The flimsy argument advanced by the State Department has been shredded even further by a new report that you can read about in Smithsonian. The whole project is a slow-rolling ecological catastrophe from start to finish.To this list of concerns, we can now add another. A new study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that production in the Athabasca oil sands region is leading to the emission of levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons PAHs two to three orders of magnitude higher-that’s one hundred to one thousand times greater-than previously thought. These higher levels of PAHs in the area aren’t imminently dangerous they’re comparable to levels found in urban areas, which result from burning gasoline in cars and trucks, but they’re significantly higher than reported in mining companies’ environmental impact assessments and Canada’s official National Pollutant Release Inventory.

via Smithsonian Tar Sands Mining Report – More Bad News About Pipelines – Esquire.

 

“significantly higher”