my grandfather had told me now we. were coming. when he walked out and that. imo. i'm sure fifty four years ago. it faded in my life when i traveled by board or by air it did. make mega billion dollars every day. if you ever watched

a new clear. night you would add to. it john re you don't understand. beautiful the. larsons land was once vast northern forest it is now become the biggest industrial project in the world the extraction of oil sands in canada. trees have been replaced with giant chimneys. oversized machines and scraped this browned land overflowing with beach women and extremely polluting oil derivatives. it's the last giant rush for black gold on a global scale. and the oil companies have come together here in the state of. the sandman's eldorado. the us that is a very interesting story because it has been there for ages that resources so large to. represents the amount that can be recovered both economically as well as

technically so with the right technology one hundred seventy three hundred sixty nine just counting the oil sands a billion barrels so that hundred sixty nine billion barrels makes it the third largest resource of oil anywhere in the world third only after saudi arabia and venezuela that's just over one hundred years worth of reserve and so therefore it is a very large very attractive and now very globally recognized source of oil for the world into the future. oil doesn't mean the end of oil oil is essentially referring to the fact that the world's cheapest and best petroleum deposits have been mined out and now we're on to unconventional resources so now we are a mining stuff that costs more we are mining stuff that has a higher environmental footprint we have to use more energy to get this energy and that's what peak oil is really all about it's simply saying look we've run out of

the cheap stuff now we're hitting the dirty stuff. the cost of doing so is going to cannibalize the global economy at the same time it undermines the world's mind and security. north of the state's capital the site of the biggest oil sand mines two million barrels are extracted every day by twenty thirty that will increase to five million barrels a day. a blessing for petroleum engineers faced with depleting traditional reserves . but ecologists called the project an aberration not least because one barrel of oil has to be used just to produce three or four. that's ten times less efficient than saudi crude the gas printing these factories could provide power to three thousand households every day be. is an unconventional source of energy like shale

gas the latest technologies are required to to extract dirty oil. has heard senator if you're interested in seed mohammed you can hear. these go to the birds that are. here. so what i'm going to do now is the how extraction so this is after mining trucks and shovels have done all their work all of the deposits gone through the crusher to bring it down to that size then they add hot water and start mixing it because they need to add air to make sure that all of that that human starts to float away that's when to do right now the heat is important because naturally it's very thick and heavy as i mentioned this is fiction at room temperature. so what they have to do though is they have to dilute it this is done with what's called not so so once the bishop has been diluted it's very thin very runny it's kind of like this and that's a little bit of human will then go through

a series of centrifuges and settling plates listlessly you know the tool that you have in there to water. great to get one barrel of pitchmen they need about eight to ten barrels of water in this extraction method so collectively the leftover clay and sad and water and a little bit of fiction and all this together is called tailings so the tailings ponds this is essentially what a tailing spawn looks like. and the plant is supposed to include reclamation and so reclamation is the rebuilding of any of the environment they've disturbed or destroyed in their process so that doesn't just mean refilling in a mine it doesn't just mean cleaning up attending spy this is a an experiment in trying to make industry more accountable the only area that's been reclaimed to that level of government certification used to belong to syncrude is about one square kilometer and it was certified in two thousand and eight but that's after they started rick laming it. the early night. for

twenty five years one square kilometer has been restored hundreds more still await . arid lands covered with slabs of bittermann. but the oil companies guaranteed to the forest will grow back to its natural state one day. kevin timony doubts such a miracle is possible. he's been studying ecosystems in the north of bird of for three decades. when the industry says that it's reclaiming the land what they're actually saying is that fear fear fear read vegetate but what they're not telling you is that they're not reestablishing native plants they may have some trees growing there but if you were to look at that far it's fine that it's missing a lot of the plants and animals that should be there we're losing the natural

biodiversity and what we're getting in return is impaired ecosystems that have a higher number of exotic species that don't belong there and a few are species that are native to the community are at. but nothing can stop the expansion of the industry. nasa has been aiming its satellites at fort mcmurray for twenty years the increase in the number of mines artificial lakes and tailing pones is clearly visible. the spread of bitterman has made almost one billion cubic metres of water highly toxic. it stays there for fifty to one hundred years before it can be treated. jennifer grant is worried about this environmental time bomb. she's an oil sands expert at the pen being a institute an organization that advises canada's government on how to a. as the

oil runs out. the rules of the game have changed over the past fifteen years. and the industry has become all mighty. not a single company in the last year it was actually able to meet directive seventy four of those at the tellings rules that are designed to help reduce the proportion of future tailings waste to any of the companies actually challenge that analysis or what was the government's response pretty quiet so there was a lot of interest in the story from the media but i didn't actually see any responses from companies i mean i think there's this is a case of of being guilty on not meeting the regulations and i think they're trying to you know keep that story as under wraps possible right now. there are huge growing problem we have not resolved challenges with tailings and there's a number of challenges there's risks of waterfowl and wildlife encounters which has happened before we had six hundred ducks just die on one incident alone in two

