NRDC: Stop Dirty Fuels

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Tar Sands

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See our letter to the Western Governors' Association

In Canada, the oil industry is transforming boreal forests and wetlands -- one of the world's last remaining intact ecosystems -- into America's gas tank.

Alberta's boreal forest is home to a diverse range of animals, including lynx, caribou and grizzly bears, as well breeding grounds for many North American songbirds and waterfowl. Oil companies are scraping up hundreds of thousands of acres of this wildlife haven to mine tar sands -- silty deposits that contain small amounts of crude bitumen.

Mining and drilling tar sands, extracting bitumen and turning it into crude oil is a dirty, energy-intensive and destructive process. It takes four tons of material dug out of open pit mines to produce a single barrel of oil; the amount of natural gas used by the industry every day is enough to heat about 4 million American homes. The production facilities, including pit mines, wells, roads and pipes, destroy the forest's highly complex ecosystems. For aboriginal peoples, mining in the region reduces local water supplies, and increases water pollution and exposure to toxic substances.

To top it off, tar sands oil production generates three times as much global warming pollution as conventional oil production. The rush to strip-mine and drill tar sands in the boreal will destroy and fragment millions of acres of this wild forest for low-grade petroleum fuel.