In order to combat global warming, we need bold investments in energy efficiency and renewable power. This progress is endangered by polluting industries’ plans to exploit new, dirty fuels. Dirty fuels, like tar sands, oil shale, liquid coal and biofuels, produce far greater greenhouse gas emissions than conventional gasoline, are difficult to extract, and take a lot of energy to refine. Dirty fuels are a false solution to our energy needs. They may pad the profits of the fossil fuel lobby, but they’ll only further endanger our chances to stop global warming. Read below to learn more about dirty fuels and their destructive environmental and social impacts.
Tar sands oil is a high carbon fuel strip-mined from beneath Canada’s Boreal forest. Fuel from tar sands represents an increasingly significant portion of the fuel used in cars in the United States. To extract oil from tar sands, companies must destroy fragile forest ecosystems and then use a very energy-intensive upgrading and refining process to turn that oil into transportation fuel. Tar sands mining and production harm the boreal forest’s fragile ecosystem, waste enormous amounts of water, and disrupt the lives of indigenous people in the area.
Oil shale is a dirty fuel source made up of rock heated to high temperatures until it releases a petroleum-like material. Oil shale development has never proven economically viable because it requires mining large tracts of land and spending huge amounts of energy to heat the rock. However, a new “in situ” method of heating the oil shale underground has been developed and oil companies are keen to test its profit potential.
Under the Bush administration, the Department of the Interior paved the way for oil companies like Shell to exploit large tracts of public land in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah for oil shale development. It will be an economic and environmental nightmare if these plans move forward. Oil shale development would increase global warming emissions, exacerbate area water shortages, pollute water and air in pristine, protected areas, and sap the resources of local communities.
The coal industry is pushing our government to subsidize and support the conversion of coal into liquid fuel as a fuel source for the future. Liquid coal carries all of the health and environmental problems of traditional coal, while creating new pollution and waste through its dirty production process. Mountaintop removal and strip mining to extract coal already creates severe environmental destruction, wiping out streams and polluting water. Liquid coal production wastes more water and produces further air pollution. Over the full life cycle, liquid coal emits twice the greenhouse gases of conventional gasoline.
The potential exists to develop biofuels that are sustainable and energy efficient, but the large-scale biofuels that are currently in use have proven to be ecologically unsustainable and inefficient. These include biofuels produced from corn, sugar and palm oil, but can also include some forms of "next generation" biofuels. Bad biofuels can create significant environmental harm. Large-scale agricultural production of corn and other crops used for biofuels often involves massive fertilizer inputs, use of large quantities of water, and soil erosion. Additionally, rather than helping prevent global warming, biofuels can actually cause global warming as a result of deforestation and the destruction of other natural ecosystems both here in the US and around the world.
Each dirty fuel relies on taxpayer support to turn a profit. The government subsidizes the refining of liquid coal, authorizes new pipelines and refineries for tar sands, opens pristine, public lands to oil shale strip mining, and requires oil companies to use dirty biofuels, in addition to other government support for these fuels. Still, these corporations continue to lobby for even more taxpayer subsidies and lax regulation. We need to organize, so tax dollars are going to promote green, renewable energy solutions, not dirty fuels.