I tend to say “fudge frosting on the crapcake,” but YMMV.
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That’s a good one too…
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What’s really impressive about tar sands is that Alberta is that they basically managed to recapitulate the trajectory of coal from resource to embittered and entitled welfare-queen of an industry not only in record time; but (depending on who you let fudge the numbers) potentially without ever actually having reached independent viability as a competitive extraction industry.
Coal, at least, has an undeniable period of history where it was absurdly dominant; and thus came by a lot of infrastructure and a large labor force more or less honestly; but tar sands where always about the lousiest oil you could classify as ‘oil’ combined with really, really, high extraction costs(even in the ‘haha, externalities aren’t on my balance sheet!’ calculation of ‘costs’).
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They wanted to jump-start it.
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Useful indicator -
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Is it bad that I’m not sure whether the “Let’s Project Plowshare that shit; then burn it to aerosolize all the radioisotopes that would otherwise have mostly remained underground” plan; or the “Petrochemical extraction is a religious obligation from a Jesus who will soon return in the end of days” part is more concerning?
Because that’s just terrifying. I’d heard of the much more restrained proposals to use more or less conventional nuclear plants to provide electricity and thermal input to tar sands processes; which run into the usual objections to whether nuclear plants are really a good idea; but are otherwise more or less sound; but I’d only ever heard of nuclear warheads in extraction contexts from that one time the Soviets had a really big fire that they needed a really big explosion to deprive of oxygen and bring under control.
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