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"The Most Destructive Project on Earth"

Canadian tar sands.

Photo: Suncor Energy Inc. / U.S. Oil and Tar Sands Program

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A week after Environmental Defense labeled Canada's tar sands the most destructive project on Earth, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will open up discussions about similar projects across the American West.

Tar sands and oil shale have oil, and that oil can be extracted, refined and burned as fuel. Some industry analysts say exploitation of these reserves will stave off the inevitable peak in production that would otherwise lead to huge price spikes and an ongoing and widening gap between supply and demand.

The question is whether the environmental cost is worth paying to prolong the era of cheap oil (or whether that oil will, indeed, come cheap.) The Alberta tar sands project pollutes massive amounts of fresh water, takes a tremendous amount of energy to extract and produces as much as three times as much greenhouse gas pollution, per barrel, as traditional oil extraction.

The Bureau of Land Management is starting the environmental review necessary to open 2.3 million acres of BLM lands in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming for development of oil shale, primarily, and to a lesser extent, tar sands, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

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