thousand and eight there's risks of seepage so we know that tailings lakes see around eleven million liters of waste per day and of course one of the biggest challenges is how we how we're actually going to reclaim and deal with this at the end of my life so can we actually reclaim this magnitude of toxic waste and i started it working at the pentagon institute nearly seven years ago at the area of tailings ponds was about fifty square kilometers that area has now grown to one hundred seventy six. some of the tailings ponds like this one at suncor run parallel to the athabaskan river. pollution from the petrochemical industry weakens the speaker system in which the northern people's lives. where the river ends deep in the northern forest the land of the first nations the native americans. there. no roads there you have to fly over the mines and discover what

this land looked like before boyle sands extraction began. last stop for chip away in the middle of nowhere. thousand two hundred souls live here on the banks of the athabaskan lake formerly a significant site for fishing. to date these indian tribes can see the oil industry swooping down on them between fatalism and resistance. huge ship is where it's just ten kilometers square and this whole area is slated to be mined. which is hundreds where i think it's four thousand square kilometers less than ten percent is being mined

but our government wants to mine the whole thing in fifty or seventy years the indian reserves it's these parts are the places that have the best chance of preservation but look at them they're surrounded by oil sands so. nothing has a chance here anymore but really my wife's family is afraid will become environmental refugees that will have to leave this part of the world just to find a healthy place to live. and i seen no sign of. taking any responsible attitude towards tensional damage that could happen. that's for chips right is. because we're down the river from all of this that flows right to us that's our drinking water. that's our wildlife that's everything that's our fishery.

larson the old native canadian is taking us to his land hunting and fishing here since he was a child he's one of four chip away and living memories he has seen as people and nature itself change. my. mind will be here to come and go sure maybe one hundred miles from here they've got plans now. and. every year but it's not ok if you don't let the rocks there. i tell him i know will be a question before here's where you seem to live only diminishing all because the environment the plants would take so much water and the big dams they have. we got no hint that would stop it. either get good but maybe a worker would have bread to feed your family now if a big money big money goes. there you might have

a good deed for a while not to riches your we've got a billion dollars a day going to buy it might have been it's still by the government out to you a million dollar stake right well no i understand quite a few are given up by oh i may have heard on a dollar did. grab. i wouldn't go there. but the native canadians patience is slowly wearing thin and for chip away and is living on welfare.

crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want. liz. lisa try to. see people are going to. feel like. taking every minute. cut.

like. this setting limits cases mostly templates. sometimes for nothing. to. just keep still and still be just if you see a stage eight looking at. least eager to it the first nations dismay is taken very seriously their anger could challenge the expansion of the industry so while companies pay them a school here are you sent to their new road to create a few jobs and make them forget about the pollution scandals lead such

as the scandal of a commercial fishing the main livelihood of the people of four chip away and it's been declining for years fishermen condemned the impact of oil sands on the fish i never seen any deformed fish years back and like water which great good and the rivers any plea. last twenty years i would share a little more. fish like me. because you know. some kind of chemical bought into me. raymond regularly senses catch to researchers who are putting together a scientific report the objective to launch a large scale toxicology study in the area which the authorities have consistently refused to conduct the fishermen in for chippewa and have been seeing more of these malformations over the years and not only more fish is showing these deformities but also different kinds of deformities that they haven't seen as much in the past

. you can see here in this in this burbage or length see here some sort of lesion below one of its fins increased temperatures of water and can lead to malformations we know that stress is related to spawning and lead to malformation but we also know that ph is and high levels of selenium and other contaminants in the water can lead to to all sorts of abnormalities so you know something like this where there's missing vertebrae is quite commonly the result of water pollution i mean once we have contaminant plumes leading away from telling spawns it's too late they can't be remediated so now we have a situation where mildred lake settling basin and other major tailings ponds have contaminant plumes that are in contact with ground water and heading towards the at

the best river we can't do anything about that what effect that will have on on the downstream over the centuries to come nobody knows but it's the sort of thing that needs to be studied. the first nations feel betrayed by the government. destruction of oil sands calls into question treaties signed almost a century ago. at the time being state of canada had finalized treaties with each tribe. an old arrangement that's almost disappeared even if the text is still in graves in the country's constitution. morning. after my. fos place the trees one two level thank you will will your is the lawyer for his people it's a family affair his grandfather signed a treaty that sanctified the native tribes rights in alberta with his own hand there is many people that took

a canoe along the at the basque river and as they're going along they seen oil seeping out from the side of the hills and they asked the first nations people the digitas people what. they said all of that soil and they said we have to make a treaty with these indians to access that it's a resource rich area treat allowed the first nations people to hunt trap fish. for their subsistence that is the basis for the relationship between canada and the first nations and what it's done is the promise of for ever as long as the grass grows as lawns and sun shines as long as the river flows all of those don't mean much because the rivers are flowing but they're full of pollutants and so is the air you know. it's not the same as it was thirty years ago it's polluted it's dangerous. and it has or it contains carcinogenic so most of the

air in the water. we hear of cancer cases everywhere from this pollution beatriz it in tells us about the loss of a loved one dozens of them and all come to the same conclusion. nothing has changed here except for the oil development. cecilia lost her son a young boy taken away in only a few weeks by a cancer a very rare type of cancer. i was in the hospital and. the doctor said. that it was cancer. so he studied out across cancer connect.

