For rapid access to the locality of Caraorman (for the exploitation of quartziferous sand) and to the Rosu touristic complex, the Crisan Caraorman channel was oversized (12 km long, 60 70 m wide, with a maximum depth of 4 6 m).
"An overwhelming objection is that exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts," NASA's James Hansen wrote recently.
The exploitation of tar sands has also led to the destruction of swaths of forest and is blamed for water and air pollution.
They say that as a result, taxpayers' money is being used to invest in activities such as the exploitation of tar sands which are causing climate change.
Canada's inaction was blamed by some on its desire to protect the lucrative but highly polluting exploitation of tar sands, the second biggest oil reserve in the world.
For energy projects under consideration right now, costing perhaps tens of billions of dollars and with a pay-off over decades (such as ultra-deep-water and Arctic drilling, or the exploitation of oil sands), the prospect that demand for fossil fuels could shrink even by 40% within 35 years, with worse to come thereafter, is chilling.
"We believe that the exploitation of tar sands and other unconventional fossil fuels threatens global efforts to avoid dangerous levels of climate change and, as these leaks have highlighted, risk ecological disaster". CNRL said a review was under way into why the leaks had occurred, but said it believed bitumen had risen to the surface because of mechanical failures of well bores.
The transborder pipe was built in 1967, long before the exploitation of tar-sands oil was commercially viable.
In the United States and Canada, the movement against the exploitation of tar sands is the expression of a civil society that wants to stop polluting our planet.
Biofuel proponents argue that the two Science papers ignore rising agricultural productivity and the fact that the carbon impact of gasoline the baseline for comparison is a moving target, as rising prices encourage exploitation of tar sands and coal liquefaction, which will boost gasoline's carbon footprint.
