First Nations communities who had inhabited the new ground zero for tar sands oil development for thousands of years began voicing concerns. Not everyone could turn a blind eye to the havoc wrought by tar sands, though. It had the backing of the Canadian government and U.S. “It was a blight on the boreal,” says Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, NRDC’s chief program officer and a policy advocate for the organization’s Canada work at the time. By 2004, Canadian production of tar sands oil had reached one million barrels per day-with much of the output bound for the United States-and Big Oil had ambitious plans to expand. Extracting and converting tar sands into usable fuel is a hugely expensive energy- and water-intensive endeavor that involves strip mining giant swaths of land and creating loads of toxic waste and air and water pollution.ĭespite these economic and environmental costs, a race to make money from this dirty fuel was kicked off in the mid-1990s by rising oil prices. Knight was describing tar sands, a sludgy deposit of sand, clay, water, and sticky, black bitumen (used to make synthetic oil) that lies beneath northern Alberta’s boreal forest in a region the size of Florida.
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