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“[The oil sands have] poisoned everyone who’s lived downstream.”

I find it unacceptable that no one seriously challenged this statement. One more finding from the RSC report: “Environmental contaminants at current levels of exposure are unlikely to cause major health impacts for the general population.” The report added that projected emissions levels were not likely to change that prospect. Hollywood personalities are one thing, but from time to time sources with impressive credentials make claims that reveal a distinct bias against the oil sands—a bias that the scientific evidence fails to support. James Hansen of Columbia University has made many unreasonable claims about the oil sands and other carbon sources. Some have been contentious enough to make his supporters disassociate themselves from him. They have been upset, for example, about his demand that U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be placed under citizen’s arrest on charges of violating the Security Act if they give the go-ahead to construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Hansen has taken facts and twisted them to support his position. He did this in a paper titled “Silence Is Deadly,” submitted to Congress and placed on the Columbia University website in June 2011.11 In it he claims that the oil sands contain an estimated four hundred gigatonnes of carbon. When released into the atmosphere, this amount of carbon would add about two hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, elevating the atmospheric level accordingly. If this occurred, he warns, it would be “essentially game over.” His original statement indicated “game over for stabilizing the climate,” but most media coverage phrased it as “game over for the climate.” Hansen’s projection implies that the elevation of carbon dioxide from the use of oil originating in the oil sands would occur in one sudden emergence of carbon from the soil, an impossibility. At a daily oil sands production rate of five million barrels of oil, it would take more than a millennium to extract, process, burn and release all that carbon into the air. That’s an annual release of one-thousandth of the carbon he is referring to. Every grade nine science student knows that carbon dioxide is absorbed by living vegetation, which uses it to sustain itself and, in the process, emits oxygen. Whatever imbalance were to occur over the next thousand years, the impact from the oil sands based on Hansen’s premise would be too small to measure, yet his claim no doubt generated at least mild panic among some.