Controversy about importing fuel from Canada’s vast oil sands has been swirling for some time. It is an issue environmentalists seized on with great hope when President Barack Obama came into office, given his pledges to work to reduce the country’s carbon footprint and the fact that oil from tar sands, as environmentalists refer to it, has a higher carbon intensity than that from traditional crude.
But the weakness in the US economy, high unemployment and rising petrol prices have combined to give the oil industry the edge. Indeed, even back in 2009, the Obama administration approved a pipeline to carry oil-sands fuel from Canada into the US, saying its action was designed to send “a positive economic signal in a difficult economic period”. The Keystone pipeline also was approved.
