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-tar sands

They are a mix of water, sand, silt, clay, unrecovered hydrocarbons, and other contaminants. Environmental impacts of oil sands. ... Climate Impacts: The greenhouse gas emissions for oil sand extraction and processing are significantly larger than for conventional crude oil. These emissions contribute to global warming and the enhanced greenhouse effect. Canada's oil sands industry will provide a secure source of energy, reduce its impact on the environment and provide economic benefits to society while developing this globally significant resource.

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textbook is similar students try sample questions

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What are the different views about exploitation of Tar Sands?

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What are the different views about exploitation of Tar Sands?

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What have international relations to do with the price of oil

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What have international relations to do with the price of oil

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Adaptation of conifers to their environment

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Adaptation of conifers to their environment

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relationship between population and resources

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relationship between population and resources

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examples in the comment box or upload

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Deforestation rates for Amazon countries outside Brazil

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Deforestation rising in non-Brazilian Amazon countries Editors note (7/7/13): Re-analysis of the original data has led to revision of the annual forest loss data. Deforestation has sharply increased in Amazon...

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In the last few decades food companies have filled our shelves with meat, chocolate, cheese and eggs, which has resulted in an explosion of livestock numbers - especially cows, pigs and chickens. There are now so many that an estimated 60% of all mammals on the planet are livestock, while just 4% are wild (the other 36% is us). Farmed poultry account for an incredible 70% of all birds .

This rapid growth in meat and dairy production has been driven by profit-hungry companies and has led to drastic consequences for our planet. All these animals need a lot of food and vast areas of forests, grasslands and wetlands have been destroyed to feed livestock. Giant chunks of the Amazon rainforest and other South American forests and savannas have been replaced with fields of soya, wiping out the wildlife they support.

This is a disaster for the climate. Agriculture and deforestation contribute a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and animal farming is responsible for 60% of the emissions from agriculture. These emissions come from a variety of sources. Converting forests and other landscapes into fields for animal feed releases greenhouse gases, and removes trees that help suck up and store carbon dioxide in the first place. Artificial fertilisers use a lot of energy to produce and they release another greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - which traps much more heat than carbon dioxide. And cows produce a lot of methane - it's no laughing matter that farts from billions of cows are warming our planet.

Chicken is often seen as a more environmentally friendly choice compared to beef, but global chicken consumption has almost doubled since 1990. Producing chicken at that scale comes with a host of problems - notably vast amounts of animal feed.

Animal agriculture is a really inefficient way to produce enough food for everyone on the planet. For every 100 calories of crops fed to animals, we get 40 calories in the form of milk, 12 calories of chicken, and just 3 calories of beef . Instead, that grain could be used to feed people directly and would help ensure everyone has enough food.

Industrial farming also comes with a host of other serious problems. Converting land for agriculture can disrupt water supplies and lead to soil erosion, while fertilisers escape the fields to pollute rivers and oceans. Animals in factory farms are kept in brutal conditions and bred to maximise meat production at the expense of their own welfare. And eating more meat and dairy is increasingly being linked to a host of health impacts such as obesity, diabetes and various cancers, jeopardising our own health.

There's still time to stop the damage, but we need to radically change the way we think about food. The best advice comes from writer Michael Pollan: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." As he suggests, we can eat less meat and dairy, not just as individuals but at a global level. To keep global temperature increases below 1.5ºC, we need to reduce the amount of meat and dairy we're eating by more than half by 2030. That means big companies need to start producing tasty, healthy plant-based meals - and reduce the amount of meat and dairy products too. What meat we do eat has to be produced ecologically, respecting both the environmental impacts and the welfare of the animals themselves.

We also need to hold governments and companies accountable for the damage food production is causing and demand a more responsible approach. In this way, we can stop destroying forests to rear animals and grow crops to feed them. In 2006, Greenpeace pioneered a collective agreement between soya growers, traders and food companies to protect the Amazon from further destruction, which is still in place today.

A better attitude towards meat and dairy means we'll be healthier, the animals we farm will be healthier, and our planet will be healthier.

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In the last few decades food companies have filled our shelves with meat, chocolate, cheese and eggs, which has resulted in an explosion of livestock numbers - especially cows, pigs and chickens. There are now so many that an estimated 60% of all mammals on the planet are livestock, while just 4% are wild (the other 36% is us).

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Brazilian police have carried out a big operation against illegal gold miners in the Amazon, arresting at least 26 people.

Gold, mining equipment and several aircraft used to take men and supplies into the remote region were seized.

Police said the miners were causing grave environmental damage in the Yanomami indigenous reserve, near Brazil's border with Venezuela.

The Yanomami have long complained of miners invading their lands.

Five criminal groups involved in illegal gold mining were identified during a year-long investigation in Roraima state, the Federal Police said.

