If you wanted to choose a source of energy that would damage local resources, poison America’s air with deadly pollution, accelerate global climate change, and become useful only a dangerously wasteful set of technologies, then tar sands and oil shale would be among your top picks. Of course, when most of us think about reforming America’s energy infrastructure, we have a very different set of priorities.

The Natural Resources Defense Council summarizes the significant shortcomings of mining tar sands and oil shale for energy as follows:

- “Mining and drilling tar sands, extracting bitumen and turning it into crude oil is a dirty, energy-intensive and destructive process. It takes four tons of material dug out of open pit mines to produce a single barrel of oil.”
- “Tar sands oil production generates three times as much global warming pollution as conventional oil production.”
- “Commercial oil shale technology is largely untested.”
- “Oil shale development would further deplete already scarce water resources in the West, threaten wildlife habitat and increase air pollution, and the conversion process could also generate toxic waste.”

Sustainability Watch places oil shale and tar sands both in the Earth’s top 5 dirtiest sources of energy, explaining, “Oil shale shares many of the same problems as tar sands. Like Tar sand its production is very energy intensive… Oil Shale like tar sands, also creates significant environmental damage when produced and consumed.”

This information about the profound shortcomings of tar sands and oil shale is not some kind of secret. It’s based upon easily accessible public knowledge.

In spite of that, nine members of the House of Representatives are pushing a new piece of legislation that would promote the mining of oil shale and tar sand deposits on protected public lands. Their bill, registered as H.R. 6211 four days ago, carries the cumbersome title, “To allow Americans the opportunity to see their vast oil shale and tar sands resources on Federal lands developed by providing the President with the ability to determine the quickest and most responsible way to access oil shale resources.”

Talk about chutzpah. According to the sponsors of H.R. 6211, the American people are supposed to regard it as an “opportunity” to have big oil corporations come onto our public lands at a bargain basement rate, take whatever wealth they can find, sell it at a huge profit that won’t be shared with the rest of us, and then leave what they found as a scarred, poison wreck of its former self. Sorry, but I don’t see the “opportunity” in that.

The federal government is supposed to act as a steward of public lands, not a pimp to sell out their precious resources for corrupt purposes at a cheap price. Yet, pimping out the valuable lands of the USA for the sake of the personal profit of a very small number of politically connected big oil elites is just what the following members of the U.S. House of Representatives have in mind. They are the sponsors of H.R. 6211, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves:

Chris Cannon
Rob Bishop
Henry Brown
John Culberson
David Dreier
Elton Gallegly
Wally Herger
Darrell Issa
John Peterson