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Tar Sands
Big Oil has big plans to jeopardize America's clean energy future by expanding the production of tar sands oil--one of the most destructive, dirty, and costly fuels in the world.
Tar Sands Jeopardize Wildlife and Climate
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.
Transporting this dirty fuel to U.S. markets has also proven to be extremely dangerous, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Learn more about the largest freshwater tar sands oil spill, which dumped nearly 1 million gallons of raw tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed due to a pipeline rupture.
Choose to Fight
Help us fight tar sands oil by donating through our new Choose Your Cause Campaign. This cause supports the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund.
What Drilling for Tar Sands Looks Like
National Wildlife Federation staff traveled to Alberta, Canada to view tar sands operations in action. See photos from the tour:
Stop the Keystone XL Dirty Tar Sands Pipeline
TransCanada, a Canadian pipeline company, has proposed a massive pipeline which would carry up to 900,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil from operations in Alberta, Canada, more than 2,000 miles to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The pipeline, called Keystone XL, would cut through six American heartland states from Montana to Texas.
LEARN MORE about the Keystone XL pipeline, and what people across the country are doing to fight it >>
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