This misreable trade is all that stands between many people and poverty. Green energy alternatives have years to decades before completely making hydrocaebons irrelevant. Electric cars certainly a big step, but only in beginning stages of market penetration.

> This misreable trade is all that stands between many people and poverty.

Nah, that's exaggeration. Tar sands are extremely polluting and the 'many people' are those that are employed in an industry that didn't even exist a decade ago, it's mostly boom towns specifically constructed around getting this oil out of the ground.

I find it quite interesting that we would impose environmental constraints on the third world - where people really need to fight to make ends meet - and yet allow something as bad as this because 'many people might land in poverty', when in fact they have alternatives, just not as lucrative.

I guess it's reusable after the oil is extracted, so it can be send back?

It is the oil. The bitumen is cracked into lighter fractions like gasoline.

(The other current method of transporting bitumen is to dilute it with naptha, which has to be sent back to the extraction site in order to be used with the next lot of bitumen)

Oil comes in many 'fractions', the heavier fractions are the ones like what this article is about (bitumen), the lighter ones are crude, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and gas forms.

Crackers (in oil refineries) take as input a heavier fraction and then break apart and sort the molecules by length giving various different outputs which can then be used in different applications.

You're right, we also need to ban, cars, milk, beef, beer, clothes, plastics, .. oh crap we've now banned everything that underpins our modern technological age.

What makes you think that any of those things, including plastics, must by made from fossil oil? So tired of being told that the only way to do things, is the way we are currently doing them. Heck, we don't even have to make so much stuff out of plastic at all, and considering where that plastic is turning up in the food chain, it might be worth the expense to start finding replacements. Aluminum recycles nicely, hemp makes some excellent fabrics, cows will do just fine on a diet of grass.

I think the call for a ban was reflecting the fact that a lot of energy is required to produce usable crude oil from tar sands. It basically involves burning natural gas to produce steam to "melt" the tar sands to be able to flow. This makes the CO2 footprint of tar sands oil significantly higher than standard oil, it would be like powering your car with coal rather than oil. A reasonable CO2 tax would render tar sands uneconomic.

Straw man.

Personal attacks are not OK on Hacker News. Please don't post like this.

If this is aimed at me I have two degrees in Geography and have worked in the oil industry.

You understand the carbon cycle then. So what is the plan with that & coal & oil?

These are problems that humans understood 60 years ago. Since then it's been a few generations of scientists and engineers thinking they were each too small to make a difference on the world. It's starting to be too late for that kind of thinking.

Tar sands are massively CO2 intensive, as well as hugely destructive of land. Take a look at satellite imagery of extraction areas - they literally tear the surface of the earth off. Watercourses are polluted with all kinds of horrible poisons as a result. One has to be wilfully ignorant or cynical to ignore the fact that we really shouldn't be exploiting this energy resource at all if we want to avoid cooking the planet, in favour of praising a method that facilitates even greater destruction. Where does it end?! :|

Don't forget the tailings ponds that are constructed to park the waste and residue chemicals from extraction and processing. They are simply left there until time and eventual facilities decay allow them to leak into nearby waterways.