Photographer and pilot Alex MacLean wanted to learn more about the Keystone XL pipeline, which if approved will carry oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, so he decided to take pictures from above of the tar sands that will supply oil to the project. What he found shocked him. “The scale of the operation is staggering,” MacLean told The Huffington Post. It’s “mind-boggling,” he said, how expansive it is, and how much money is being poured into drilling and strip mining for the viscous petroleum product that will give the Keystone XL pipeline its oil.

Hot waste fills a tailing pond at the Suncor mining site in Alberta.

MacLean took photos from 1,000 feet above northern Alberta’s oil operations. The tar sands, more commonly referred to in Canada as the oil sands, are the world’s third-largest petroleum reserve and underlie an area roughly the size of Florida. While the Alberta government says only 3 percent of the area is suitable for strip mining, in which forest and bog “overburden” is stripped away, that still amounts to about 1,850 square miles — an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. Flying above wilderness beauty punctuated by slick oil sheens and puffs of smoke from a refinery, “you realize how wasteful we are,” MacLean said. As of early 2013, mining operations had disturbed about 276 square miles of boreal forest in the region, according to the Pembina Institute, a nonprofit Canadian think tank focused on energy. The area totals over half the size of the city of Los Angeles. The project “impressed on me, more than ever, just what the demand is for petroleum products downstream,” MacLean said, and it shows how that demand drives “vast destruction of natural systems.” According to MacLean, some Albertans supported the idea of the project, but felt the growth has been too rapid and poorly managed. But among scientists and researchers, he said, there’s a “real feeling that the environment is being poisoned, with both water and air pollution.”

Checkerboard clearing of the overburden at the Syncrude Aurora North Mine Site in Alberta.

A growing number of people are calling the Keystone XL pipeline the Death Funnel.   Look at how the extraction process is polluting both the water and air.  The corporations do not have the technology to clean this up.   They have not invested money into new accident research only new extraction research.   Now imagine 830,000 barrels of this crude being piped across the USA to the global market every single day.   It will then be then shipped globally to be burned or processed.  Please view all of the photos in the supplied  link above which  displays the extraction process again.   Ask yourself, are these corporations responsible?    Calling what the gas and oil corporations are doing as “Bad Behavior” is being far to kind when explaining what is happening and the speed at which it is happening. There are so many good reasons the pipe line has not been approved.   Foremost, it is clearly a life saving reason – all our lives.

How much economic risk does an US citizen face from the impacts of climate change?  I found one site that claims to offer information.  If you are interested, you can sign up to get economic and  scientific reports for your area.     Risky Business may be helpful.