Next week, officials will meet from across Europe to approve the plan that would prevent tar sands oil from ending up at the pumps. If the proposal goes ahead it would deal a major blow to oil industry plans to expand Canada’s tar sands open cast mining operations.

Right now the vote could go either way because of the UK-led diplomatic effort to scuttle it. So Greenpeace has a campaign that any UK person can participate in, to put pressure on the UK government to stop its attempts to scuttle the legislation.

The tar sands deposits of heavy oil mixed with clay and sand lie below the surface of the Canadian wilderness. To extract the tar, oil companies destroy the Canadian boreal forest, gouge out hundreds of metres of top soil, and turn the landscape into a gaping black pit. Two tonnes of earth has to be dug up and processed to produce each barrel of tar sands oil, Greenpeace UK writes.

Worst of all, tar sands oil creates three times the emissions per barrel that you would get from normal crude. There’s no way tar sands oil makes any sense for our environment or climate, Greenpeace concludes.

The map allows you to choose a location, such as Vancouver, BC, Canada. It then places red patches the size of the tar sands over your chosen location. Seeing the red patches over your home town really does give a sense of the enormity of the project.

More than its size, the environmental damage the tar sands cause makes them controversial. As the website writes, the harvesting of petroleum from the tar sands destroys the land, pollutes the water and is poisoning downstream communities. It is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emission growth in Canada. The tar sands already produce over 30 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year; by 2020 that number could grow to over 140 million tonnes.

While most of us use oil in some form, it would be good if the tar sands would clean up their act.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it clear that he wants to position Canada as an “energy superpower” through increased development and export. The Northern Gateway project from Enbridge is one of several disputed projects. If completed, it would provide infrastructure to pipe crude oil from Albertan tar sands to the Port of Kitimat in British Columbia and then out to Asia via off-shore tankers. To get out of the port, the tankers would have to navigate the inlets of the Great Bear Rainforest, a journey that could easily be environmentally disastrous if a spill were ever to occur.

Even without considering the possibility of an oil spill, many concerns exist over potential leaks from oil pipelines. Just recently, a 45 year old pipeline spilled 4.5 million litres of crude oil into Albertan boreal forest and wetlands, prompting a letter from the Alberta Wilderness Association to the Minister of Energy. This was followed by a spill near the community of Little Buffalo in Alberta which resulted in a spate of nausea, eye irritation, and headaches in the populace.

Hoping to prevent such disasters from reaching British Columbia, the Sierra Club is one of many organizations declaring opposition to the use of off-shore tankers on BC’s coast. Along with community groups, Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois MPs, they support a ban on off-shore oil tankers, warning that a single spill could endanger an entire ecosystem as well as the lives of coastal communities and First Nations groups. With the recent Canadian federal election giving Harper and the Conservatives a majority government, it is unclear how effective these objections will be.

The Arctic is warming alarmingly quickly, but there’s still time to make choices that alter the future and save it.  ”Oil and Ice”s purpose is to stimulate discussion and debate about those choices.  Struzik has witnessed the changes that are happening in the Arctic through his extensive time there, while Nikiforuk is an expert on the economics and influence of the tar sands.

The conversation will take place in 10 Canadian cities between November 4th and 20th.  More information is available on WWF-Canada’s website.