narrativemag:

Rick Bass, Robert Hass, Bill McKibben, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and actress Daryl Hannah were among the activists arrested on Wednesday in front of the White House, where they were taking a stand against the Keystone pipeline. In this essay, Bass explains the magnitude of the environmental disaster the pipeline represents.

We are being led as if with a ring through our nose, being sold the lie that Alberta tar sands oil is conflict-free oil, gotten by scraping away the boreal forest of Canada — the great lungs of North America, one of our last hopes for temperance against rising CO2 levels — and are steam-cleaning, with huge amounts of fossil fuel, thick tar from the sandstones buried beneath that forest. An open pit 50 sprawling years in the digging, before it’s done, and the Athabasca River running sheeny with fracture fluids and other toxins, to feed the world market. They boil the tarry sand — as if making the last of stone soup — but what malicious residue remains, from getting to that last cup?

It’s a filthy way to get oil, and in the oilfield, I’ve seen some filth: broken pipes, broken promises, false assurances. I’m not talking about geologists or engineers, I’m talking about — I don’t even know what to call it anymore. In the media it’s referred to as Big Oil, but we all know it’s gotten even bigger than that.

Bass, whose first career was in oil and gas geology, has been an outspoken environmental activist and has written powerfully on the subject of oil. “Being an eater of oil—a consumer—is surely the worst of my physical sins, a sin we all possess and about which we can all continue to make rueful jokes, between shrugs of acceptance, always hoping or even promising to do better another day,” Bass wrote a few years ago. Today is that other day.