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A tar-sands facility: oil doesn't get any dirtier than this.At ForestEthics, persuading the world's largest corporations to treat the Earth ethically is our bread and butter. And it often starts with a letter.

Last week, we mailed letters to more than 100 Fortune 500 companies, warning that their continued consumption of fuels from Canada’s tar sands—the world’s dirtiest oil—puts their brands at risk.

As ForestEthics Executive Director Todd Paglia documented in a vivid slideshow for Grist last year, the tar sands manage to combine multiple local and global environmental hazards into a single industrial project—in fact, the largest industrial project in the world. In the parlance of addiction, the tar sands are proof that we’re getting pretty close to rock bottom. It’s a giant step backward for a world that is ready to break its addiction to oil.

Tar-sands oil production generates three to five times the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional oil production. Communities downstream of tar-sands projects are facing elevated levels of cancer. Tar-sands production creates toxic lakes so vast they can be seen from outer space. Production of tar-sands oil destroys fresh drinking water, pollutes the air, and razes North America’s Great Boreal Forests. Tar-sands sludge, extracted primarily in the province of Alberta, Canada, cannot be made clean by technological solutions.

And the tar-sands problem is coming to America.  An increasing percentage of U.S. transportation fuels--consumed in massive quantities to ship American products and power American cars--are derived from Canadian tar-sands oil. This means that despite what you may have heard, a lot of America's favorite products—from cans of soda to bars of soap to books purchased online—have a dirtier carbon footprint than they've ever had before.

The tar-sands industry is proposing new pipelines and refineries that would expand U.S. capacity for converting their tarry sludge into fuel. If these plans move forward, America will have moved Alberta's toxic local impacts to our towns and cities. At the precise moment America has concluded that our economy must be cleaner, tar-sands oil threatens to make it dirtier.

In last week’s letter, we offered a hand in helping companies rely more on cleaner fuels and less on dirty tar-sands fuels, while also notifying them that a public campaign could be launched against any company that does not act ethically in response to the tar sands’ devastating environmental and health impacts. The choice is theirs to make.

Both the sincere offer of help and the legitimate threat of public action are critical, and this "carrot/stick" approach marks a return to the strategies that made ForestEthics’ reputation. As ForestEthics has found over the years, the old adage "the customer is always right" can be a powerful tool for change.

And America’s Fortune 500 companies are some of the most powerful customers in the world.  Many of these companies did not know they were customers of Canada’s tar sands until they received our letter.  Now that they know, they can either burnish their brands by helping to lead us into a clean energy future, or they can 'tar'-nish their brands by passively accepting Big Oil’s latest plan for keeping us addicted to fossil fuels.

A version of this post was originally published at ForestEthics.org.

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Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk won the top prize from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual reporting awards for his investigation of oil extraction in the tar sands of northern Alberta.

Nikiforuk’s book -- Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent -- examines the high social and environmental costs of the process of converting bitumen to refinable oil, which has drawn $150 billion in investment from the world’s largest oil companies. SEJ awarded Nikiforuk the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, which comes with $10,000.

Grist reviewed the book and interviewed Nikiforuk when it was released; he told us:

He said the economic downturn and drop in oil prices have slowed the pace of tar sands development, though they’re still generating attention. A pair of new studies attempt some tar sands greenwashery, and the activist group Action Factory held an oily demonstration in Washington on Friday to urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to nix a pipeline linking tar sands oil to U.S. refineries.

More notable winners from SEJ’s awards:

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What could beat Amazonian deforestation, massive coal plants next to elementary schools, factory farming, mountaintop removal, and giant trash heaps in the middle of the ocean for the title of "the most destructive project on Earth"? [PDF]

Cue the tar sands, a vast expanse of the Albertan province opened up to rampant drilling, surface mining, and pipelines through what was once a strikingly beautiful section of the Canadian boreal forest. Canada's Environmental Defense deemed it "the most destructive project on Earth" last February.

While this region holds immense ecological and aesthetic value on the planetary exterior (it is the largest remaining unspoiled forest and wetland ecosystem and one of the most biodiverse carbon sinks on Earth), its subterranean layers are rich with oil that is deeply embedded in an earth and sand mixture called bitumen. Starting to imagine what this project might look like?

Some have likened it to Mordor, the fictional land ravaged by the Dark Lord in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Huge swathes of forest -- the tar sands developments are visible from space -- have been leveled to mine the earth, make way for processing facilities, and provide space for tailing ponds. The projects strain the freshwater capacity from the Athabasca River, and the downstream pollution is linked, some believe, to rising cancer rates in indigenous communities.

The world's leading oil and gas companies are salivating over Alberta's tar sands, thanks to record oil prices for much of 2008 and declining access to the fossil fuel resources in countries like Russia and Venezuela. Alberta is estimated to be home to 60 percent of the world's more easily accessed oil reserves.

