Words of Warming

What Are Tar Sands?

Indigenous and environmental groups are fighting the construction of a tar sands pipeline that would cross 200 bodies of water

Words of Warming is a series from Future Human defining the language of climate change and environmental and climate justice.

Definition of tar sands (also called oil sands):

A mixture of sand, clay, water, and bitumen—a thick, sticky oil that’s made of hydrocarbons; it can be refined to produce gasoline and other products that require petrochemicals.

The Revelator recently interviewed Tara Houska, an attorney and Indigenous rights activist, about the fight to stop a tar sands pipeline called Line 3 from being built because of the potential public health threat the pipeline represents:

There’s also this huge push on [President Joe] Biden, who canceled Keystone XL [another tar sands pipeline] on day one and has centered himself as the climate president. We’re looking to the administration to intervene on something that’s an obvious climate disaster.

How can we say we’ll cancel one pipeline but build another? It’s the same types of violations and the same types of climate impacts coming out of the Alberta tar sands.

Building Line 3 will have the equivalent emissions of building 50 new coal power plants. That’s insane.