Polar Bear Alberta Oil Sands Protest in Vancouver

onMay 12, 2008 @ 10:56 PDT

It’s not everyday you encounter a polar bear on Vancouver’s famous Sea Wall. Especially a really cranky one raising awareness about the environmental impacts of the Alberta Oil Sands industry.

You can check out the latest pictures we have uploaded to our Flickr account as part of DeSmog’s Arctic Front initiative.

We have polar bears deployed all over Canada and since the initiative has become so popular, we now have polar bears deployed all over the world, including: Colombia, India, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, Israel, and the United States (LA, Texas and DC).

If you’re interested in joining up (and dressing up), please drop us a line at: desmogblog[at]gmail[dot]com.

We also have a very active Facebook group if you would like to join up.

Here’s a few factoids about the massive environmental impacts the Alberta Oil Sands are having on our environment:

Oil Sands operations could eventually cover 149,000 square kilometers of pristine forest – that’s an area roughly the size of Florida.

Each day the oil sands use 600 million cubic feet of natural gas to, in effect, melt the tarry sludge into a usable form – that’s enough natural gas to heat more than 3 million Canadian homes.

Producing a barrel of oil from the tar sands produces three times more greenhouse gas than a barrel of conventional oil.

Oil sands operations use about the same amount of freshwater in a year that the entire City of Calgary uses (population 1 million) – 90% of this freshwater ends up in toxic tailing ponds.

Toxic tailing ponds already cover more than 50 square kilometers and are considered to be one of largest man-made structures in the world.

By Kevin Grandia

Kevin is a contributor and strategic adviser to DeSmog. He runs the digital marketing agency Spake Media House. Named a “Green Hero” by Rolling Stone Magazine and one of the “Top 50 Tweeters” on climate change and environment issues, Kevin has appeared in major news media outlets around the world for his work on digital campaigning. Kevin has been involved in the public policy arena in both the United States and Canada for more than a decade. For five years he was the managing editor of DeSmogBlog.com. In this role, Kevin’s research into the “climate denial industry” and the right-wing think tank networks was featured in news media articles around the world. He is most well known for his ground-breaking research into David and Charles Koch’s massive financial investments in the Republican and tea party networks. Kevin is the first person to be designated a “Certified Expert” on the political and community organizing platform NationBuilder. Prior to DeSmog, Kevin worked in various political and government roles. He was Senior Advisor to the Minister of State for Multiculturalism and a Special Assistant to the Minister of State for Asia Pacific, Foreign Affairs for the Government of Canada. Kevin also worked in various roles in the British Columbia provincial government in the Office of the Premier and the Ministry of Health. In 2008 Kevin co-founded a groundbreaking new online election tool called Vote for Environment which was later nominated for a World Summit Award in recognition of the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications. Kevin moved to Washington, DC in 2010 where he worked for two years as the Director of Online Strategy for Greenpeace USA and has since returned to his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.