Quick-what country exports the most oil into the United States? Saudi Arabia? Venezuela? Iraq?

Nope. Canada. And the oil we get from our northern neighbor is about the most ridiculous energy bargain imaginable. Most of the stuff comes from vast deposits of tar sands in Alberta. Eventual emissions of CO2 are three times as much as from an equivalent amount of conventional crude oil. Mining the sands requires razing wide expanses of boreal forests and the peat soil beneath the trees, an inconvenient substance the industry sometimes calls "overburden." This is clearly disastrous for wildlife as well as for groundwater and air quality.

And now the capper-extraction of the tar sands and conversion to usable oil is so energy intensive that Canada is considering building nuclear plants to generate the electricity necessary to mine and refine the sands. This would be, according to a series of articles and links gathered by Grist magazine  (make sure to look at the photographs), the first time so-called "clean" nuclear electricity would be used to provide decidedly unclean fossil fuels to keep global warming rocketing along on track.


Today (February 19, 2009), President Barack Obama makes his first trip abroad to Canada, the biggest supplier of imported oil to the United States (Saudi Arabia is a close number 2). This trip offers a key opportunity to set a course for repowering the North American economy with clean energy, but there are obstacles that need to be overcome. 

Half of Canada’s oil production is from the Tar Sands, one of the biggest and dirtiest fossil fuel projects on the planet. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants special treatment for the tar sands under Obama’s clean energy plan. 

Visit Obama2Canada.org to tell President Obama that Tar Sands oil will not help us move toward a clean energy economy.

The Tar Sands does not fit into a new energy economy:

Production of oil from the Tar Sands creates three times the global warming emissions of conventional oil. The Tar Sands are Canada's fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions and the largest fossil fuel project in the world. Local communities downstream of the Tar Sands are experiencing elevated cancer rates. Its toxic lakes and mining operations, which can be seen from space, devastate the surrounding Boreal Forest and its species.


People really are nuts.