AlterNet / By Janet Redman
"the process of mining tar sands is disastrous to ecosystem and human health. Hard-to-extract bitumen oil is bound to sandy soils under Canada's boreal forest and wetlands. The only way to unlock the reserve is to scrape off a part of the forest the size of Florida or melt the oil in place using a steam and pump process that decimates life on the surface. But the idiocy doesn't end there. It takes three barrels of water to extract every one barrel of oil from tar sands. At current rates, that means about 400 million gallons of water a day. And after it's used the vast majority of polluted wastewater is sent to tailing ponds that have been found to leak over a billion gallons of water per year contaminated with cyanide, ammonia and other toxic chemicals. "
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