Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

and sensible bank regulation. If there is an overarching consensus among Americans about their cousins to the north, it is that they are like Americans but nicer, probably smarter, and more loving of hockey.

Less well known is that Canada is a towering, earth-shaking, CO₂-belching petroleum giant. Let us keep our stereotype that Canadians are mild-mannered, but in terms of oil there is nothing moderate about them. They have it. With something like 175 billion barrels’ worth hidden under the ground up there, the country is second in the world only to Saudi Arabia in proven petroleum reserves. The United States’ number-one single provider of foreign oil isn’t someplace in the Middle East. It’s Canada.

A secret joy must surge through the heart of the US economy at this fact. Here on our very doorstep is a Persian Gulf without the Persians. A Saudi Arabia without the Saudis—or the Arabians. And Canada literally advertises this fact. In 2010, the Alberta government bought time on the huge screens of Manhattan’s Times Square. “A good neighbour lends you a cup of sugar,” one ad read. “A great neighbour supplies you with 1.4 million barrels of oil per day.” It’s enough to make modest, climate-change-fearing Democrats want to build pipelines.

Those 175 million barrels, though, come with a 170-billion catch. Most of Canada’s oil—half of what it produces today and 97 percent of what it expects to produce in the future—isn’t in the form of liquid petroleum, ready to be pumped out. It’s oil sand, a thick, grimy sludge buried underground. And it takes more than sticking a straw in the ground to drink this particular kind of milkshake. It takes the world’s largest shovels, digging vast canyons out of what was once Alberta’s primeval forest; and the world’s largest trucks, delivering huge quantities of the sticky, black sand into massive separators that need insane amounts of heat and water to boil the sand until the oil floats out of it, leaving behind—not incidentally, if you’re a duck—unfathomable quantities of poisonous wastewater, which are then stored in tailings ponds of unusual size.

Got it? Environmentalists call it dirty oil, as if the stuff that comes out of the ground in Kuwait were somehow clean. But oil sands oil isn’t dirty just because it requires strip-mining on a terrifying scale, or because it generates entire lakes of waste. It’s also energy-intensive: you have to spend a lot of energy to separate and process the oil, much more than if you were simply pumping petroleum out of a well. So if you’re passionate about carbon dioxide emissions and climate change—passionate about avoiding them, that is—oil from oil sands should give you the creeps. When you burn it, you’re also burning all the energy that was used to produce it. The technical term is double whammy.

Engineers in the audience may argue that in terms of CO₂ emissions, oil sands are at worst a 1.25 whammy, depending on how you run the numbers. Nevertheless, a movement has coalesced around the goal of stopping oil sands development, with environmentalists determined to make Canada stop digging new Grand Canyons in its backyard. Leave the sticky stuff in the ground, they say, reasoning that, with the world already suffering for our overuse of fossil fuels, this is no time to be developing a new source.

But it’s hard to hear that argument over the incredible grumbling sound coming from the collective stomach of the United States. It sees Canada’s oil as a possible route to so-called energy independence, which is another way of saying “oil without Muslims,” and it wants nothing more than for Canada to rip the green, boreal top right off the entire province of Alberta and shake all that black, sandy goodness directly into a refinery. And that drives environmentalists batshit crazy with rage.

Fort McMurray lies in a splendid isolation of forest and swamp, nearly three hundred miles north of Edmonton, the provincial capital and nearest major city. As with most boomtowns, it’s tempting to call Fort McMurray a shithole, but its attempt at wretchedness is halfhearted. For every corner of town that is dingy or low- rent, there is one that is tidy and clean. For example, Franklin Avenue: there is the Oil Sands Hotel, its yellow sign illustrated with large, orange oil drops. A narrow marquee boasts, CHEQUES CASHED, LOW RATES, RENOVATED ROOMS 99.00, ATM IN LOBBY, EXOTIC DANCERS MONDAY-SATURDAY 430-1AM. Across the way, as counterbalance, are the city hall and provincial buildings, a pair of sleek brick cubes that project an orderly municipal competence. At seven and nine stories, they are the tallest things in town. The next block down you’ll find the Boomtown Casino, busy even at midnight on a Tuesday, as the people of Fort McMurray feed their oil sands money into slot machines.