all. that's where it all begin this nightmare one of my son's friends that are we as parents. and. there is a few other diagnosed you're around his age have cancer it's not normal. it's just water and this pollution like what they're burning out there at these sites is not safe for even the work people that work there. it's just i'm real like oh today money

rules you know the people that are killing these people. they should be traveling every other murder they're everybody's. great. a few years ago the law of silence was broken we went to fort mckay another native canadian reserve to meet dr john o'connor the man who sparked this scandal. how are you. so what's going on. right now if you had to pay for. this irishman was the only doctor it for chip away in for forty years. and it's not appear trace of her own a rural district doctor and he was alarmed by the increase of cancer in such a small community. it's i discovered

a margin of pathology cancers and old immune diseases that. really surprised me cancer ward came up to the community got the information he needed went back to edmonton and they took a year and two thousand and nine they announced there's actually a thirty percent higher rate of cancer and for chip and among them rare cancers is it environmental is a bad luck is that life is a genetics we know the people poor chip eighty percent of the community is traditional they subsist off the land on fish gather and trap. genetic cancers you can see the mite off you know and there's no there's no real suggestion that there's a genetic issue that low could happen anywhere. the environmental changes that have been seen an increase in independent science has proven that we've never had and by the way a public health official said one word or other one word of concern that the tar

sands may be causing an impact and it is bizarre even based on the precautionary principle you know which is a sort of a fundamental of public health if there's a risk he removes the risk of you move the people people are hardly concerned about these native canadians and cancer in fort mcmurray the region's resources keep attracting gold diggers black gold that is. this city has become one of the most prosperous in the country the most expensive two entire districts are hastily built to welcome boyle workers and their families a new house a fabulous salary people from around the world come here to make a fortune canadian petrodollars can withstand all crises when the recession hit like you never really get married ever really felt or say right it was a little now like everywhere else like a lot of places they felt it hit really hard but here everything just kind of kept on going as it was. right everything just kept going off. realistically like you

need or it's not going to stop a lot of people have a negative attitude if you have a positive attitude and you're going there's lots to do and you can keep yourself entertained and there's the really good opportunities for oil sands should earn canada two trillion dollars in twenty years so criticisms are warnings are often brushed aside the government drums its official line in terms of oil exploration there is much worse elsewhere we are so transparent people sometimes try to use that transparency against us but i would encourage them to go to other countries where it isn't so transparent for example iran's or many of the other middle eastern countries they're having increasing difficulties mainly because of the result of political instability it would be great if there was another. a magic source of energy that had no consequences on the environment there is no such thing so as long as we're going to be using oil as part of the energy mix in the world the all sands in alberta are an important piece of that and we're determined to

work hard to ensure that our environmental standards are amongst the very best in the world. the image of a responsible and ecological canada has been dented. undescended twelve two thousand and eleven the country shut the door on the kyoto protocol. reducing greenhouse gases is impossible with the oil sands boom. andrew nikifor of has done the math the country ran the risk of getting a fourteen billion dollar fine for exceeding its quotas many members of the canadian government do not believe climate change is a threat the prime minister of canada is a climate change skeptic so the canadian government is in a mad rush to exploit this resource as quickly as possible before the rest of the world shames us into controlling production and says look. joe million barrels that's enough we don't the world will not need five million barrels of this stuff

is too dirty you know this resource is telling you now you must get off oil this is the end game when you have to dig up the forests the size of rhode island or delaware when it takes two tons of sand to make one barrel of oil you know you're at the bottom of the nightstand and that's where we're at. a fork in the road between fossil energy and renewable energy also a fork in the history of canada's north. in fort mcmurray oil workers take their children to see the bison. the animals are housed in a former mine of the same crude oil company. proof that the environment is in good health. and for chip away and in other native canadian reserves the elderly are withdrawing even further into their communities they watch the factories advance on this land that they consider sacred. i cry.

if you had to wear trouble. will be not. going to be. might be pulling a minority on the man and. i cannot be counted might or might. trip web people because we were down here and pulled a man. that were mission led many to of. which you are wrong to begin with it would be all maybe. no no memorable a bad lab back and that they destroyed that gold never.

lucky brightness least slum search trish listen i put think your lists. on our reports are split erlich in sterling. to me in the knowledge the olympic athlete. clear channel where your. peer. to. peer be. live

live to keep. keep the plug. plug. a pitch. little bit it live i'm abby martin the stories we cover here are not going to hear any rights or back story the extra headline same time there's a reason they don't want to deny. or to tell friends that we should all be completely outraged now let's break the set.

a mother pictured holding her child the one both were killed during and of tillery attack on goal of in eastern ukraine killed has been talking to in the city because it's close to the major anti-government stronghold often hits. the conflict raging in the area forces international experts to scrap their plans to visit the site of a malaysian plane crash as ukrainian army sets up its us onslaught against anti government forces. also this week russia's defense ministry releases satellite are rated data suggesting there was a second plane near the malaysian airliner possibly a ukrainian military fighter jet while the u.s. is.