Environmental and Public Health Disaster: Canada's Tar-Sands Cesspool by Michael Werbowski
The Paris based, French monthly journal,"Le Monde Diplomatique", in it's April edition took a long, hard, and deep, look into the immense toxic cesspool which are the Alberta tar-sands today.
According to the in-depth report ( entitled in French: "Sous les sables bitumineux de l'Alberta") , around the Athabasca lake region, the cancer rate is becoming "alarming"; or 30% above the Albertain provincial average. The culprit is suspected to be the 230 Km2 toxic reservoirs where the effluence from the oil industry's operations is collected. The massive scale extraction of the "black oil," underway for years now, seeks to suck out the remaining 170 billion barrels of beneath the Boreal forest, of which huge swaths are by now cut and destroyed to get to the oil ( as the earth is transformed into toxic sludge) underneath. Massive quantities of fresh-water are used to "steam out" the viscous petrol from the tar-like sands. The process gives off vast amount of C02 gas as well. Read Michael Werbowski's full article here, on the Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG) website.
