The good folks at It’s Hot in Here radio invited me on today for a discussion of the tar sands, tankers, and Enbridge pipelines. Michigonian interest in that last topic has been substantially sharpened by the Battle Creek spill two weeks ago, but awareness of the Albertan tar sands is still thin in the U.S., even among enviros. So maybe I can be forgiven for launching into a petroleum diatribe fully 45 minutes long.

Here’s the audio. I start around 7:00 and finally calm down at about 52:00.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/hotinhere/wcbn20100823.mp3]

Two things I entirely forgot to mention:

• The current footprint of tar sands operations is about 1.5 times the size of metro Detroit (it’s good to work in local units).
• The BP spill. I totally failed to work that in in any way.