Don't be fooled

Gulf Oil Disaster Doesn't Make the Tar Sands Green

It's funny how it's taken the worst ecological disaster in US history to suddenly make other forms of oil extraction and processing look green. Only months ago, the carbon trail from the massive planned expansion of tar sands production made Canada a pariah at the world environmental summit in Copenhagen. But now tar sands producers and others are promoting tar sands oil as an ecologically friendly alternative to the environmental risks of another deep-water oil spill.

How low the bar has fallen.

There's nothing clean about the production of synthetic oil from tar sands. The production of a single barrel of synthetic oil pollutes some 125 gallons of fresh water and emits over 200 pounds of carbon dioxide, principally as a result of the combustion of the natural gas, over 1,000 cubic feet of it, needed to generate the heat to separate the oil from the sand and then process it.

The solution is not finding alternative ways to get oil - it is how to wean ourselves off our oil addiction.