And so they landed — dived down and never came up. Five hundred ducks.

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/the-dark-side-of-canadas-oil-boom

The dark side of Canada's oil boom

Unbeknownst to many, Canada now produces more oil than Texas or Kuwait. A new book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent uncovers the dark underbelly of our northern neighbor.

By Jim Motavalli Wed, Jul 22 2009 at 5:26 AM EST

People who saw the film Winged Migration have a pretty good idea what the surface of the Earth looks like to a duck in flight. And to a large flock of 500 buffleheads flying over the Aurora North Settling Basin in the spring of 2008, this huge toxic waste pool (one of many) from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands oil production appeared to be a hospitable, ice-free lake.

And so they landed — dived down and never came up. Five hundred ducks.

If you live south of the border and you’ve heard of tar sands at all, it’s probably because of this incident. But most of the time this $200 billion enterprise, which is the largest energy project in the world and has turned Canada into our biggest oil provider, is invisible to Americans. It’s a process as horrific as U.S. mountaintop removal mining, but it goes about its work of destroying a boreal forest the size of Florida without much outside scrutiny. “It’s a Canadian thing,” people say, if they say anything at all. But Americans are driving cars fueled by tar sands oil, and it’s a big problem for all of us.

Tar Sands is an angry book, and it comes by its rage honestly. Written by well-known Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, an eight-time winner of that country’s National Magazine Award, it is a well-researched and well-written polemic. Nikiforuk has an ear for compelling metaphors: in its natural state, tar sands bitumen is “as hard as a hockey puck,” and just one company, Syncrude, fuels its process with enough water from the Athabasca River “to annually fill the glasses and bathtubs of a third of Denver’s residents.”

[BrklynLiberal]

1. oh...my...gawd.......

:mad: :puke: :wow: :cry:

[Big Oliver]

12. All the fools that use fossil fuels should all be killed the same way as those ducks! n/m

x

[NYC_SKP]

2. Kick. Rec. n/t

[CountAllVotes]

3. bitumen is “as hard as a hockey puck,” and just one company

:puke: :cry: :(

:kick: & recommend.

[Odin2005]

4. Oh god...

:cry:

[mopinko]

5. junkies find veins in their toes nt

[Soylent Brice]

8. ^^^BEST ANSWER^^^

[Chulanowa]

10. That's EXACTLY it!

Thank you for putting it so succinctly.

[mopinko]

11. stole it from al gore.

[kas125]

6. That's one of the reasons my friends and I have been

fighting BP for years already. They have a huge refinery near here that is one of the major polluters of Lake Michigan and as we speak, they're building the facilities to process tar sands. Our group has hired attorneys, met with everyone in state government, begged the state Department of Environmental Management to DO something... and they did - they gave BP even MORE contracts with less regulations. Ugh.

[Lorien]

7. Reason #67894000002 for why we need a clean green energy revolution

and Apollo project. Solar, wind, high speed National maglev monorails, new innovation = JOBS and a fresh start for the economy too!

[blindpig]

9. Kill Capitalism

[cwydro]

13. Well, we are killing our world. nt

k and r