The miners were using powerful pumps mounted on barges to dredge material from the bottom of the river and blast the river banks.

The environmental impact was worsened by the use of highly-toxic mercury to separate gold from the river silt.

Among those arrested are pilots, engineers and businessmen accused of funding the mining operations and selling the gold in the city of Boa Vista.

"The focus of the operation was to target the economic motor of illegal mining, which is to say the financiers and the planes used to invade indigenous lands," police superintendent Alexandre Silva Saraiva told O Globo newspaper.

Around 20,000 Yanomami live in relative isolation in the indigenous reserve, which covers nearly 100,000 square km (38,610 square miles) of rainforest along the Venezuelan border.

The tribe has been resisting encroachment by gold miners for decades, accusing them of destroying the rainforest and introducing diseases.

In recent years the soaring price of gold on world markets has driven a surge in unlicensed gold-mining in many parts of the Amazon.

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Brazilian police have carried out a big operation against illegal gold miners in the Amazon, arresting at least 26 people. Gold, mining equipment and several aircraft used to take men and supplies into the remote region were seized. Police said the miners were causing grave environmental damage in the Yanomami indigenous reserve, near Brazil's border with Venezuela.

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THE RAINFOREST AS A RESOURCE FOR ECONOMIES

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THE RAINFOREST AS A RESOURCE FOR ECONOMIES

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IN THE 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was felled every year, Brazil was the world's environmental villain and the Amazonian jungle the image of everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade, from a ten-year average of 19,500 km (7,500 square miles) per year in 2005 to 5,800 km ² in 2013. If clearances had continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a year's emissions from the European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in tackling climate change.

But how did it break the vicious cycle in which-it was widely expected-farmers and cattle ranchers (the main culprits in the Amazon) would make so much money from clearing the forest that they would go on cutting down trees until there were none left? After all, most other rainforest countries, such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have failed to stop the chainsaws. The answer, according to a paper just published in Science by Dan Nepstad of the Earth Innovation Institute in San Francisco, is that there was no silver bullet but instead a three-stage process in which bans, better governance in frontier areas and consumer pressure on companies worked, if fitfully and only after several false starts.
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The first stage ran from the mid-1990s to 2004. This was when the government put its efforts into bans and restrictions. The Brazilian Forest Code said that, on every farm in the Amazon, 80% of the land had to be set aside as a forest reserve. As the study observes, this share was so high that the code could not be complied with-or enforced. This was the period of the worst deforestation. Soyabean prices were high and there was a vast expansion of soyabean farming and cattle ranching on the south-eastern fringe of the rainforest.

During the second stage, which ran from 2005 to 2009, the government tried to boost its ability to police the Amazon. Brazil's president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, made stopping deforestation a priority, which resulted in better co-operation between different bits of the government, especially the police and public prosecutors. The area in which farming was banned was increased from a sixth to nearly half of the forest.

Also, for the first time, restrictions were backed up by other things: a fall in export earnings from soyabeans because of a rise in Brazil's currency, the real; a sharp improvement in cattle breeding which meant farmers could raise more animals on fewer hectares; and a consumer boycott. After a campaign by Greenpeace and others, buyers of Brazilian soyabeans promised not to purchase crops planted on land cleared after July 2006. All of these combined to cause deforestation to plummet (see chart).

The third stage, which began in 2009, was a test of whether a regime of restrictions could survive as soyabean expansion resumed. The government shifted its focus from farms to counties (each state has scores of these). Farmers in the 36 counties with the worst deforestation rates were banned from getting cheap credit until those rates fell. The government also set up a proper land registry, requiring landowners to report their properties' boundaries to environmental regulators. There was a cattle boycott modelled on the soya one. And for the first time, there were rewards as well as punishments: an amnesty for illegal clearances before 2008 and money from a special $1 billion Amazon Fund financed by foreign aid.

By any standards, Brazil's Amazon policy has been a triumph, made the more remarkable because it relied on restrictions rather than incentives, which might have been expected to have worked better. Over the period of the study, Brazil also turned itself into a farming superpower, so the country has shown it is possible to get a huge increase in food output without destroying the forest (though there was some deforestation at first). Still, as Dr Nepstad concedes, a policy of "thou-shalt-not" depends on political support at the top, which cannot be guaranteed. Moreover, the policies so far have been successful among commercial farmers and ranchers who care about the law and respond to market pressures; hence the effectiveness of boycotts. Most remaining deforestation is by smallholders who care rather less about these things, so the government faces the problem of persuading them to change their ways, too. Deforestation has been slowed, but not yet stopped.

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IN THE 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was felled every year, Brazil was the world's environmental villain and the Amazonian jungle the image of everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right.