Earth! Fire! Wind! Water!......heart?

During my last unemployment stint, the paper and pulp industry had suffered major downsizing while oil had reached its peak price of $147.27 / barrel. Given that the oil sands are supposedly profitable at $30-35 / barrel, Northern Alberta was swimming in cash.

I went to several recruiting sessions for various oil sands companies. No surprise. I came up empty while Mr.Fannypack probably ended up with a job.

Upon further research, I became more aware of the oil sands and its environmental impact. The ripping up of the land didn’t bother me, because eventually a reclamation project would revitalize the land. The massive water usage also didn’t bother me since most of the water is probably recycled and any discharge would be under permit levels. However, oil sands emit much more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil extraction and there’s no real penalty because of our lax emission laws.

With a student loan and other bills to pay, I came to a realization that I was much like the local native faced with the dilemma of taking a job chopping down the rainforest or letting his family starve to death. I’m lucky in that I have no dependents to support which simplified my decision making, so I decided to not be a shill and avoided the oil sands like a plague. I also felt that the oils sands was like the pulp and paper industry pre 1990’s. The industry may be prosperous right now, but hard times were bound to come later on. Granted, this is probably true of any industry due to the cyclical nature of the economy.

My hunch came semi-true as the economy and oil prices took a dump and many oil sands projects have been scaled back or put on hold. Then again, the price of many commodities has fallen drastically and for my lifetime at least, we will still probably rely heavily on fossil fuels. So maybe my hunch was a bit silly. The important thing is that I didn’t sell myself out.