A section of an evening with Coach Paul
The Washington Post has a fascinating article in todays (yesterdays) paper, hey it can happen.
Canada Pays Environmentally for U.S. Oil Thirst. They even seem to have written about this previously:
Where Oil Is Mined, Not Pumped. In reading through it; it would be a mistake to overlook the accompanying slideshow or the graphic describing the steam injection extraction process
Extracting Oil From Sand.
It seemed familiar though, I had heard this before, recently. I had heard it from coach Paul. This is simply how I know him, through my sister Ann; he is my niece Nicole's soccer coach. If you stand in one place long enough, you will invariably find yourself coaching a team in a youth soccer league. The setting was a celebratory dinner at a mexican restaurant by chance only one block down from a restaurant called the Dancing Crab over which a tower looms. My nephew Lucas's friend Phillip who's family has temporarily removed to Sweden was in town briefly. As it happens coach Paul's son [B.] is also a friend of this Phillip, and so several families, others besides those named, were there together. Among the adults the conversation ranged widely, but at one turn it passed over the role of oil in world politics, particularly on the fortunes and misfortunes of the localities where petroleum extraction occurs. Coach Paul, who is Canadian, shared first hand descriptions of the oil shale regions of Canada and of the vast reserves contained there. And of the post lunar landscapes created by going after oil there
"Fort McMurray, Alberta" - Google Maps - just what is described in this article. He also spoke of the way that unlike earlier periods of oil exploration, towns are not created. There is more of a tendency to treat these sites like off-shore oil rigs: fly people in, fly them out. I had some sense of this - mostly due to obsessive Google Earth junkets. I had seen marks on the north Canadian landscape and had fitted them to ideas I had about strip mining. The scale of these operations was more than I could readily get a grasp of though. I felt that coach Paul from whom I had gotten this story ought to get a byline out it (this is no knock on Doug Struck of the Washington Post Foreign Service who did write the piece) . He impressed me considerably at the time, and while it is true I don't get out much, I suspect this judgement would hold up even if I did. I understand that for his day job he works for a newspaper. On reflection, it being, I believe, a Canadian newspaper, it may be that his primary work effort lies in attempting to explain America and Americans to Canadians and not in explaining Canada and Canadians to Americans.
11:50:26 PM  ;;
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