TED演讲 第16期:石油真正的代价(2)

And I think particularly now,

as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis,

we can learn so much from these people

who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem

for over 10,000 years.

In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis

of all of these values that we've been talking about,

and I think these are some of the core values

that make us proud to be Canadians.

This is the Alberta tar sands,

the largest oil reserves on the planet

outside of Saudi Arabia.

Trapped underneath the boreal forest

and wetlands of northern Alberta

are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen.

And the mining and the exploitation of that

is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before.

I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this.

If you look at that truck there,

it is the largest truck of its kind of the planet.

It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck

and its dimensions are 45 feet long

by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high.

If I stand beside that truck,

my head comes to around the bottom

of the yellow part of that hubcap.

Within the dimensions of that truck,

you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home

quite easily. I did the math.

So instead of thinking of that as a truck,

think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home.

That's not a bad size home.

And line those trucks/homes back and forth

across there from the bottom

all the way to the top.

And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is.

Now, you can apply that same kind of thinking

here as well.

Now, here you see -- of course, as you go further on,

these trucks become like a pixel.

Again, imagine those all back and forth there.

How large is that one portion of a mine?

That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area,

probably much larger than the city of Victoria.

And this is just one of a number of mines,

10 mines so far right now.

This is one section of one mining complex,

and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process.

No tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval,

so it is essentially a rubber stamp.

The other method of extraction is what's called the in-situ.

And here, massive amounts of water

are super-heated and pumped through the ground,

through these vasts networks of pipelines,

seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations.

And even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant

as the mines, it's even more damaging in some ways.

It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness,

where there is 90 percent reduction of key species,

like woodland caribou and grizzly bears,

and it consumes even more energy, more water,

and produces at least as much greenhouse gas.

So these in-situ developments are at least as

ecologically damaging as the mines.