Word: alberta
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...mixed with student deaths it could be explosive. Beijing's first instinct will be to sweep the schools scandal under the rug. Much of the online anger over the collapsed schools has been deleted and all discussion of the topic has been banned. But Jiang of the University of Alberta says that, as China's civil society develops, leaders know they must adapt. "It will be extremely tempting for the control types and ideologues to use [the earthquake] to glorify the party and to direct this new openness toward reporting only good news. But that will be one step backward...
...open-pit mine, Pat Crisby, a plainspoken Newfoundlander, makes a startling observation. "We move enough dirt to fill the SkyDome in 48 hours," says Crisby, a fiftyish manager at Syncrude Canada Ltd., a company that is the Incredible Hulk of North America's biggest and richest resource deposit: Alberta's oil sands. The idea of filling the 60,000-seat home of the Toronto Blue Jays (now called Rogers Centre) with sticky, bitumen-laced soil from the Aurora North mine in a weekend is mind-boggling. But it puts the business conducted on this chunk of boreal real estate into...
Syncrude, headquartered just north of Alberta's booming Fort McMurray, is a consortium of U.S. and Canadian oil companies including Imperial, Petro-Canada and ConocoPhilips that produces 350,000 bbl. of light, sweet crude per day from tar sands at three mines on the banks of the Athabasca River. About two-thirds of that gets piped to the U.S. Syncrude accounts for about 27% of the 1.3 million bbl. extracted by oil companies every 24 hours from this stark landscape of jack pine, spruce and poplar forests shot through by a bright northern light...
...without the loopy President and the deadweight national oil company as unwanted partners--as the biggest oil boom in North American history hits terminal velocity. An estimated $124 billion will be invested from 2007 to 2012, according to the Athabasca Regional Issues Working Group, an industry association. Production in Alberta's oil sands will more than quadruple, to about 5 million bbl. daily, by 2015; Canada currently exports an average of 1.9 million bbl. daily (from all sources) to the U.S., more than any country, including Saudi Arabia. That's about 20% of total U.S. imports. "Canada has emerged...
...central government's heavy-handed tactics and rhetoric, even though repression reduces the country's stature in the global community. "When the rest of the world looks at China, they see this increasingly powerful and confident country," says Wenran Jiang, director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta. "But when the Chinese leadership looks at the country, they see the exact opposite: weaknesses everywhere, rising inflation and civil unrest, environmental disasters and corruption. So the overall mentality of the central authorities is very insecure and nervous." In the case of Tibet, Chinese leaders are now trapped by their...