About a week ago, JohnnyRook posted a diary which touched on the death of 500 ducks, earlier this year, in one of the tailings ponds at a bitumen-extraction site in northern Alberta, Canada. The mine is run by Syncrude, which is one of the larger operators in the Athabasca tar sands.
The death of those ducks made national (and international) headlines, and came at a bad time for the Albertan provincial government, which had just launched an expensive "greenwashing" PR campaign to try and improve the tar sands' poor environmental image. The death of those ducks arguably helped to derail the province's effort at spin, and in a very public way.
But, now, it looks like there's to be further public scrutiny of the World's Dirtiest Oil because of our feathered friends.
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