Greenpeace divers protesting against the planned oil shale mine

Australia has stepped back from the brink of madness and decided to shelve plans to mine oil shales right on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef.

Proposals to extract millions of tonnes of oil shales from the Whitsunday Islands threatened to drain precious water supplies, and to risk toxic leaching and air pollution - as well as increasing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, following a strong protest campaign led by the local Save Our Foreshore group, common sense has prevailed and last week Queensland premier Anna Bligh announced a 20-year moratorium, effectively ending the threat for the immediate future.

What do you do when oil prices rocket?

1. Swap the car for public transport?
2. Burn more energy to extract oil from sand while leaving behind toxic wastelands?

Well, if you are Syncrude Canada Ltd operating near Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada, you choose option B. But since Greenpeace would rather go ahead with option A; we decided to show Syncrude how wrong their tar sands project really is.

Canada's Tar Sands project has been suffering from a bit of a PR problem, what with it being one of the most ludicrous and environmentally catastrophic schemes ever to have occurred to humankind and all.

(If you haven't heard of it yet, the plan is to extract crude oil from bituminous sand and clay in Northern Alberta. To produce one barrel of oil, up to four tonnes of rock and soil - plus the pristine boreal forest on top of it - need to be removed and four barrels of surface and ground water need to be used. The process is so energy intensive that tar sands produce up to five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.)

Tar sands in northern Alberta

A few years ago, BP spent about US$200 million to rebrand the company as beyond petroleum - to convince us that the company was going green, investing in renewable energy, and cared about climate change.

Statements by former Group CEO Lord John Browne called for research into the effects of his industry on climate change, and effectively got the company blackballed by the American Petroleum Institute.
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