Power Vote

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates - the first and third richest men in the world - quietly toured Canadian Natural Resources Ltd's Horizon oil sands project near Fort McMurray, Alberta, this week. Greg Stringham, vice-president at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, says the two men asked the industry body to give a general overview of the oil sands and Canada's position in the energy world.

Also of note: The area the men toured is a part of Alberta known as the place where a two-headed fish was recently caught.

As reported by Treehugger, Stuart MacMillan of Parks Canada calls the fish "really unusual. The fish has an obvious abnormality. I had never seen anything like that myself before. I can’t speculate on what might have caused it.”

I can't imagine why such a thing would happen to a fish there either. But that's an aside.

According to local media reports, Gates and Buffett visited the $8.7 billion (US) project on Monday where Horizon is slated to begin operations later this year.

With reserves of about 173 billion barrels, the oil sands of the regions are the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East. The region's producers plan to spend more than $120 billion (US) developing the oil sands as a resource (which combined with operating costs adds up to more $215bn) over the next five years, and output is expected to nearly be 2.8 million barrels a day by 2015 and 4.8 million by 2020.

Gates and Buffett were said to be "expressing curiosity" in the tar sands and perhaps considering investment.

Let's be honest, though. If two men who make >$4000 per minute simply on the interest of their holdings decide to take a field trip to one of the most potentially profitable regions on earth and meet with companies considered to be blue-chip long-term investments ...then they are thinking of investment.

Though the stocks of the oil sands companies were hit hard earlier this summer with the brief drop in oil prices, the visit of Buffett and Gates brought the prices surging back up again.

And as the value of the companies increases we all know the parallel increasing difficulty in limiting or ceasing their operations.

That said, there are groups, organizations like Green Peace, and lawsuits out there which have made the last few months particularly tumultuous for the oil sands industry. The industry has also been under siege by foreign governments, including U.S. mayors, who voiced concerns about the industry's impact on air and water quality due to its level of emissions.

Whether or not the efforts of these organizations and political leaders is enough, however, remains to be seen. Certainly their efforts need support.

The ongoing development of tar sands - an energy source as dirty as coal - will greatly hinder our ability to secure a clean, just energy future.

All of us should keep this issue on our radars, and particularly for those in areas with tar/oil sands, work against this environmentally detrimental development through Pover Vote and other campaigns.