Argumentative Essay On Oil Sands

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The Alberta bituminous sands are a very contentious issue in the environmental future of Canada. They can also be referred to as the tar sands or oil sands. In this paper, I will be referring to them as the oil sands. From said oil sands, we extract raw bitumen and refine it into oil, which we can then use as fuel to do everyday things like cook our food and drive our cars. There are many controversial opinions surrounding the topic of oil sands and what we should do with them. Should we advance them and increase production or should we shut them down and start shifting towards alternative energies? Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau is in the latter group. Just January of this year, he stated about the oil sands industry that we “need …show more content…

There are people who think that we should use the money we have to advance the oil sands further. Meaning we are investing in advancing the technology that is used to extract the bitumen from the ground and the processes that refine it into functional oil. That is a viable option that might positively affect our economy. I understand that many people think that way, but in my mind I can’t help but ask why. Why would we use money to advance our oil sands when currently the cost of producing the oil continuously brings us more and more losses in revenue. Opposers to the phase out call our oil sands a significant and key element of our economy, except in the past couple years, we have had major losses of revenue in around 20 billion dollars due to the oil sands (Bickis, 2016). One of the biggest concerns is if we phase out the oil sands, how many people would be out of a job? This is a major worry for people, without the oil sands many people would not have work because it is our biggest source of economy and jobs. From here, to solve this issue we shift the workers from oil into clean renewable energy. Workers will not be left to fend for themselves once they lose their jobs, with aid from the province, they will be able to find jobs in the “renewable energy sector” (Kohut,

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