Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

But for the moment, the world was still half-spinning, and I couldn’t look. I rolled the window down and felt relief stream in with the wind. Nikolai hugged the edge of the road as we picked up speed, and I leaned my head against the frame of the car and listened to the rising drone of the engine, eyes closed, mouth hanging open, gulping in the sweet, sunny air of the Exclusion Zone.

On April 28, 2008, a group of some sixteen hundred ducks landed on a lake near Fort McMurray, Canada. It was a warm day for early spring in northern Alberta, the temperature reaching into the mid-sixties. The ice on the water was still melting after the long winter. The ducks were heading for nesting grounds in the green expanse of Canada’s boreal forest—a vast band of coniferous trees and wetlands that stretches clear across Canada and that provides a summer home for half the birds in all North America.

Around these parts, though, a duck can’t safely assume that a lake is in fact a lake. This lake, for instance, was actually a huge tailings pond owned by the Syncrude corporation—“tailings pond” being a term of art in the mining industry for “waste reservoir.” As the birds touched down, they became coated with oily bitumen residue. Most of them sank. Others languished on the surface, waiting to be saved by human beings or videotaped by journalists. Of the sixteen hundred birds, fewer than half a dozen survived. Ducks of the world, beware of Alberta.

Syncrude had presumably hoped to keep its little duck holocaust private, but an anonymous tipster reported the incident and, before the day was out, the company had a full-blown public relations disaster on its hands. “Hundreds of Ducks Dead or Dying after Landing on Syncrude Tailings Pond,” reported the Western Star, while the Spectator ran the cheeky “Tar Pond Dooms Ducks to Death.” Within days, the scandal grew from mere corporate misfortune—“Syncrude in Hot Water over Duck Disaster” (Windsor Star) —to provincial government headache—“Duck Disaster Sinks Alberta Government’s Credibility” (Calgary Herald) —to a matter of national import that demanded the prime minister’s attention—“Harper Promises to Investigate Dead Ducks in Northern Alberta” (CBC).

This, then, is Canada—perhaps the only country where ducks have national, even geopolitical, significance.

But this isn’t because the Canadian character is somehow uniquely sensitive to the welfare of its waterfowl. It’s because the sixteen hundred—long may their memory live—had, with their deaths, scratched a festering sore on the Canadian national psyche. They had landed—and died—in something larger than a lake. Larger than a tailings pond. They had hit a grim bull’s-eye in the world’s largest and most controversial energy project, in the Middle East of the Great White North, in the cauldron of our energy future. They had landed in oil sands country.

Canada lives in the imagination of the United States as a benign, continent-size footnote, the brunt of conservative jokes about invasion and annexation, and the object of liberal daydreams about socialized medicine and sensible bank regulation. If there is an overarching consensus among Americans about their cousins to the north, it is that they are like Americans but nicer, probably smarter, and more loving of hockey.

Less well known is that Canada is a towering, earth-shaking, CO 2-belching petroleum giant. Let us keep our stereotype that Canadians are mild-mannered, but in terms of oil there is nothing moderate about them. They have it. With something like 175 billion barrels’ worth hidden under the ground up there, the country is second in the world only to Saudi Arabia in proven petroleum reserves. The United States’ number-one single provider of foreign oil isn’t someplace in the Middle East. It’s Canada.

A secret joy must surge through the heart of the US economy at this fact. Here on our very doorstep is a Persian Gulf without the Persians. A Saudi Arabia without the Saudis—or the Arabians. And Canada literally advertises this fact. In 2010, the Alberta government bought time on the huge screens of Manhattan’s Times Square. “A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar,” one ad read. “A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.” It’s enough to make modest, climate-change-fearing Democrats want to build pipelines.

Those 175 million barrels, though, come with a 170-billion catch. Most of Canada’s oil—half of what it produces today and 97 percent of what it expects to produce in the future—isn’t in the form of liquid petroleum, ready to be pumped out. It’s oil sand, a thick, grimy sludge buried underground. And it takes more than sticking a straw in the ground to drink this particular kind of milkshake. It takes the world’s largest shovels, digging vast canyons out of what was once Alberta’s primeval forest; and the world’s largest trucks, delivering huge quantities of the sticky, black sand into massive separators that need insane amounts of heat and water to boil the sand until the oil floats out of it, leaving behind—not incidentally, if you’re a duck—unfathomable quantities of poisonous wastewater, which are then stored in tailings ponds of unusual size.

Got it? Environmentalists call it dirty oil, as if the stuff that comes out of the ground in Kuwait were somehow clean. But oil sands oil isn’t dirty just because it requires strip-mining on a terrifying scale, or because it generates entire lakes of waste. It’s also energy-intensive: you have to spend a lot of energy to separate and process the oil, much more than if you were simply pumping petroleum out of a well. So if you’re passionate about carbon dioxide emissions and climate change—passionate about avoiding them, that is—oil from oil sands should give you the creeps. When you burn it, you’re also burning all the energy that was used to produce it. The technical term is double whammy.

Engineers in the audience may argue that in terms of CO 2emissions, oil sands are at worst a 1.25 whammy, depending on how you run the numbers. Nevertheless, a movement has coalesced around the goal of stopping oil sands development, with environmentalists determined to make Canada stop digging new Grand Canyons in its backyard. Leave the sticky stuff in the ground, they say, reasoning that, with the world already suffering for our overuse of fossil fuels, this is no time to be developing a new source.

But it’s hard to hear that argument over the incredible grumbling sound coming from the collective stomach of the United States. It sees Canada’s oil as a possible route to so-called energy independence, which is another way of saying “oil without Muslims,” and it wants nothing more than for Canada to rip the green, boreal top right off the entire province of Alberta and shake all that black, sandy goodness directly into a refinery. And that drives environmentalists batshit crazy with rage.

Fort McMurray lies in a splendid isolation of forest and swamp, nearly three hundred miles north of Edmonton, the provincial capital and nearest major city. As with most boomtowns, it’s tempting to call Fort McMurray a shithole, but its attempt at wretchedness is halfhearted. For every corner of town that is dingy or low-rent, there is one that is tidy and clean. For example, Franklin Avenue: there is the Oil Sands Hotel, its yellow sign illustrated with large, orange oil drops. A narrow marquee boasts, CHEQUES CASHED, LOW RATES, RENOVATED ROOMS 99.00, ATM IN LOBBY, EXOTIC DANCERS MONDAY-SATURDAY 430-1AM. Across the way, as counterbalance, are the city hall and provincial buildings, a pair of sleek brick cubes that project an orderly municipal competence. At seven and nine stories, they are the tallest things in town. The next block down you’ll find the Boomtown Casino, busy even at midnight on a Tuesday, as the people of Fort McMurray feed their oil sands money into slot machines.