Shut Down the Tar Sands
If you’re a Canadian who cares about things like uncontaminated beauty and sustaining human life on earth, you should stand up and demand that the Alberta’s tar sands be shut down.
The latest news out of Alberta is that a flock of five hundred migratory ducks are drowning [Update: have drowned] in a massive pool of thick sludge, the ever-growing byproduct of one of the dirtiest engineering projects on earth.
From DeSmog Blog:
The oil sands are licensed to use more fresh water in a year than the entire City of Calgary (about the same size as Austin, Texas) and 90% of that fresh water ends up in massive tailing ponds, so large that that they are considered one of the largest human-made structures in the world.
Forget the term ‘tailing pond’. Let’s call these things what they really are: pollution pits. The largest pollution pits in the world. In the Canadian wilderness. What an embarrassment.
(Remember what pits like this have already done to Canadians?)
And all this for an inefficient source of energy that even our mighty American customers are saying is too dirty?
Please do your part towards making sure that the tar sands get shut down.
(Image above found over at oneearth.org)
[Update: To provide a degree of context, here’s the number of dead ducks that we’re talking about…]
May 21st, 2008 at 2:46 am
great post. the visual is highly effective.