Downtown sits on the triangle of land where the Athabasca and Clear water Rivers converge and run north. But Fort McMurray is growing. Just across the Athabasca, a loop of fresh suburbs three times the size of downtown sprawls up the hill. In the eight years preceding the global economic slowdown of 2008, the city’s population nearly doubled, to about a hundred thousand people. Housing is therefore exceedingly tight in Fort McMurray, and prices are closer to what you might expect in Toronto than in some town a five-hour drive from anywhere. Places to live are in such short supply, and the population drawn by oil sands work so transient, that some twenty-five thousand people—nearly a quarter of all residents—live in work camps provided by the oil sands companies. Which is to say, they don’t really live here at all.

I arrived on a broad summer day, the sky smooth and bright and warm. I was staying with Don and Amy, an affable couple I had contacted through friends. Along with a teenage son, they lived in a two-story house in one of the recently built suburbs. Don was tall and thoughtful and wore socks with his shorts. Amy was small, dark-haired, and sprightly in a way that made her seem much younger than she was. They were in the full flower of middle age, spending their free time hiking and bicycling when the seasons allowed it. Hospitality seemed to come to them as a natural side effect of owning a house, and although they had no idea who I was or why I was there, they gave me my own bedroom upstairs and let me have the run of their fridge.

They both worked for oil sands companies: Amy for Suncor, Don for Syncrude. These are Canada’s two primary oil sands companies, and each reliably pulls in billions of dollars in annual profits. Amy did leadership training, while Don was an engineer.

What, they wondered, was I doing in Fort McMurray?

I didn’t want to say I had come to their town to see how the very two companies they worked for were ruining the world. It’s this phobia I have about not seeming like a total asshole. So I gave them the long, squirmy version, something about environment and industry and seeing for myself and—

“Well,” said Amy brightly. “We both work for the dark side.”

The dark side?

Don scratched his head. “I don’t know if you heard about our duck episode.”

The rivers and forests that cradle Fort McMurray offer plenty of invigorating outdoor activities to visitors looking for that sort of thing. By the looks of it, you could do some great hiking or buzz the river on a Jet Ski, and I’m sure there’s moose around that you could shoot. But the pollution tourist goes to Fort McMurray only for the mines.

It was a homecoming of sorts. I was born in Alberta (in Calgary), and although I left before I was two years old, it had always lingered in my imagination as that magical place—the place I’m from. This was my first time back in the province, and I intended to celebrate by seeing some torn-up planet.

I will admit to a certain excitement about it all, even though the responsible attitude, as a sensitive, eco- friendly liberal, would have been one of grave concern, or even horror. But I’m also the son and grandson of engineers: intelligent, bullshit-allergic men out of Alaska and South Dakota, men who lived by their knowledge of roads and of pipelines, and of rocks, and of how things get done. And though I inherited barely a trace of their common sense, I honor them how I can. How else to explain my almost sentimental enthusiasm for heavy infrastructure and industrial machines?

You could say, then, that I came to Fort McMurray with conflicted feelings about the oil sands, unsure of just how much filial gusto and faux-local pride were appropriate at the scene of a so-called climate crime. But this could be said about Canada in general. I was merely a walking example of the country’s love-hate relationship with its own resources. The modest northern country where Greenpeace was founded had been declared an “emerging energy superpower” by its own prime minister, and in a spasm of vehement ambivalence, Canada was both pioneering the era of dirty oil and leading the fight to stop it.

Suncor’s and Syncrude’s main operations are located a quick jaunt up Highway 63, which runs parallel to the Athabasca, past hummocks of evergreen. About twenty-five miles out of town, the air starts smelling like tar. Suncor’s business is hidden from the road, but Syncrude shows a little leg. As you get close, the trees disappear, and you pass a long sandy berm; one of Syncrude’s flagship tailings ponds sits on the other side, a shallow lake of