The Alberta tar sands are now the largest single source of crude oil imports into the United States, ahead of Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (the next biggest sources in that order).

It takes up to four barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil extracted from the tar sands. The water is drawn from the Athabasca River system, with devastating consequences to the peoples who live along and rely on that river.

But the environmental consequences of this project (by itself as large as the entire state of Florida) are not just local. The production of crude oil there accounts for at least 40 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

The Alberta tar sands operation has been called “the single most destructive and unsustainable project on earth.”

The documentary, H2Oil, explores those consequences. (See the trailers below).

Hold in your mind at once both the scale and devastation of the Alberta tar sands project and the scale and destruction of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You will then understand the most fundamental trend in modern man’s desperate quest for oil to fuel his unsustainable way of life: The era of cheap and easy-to-obtain oil is over. The era of expensive and dangerous oil is well underway.