A tar-sands facility: oil doesn’t get any dirtier than this.At ForestEthics, persuading the world’s largest corporations to treat the Earth ethically is our bread and butter. And it often starts with a letter.
Last week, we mailed letters to more than 100 Fortune 500 companies, warning that their continued consumption of fuels from Canada’s tar sands—the world’s dirtiest oil—puts their brands at risk.
As ForestEthics Executive Director Todd Paglia documented in a vivid slideshow for Grist last year, the tar sands manage to combine multiple local and global environmental hazards into a single industrial project—in fact, the largest industrial project in the world. In the parlance of addiction, the tar sands are proof that we’re getting pretty close to rock bottom. It’s a giant step backward for a world that is ready to break its addiction to oil.
Tar-sands oil production generates three to five times the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional oil production. Communities downstream of tar-sands projects are facing elevated levels of cancer. Tar-sands production creates toxic lakes so vast they can be seen... Read more
