Tar Sands - National Wildlife Federation

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Big Oil has some big plans to put America’s clean energy future in jeopardy by expanding the production of tar sands oil – one of the most destructive, dirty, and costly fuels in the world.

In 2008, 1,600 ducks drowned in toxic tailing ponds created to produce dirty tar sands oil.

In July, 2010, 1 million gallons of oil gushed into a Michigan river from a pipeline owned by a tar sands company.

And now, tar sands oil companies want to pump this dangerous and dirty fuel right through America's heartland, putting our public water supplies, crop lands, and wildlife habitats at risk of tar sands oil leaks.

To extract the tar sands, oil companies are digging up pristine forest in Alberta, Canada, which provides habitat for large populations of migratory birds, wolves, grizzly bears, lynx and moose.

Mining and extracting these tar sands destroys enormous swaths of important ecosystems, produces lake-sized reservoirs of toxic waste, releases toxic chemicals into our air when it is refined in the U.S., and emits significantly more global warming pollutants into the atmosphere than fuels made from conventional oil.

See: Keystone XL Pipeline - Issues