The pipe dream of North American oil independence has spurred a gold rush to this fossil fuel playground. A who's who of Western oil companies comprises the all-star lineup of tar sands players -- Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, Shell, BP, Syncrude, Statoil, PetroCanada, and more. Unfortunately, tar sands drilling and mining has only just begun. Companies plan to spend as much as $125 billion to expand mining, drilling, and refining operations over the next 10 to 15 years. And neither the Canadian federal nor provincial governments have stepped up to the challenge of planning for the cumulative impact of all the development.

Alongside environmental watchdogs, shareholders are raising red flags and demanding that drillers move slowly and cautiously. In the U.S., our firms, Green Century Capital Management and Trillium Asset Management Corporation, two socially responsible investment companies, have been mobilizing at Chevron and ConocoPhillips. The Canadian mutual funds company Ethical Funds has engaged a number of Canadian oil and gas firms and produced several useful reports on the tar sands. Investors in the U.K. and Europe have been approaching BP and Shell.

Green Century and Trillium filed shareholder resolutions in 2008 at Chevron and ConocoPhillips, outlining key risks and asking the companies to report on environmental damage resulting from their expanding tar sands operations, including the implications of discontinuing expansion plans.

Athabasca tar sands.

Photo: katakanadian

Included in the laundry list of obvious risks to the companies, the investors noted impending costly regulations on carbon emissions in both Canada and the U.S. (the tar sands' largest customer); declining operational water availability; reputational damage due to impact on air quality, water quality, and wildlife; and the possibility of litigative and competitive threat.

In making our case to our fellow shareholders, Green Century and Trillium noted the particularly worrisome hazard surrounding tailing ponds from mining operations, acutely toxic pools of sludge that cover almost 20 square miles of forest and bogs. Last year, these nasty puddles were splashed across international headlines when an entire flock of 500 migrating ducks was found dead in one of Syncrude's massive tailing ponds.

Nearly 30 percent of both companies' shareholders supported the proposals presented by Green Century and Trillium. This is a very high vote in the rarefied world of shareholder proposals -- not quite a vote of no confidence, but a strong signal to executives that a critical minority of stockowners is not on board with the program.

Green Century and Trillium are now pursuing follow-up meetings with both companies to discuss last year's resolutions and the companies' plans to address investor concerns.

In the end, the tar sands are a textbook example of our failure as human beings to look beyond short-term profit maximization. In a rational global economy capable of looking to long-term rewards, we would now be enjoying the economic, political, and environmental benefits of two decades of aggressive efficiency measures, phased-down fossil-fuel use, and the mass distribution of renewable energy technologies.

Instead, we have new financial maelstroms threatening our economy every week, the "most destructive project on Earth" annihilating one of our planet's most valuable ecological resources, and ... hundreds of unnecessarily dead ducks.

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Fish, water, and sediment downstream from the gigantic oil sands projects in Alberta are chock-full of carcinogens and other toxins, says a new study. While the research does not make a direct link between the oil sands, the toxins, and presumed health consequences, the largely Native residents of downstream community Fort Chipewyan have long suspected that they experience higher-than-normal rates of rare cancers. (Alberta's health department does not agree.) Head researcher Kevin Timoney says that Fort Chipewyan's drinking water is safe, but he found high levels of arsenic, mercury, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon in fish, which many of the village's 1,400 residents eat regularly. Fort Chipewyan is calling for a moratorium on oil sands development, which, seeing as aboriginal health is invariably a higher priority than fossil-fuel profit, will no doubt be granted any day now.

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Illnesses including leukemia and lymphomas are cropping up at greater than expected rates in a First Nations community near oil sands in Canada's Alberta province. Elders at Fort Chipewyan say incidence of disease started rising when the oil industry started extracting and processing hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day near their community of about 1,200 people. Area medical examiner John O'Connor says he'd like to figure out what's going on before more oil developments are approved; he's diagnosing unusually high numbers of immune-system diseases, and has also treated five community members for a fatal cancer that typically occurs in one out of 100,000 people. O'Connor is negotiating with federal health officials to start an epidemiological investigation ASAP. Alberta's oil sands are estimated to hold between 1.7 trillion and 2.5 trillion barrels of oil -- second only to reserves in Saudi Arabia -- and production is set to quadruple in the next 25 years.

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Canada's already-tense internal battle over whether to ratify the Kyoto Treaty on climate change heated up further yesterday, when the province of Alberta withdrew from negotiations after its alternative emissions-cutting plan was rejected by the other provinces and territories. In response, Alberta resigned as co-chair of the commission formed to negotiate climate issues and refused to sign the communique issued by the nation's other energy and environment ministers. Without Alberta in the picture, it will be difficult for Canada to comply with the Kyoto accord, because the province produces about a third of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. The stage is now set for even more internal friction: The federal government has said it is prepared to override Alberta's opposition if necessary, and there are rumblings that the province could go to court to avoid complying with the treaty if it is ratified.

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