battle.
