Tar Nation

Already the largest supplier of foreign crude to the U.S., Canada is ramping up mining of its prodigious tar sands to slake America's (and the world's) ever-increasing thirst for oil. As the Washington Post reports, this Oil Rush has enormous environmental consequences. An obvious one is the wholesale destruction of large swaths of Alberta's Boreal Forest, where the bituminous sands are found. See the slide show. It's not a pretty picture. A less-obvious consequence has to do with global warming.

The Boreal Forest is considered an important carbon sink and a vital tool for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Now, a large swath of that forest has been turned into a producer of greenhouse gases and a further impediment to Canada reaching its emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol. As has been noted here before, Ottawa is committed, under the climate treaty, to a six per cent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2012. Actual emissions have in fact risen by 30 per cent, and the mining of tar sands is the main contributor to that increase.