Tar sands billions could be better spent

WWF-UK and The Co-operative have launched a report illustrating how the significant resources currently being poured into environmentally damaging tar sands by the big oil companies (estimated £254 billion) could instead be used to create green energy or to help meet global development goals. It explains how this money could instead be used to kick-start ambitious green energy plans in Europe, or to enable the world to hit half the UN’s Millennium Development Goals in the 49 least-developed countries, which would mean averting four million child deaths annually. It is argued that the money that oil companies want to pump into tar sands would cover the cost of the proposed Desertec Industrial Initiative, linking North African solar plants into a supergrid supplying 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050, or that it could fund a Europe-wide shift to electric vehicles. WWF’s head of campaigns, Colin Butfield, says: ‘This report has thrown up some quite staggering statistics in terms of how this money could be spent trying to save the planet rather than destroying it. If Canada extracts its probable reserves of oil from tar sands, this will almost single-handedly commit the world to dangerous levels of CO2 in the atmosphere – contributing to dangerous climate change, destroying ecosystems and habitats around the world’.
http://www.wwf.org.uk/news_feed.cfm?3757/Tar-sands-billions-could-be-bet...