Lawmakers Push Disastrous Legislation on Keystone XL

Code:

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/12/02-6

. . . Strip mining of oil from Alberta’s tar sands has already destroyed tens of thousands of acres of boreal forest and polluted hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the Athabasca River, creating toxic ponds so large they can be seen from space. Processing and refinement of tar-sands oil produces two to three times more greenhouse gases per barrel than conventional oil and represents a massive new source of fossil fuels, which leading climate scientist Dr. James Hansen has called “game over” for our ability to avoid climate catastrophe.

If this were not enough, the caustic oil known as bitumen, which would be transported across six states and thousands of water bodies, poses an unacceptable risk of spill. An existing pipeline, Keystone 1, has already leaked 14 times since it went operational in June 2010; one spill dumped 21,000 gallons of tar-sands crude. Another tar-sands pipeline spilled more than a million gallons in the Kalamazoo River.

. . .