Glen Reynolds smugs, “WANT CHEAP, SAFE, TERROR-FREE ENERGY? Environmentalists don’t.” He is talking about petroleum extracted from Canadian tar sands, although it that energy source doesn’t really qualify as cheap or safe. An article from the May/June issue of Mother Jones examines the costs of such extraction, and the results aren’t pretty:

. . . Converting tar sand into gasoline emits up to three times the greenhouse gases as drilling and refining conventional oil. The extraction process consumes roughly twice the energy of producing conventional oil . . . And there are growing questions about the mines, which have transformed once-sleepy northern Alberta into an industrial frontier, and their health effects on wildlife and people . . .

Ten years ago, as the tar sands boom was just getting under way, . . . commercial fishermen began to haul in unusual numbers of deformed fish from Lake Athabasca. Walleye came in with humpbacks, crooked tails, pug faces, and bulging eyes. In 2002, an elder named Raymond Ladouceur, who’d been fishing the lake longer than anyone, dropped off 200 pounds of freakish-looking walleye at the doorstep of the Fish and Wildlife Division in Fort McMurray. Instead of testing them, officials left the fish outside to rot. . .

The anecdotal evidence that something was wrong was mounting: Fort Chipewyan’s hunters complained that their duck and muskrat tasted watery and bland, that moose livers were enlarged and spotted white, and that when they boiled river water it left a viscous brown scum on the pot. . .

Nothing says “safe” like “viscous brown scum”! When he says “terror free,” I’m guessing that Reynolds is referring to the way that our energy appetite transfers wealth to Saudi Arabia and Iran; and it’s a little late in the game to start worrying about that. With the exception of a few “hybrid hawks” most in the war party have had little to say on the subject out of fear of giving aid and comfort to Jimmy Carter.