Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.

If you gave oil companies a choice between the tar sands in Canada or oil in Saudi Arabia, which do you think they'd choose?

If you think Wall Street firms have it good, you haven't looked closely at Big Oil.

Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.

From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.

Waste oil is the largest byproduct of our business, and we use that byproduct to make something of value and contribute back to local communities.