The majority of the tar sands, however, can't be dug up like Appalachian mountaintops. About 80 percent of the reserves lie so deep under the forest that they must be steamed or melted out of the ground with the help of a bewildering array of pumps, pipes, and wells. Engineers call the process in situ (in place) thermal, and it burns up nearly twice as much natural gas as the open-pit mines. The Canadian government recently estimated that it might take 20 nuclear reactors to replace natural gas as a fuel source in tar-sands operations by 2015, and companies are already putting forth proposals to build them.

This fantastic appetite for natural gas (a relatively clean fuel), combined with energy-intensive upgrading, explains why bitumen is such a climate changer. In fact, it emits three times more carbon than conventional oil. "You know you are in the bottom of the ninth inning when you have to schlep two tons of sand to get a barrel of oil," says Jeffrey Rubin, the chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Matthew Simmons, a Houston energy analyst and author of the best-selling Twilight in the Desert, an exposé of Saudi Arabia's dwindling oil supplies, calls the tar sands "an atrocious resource." And Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of Canada projects at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), agrees. "The boreal forest is our last defense against global warming," she says, "yet here we are, digging up this wilderness for tar-sands development."

The boom has transformed Fort McMurray from a sleepy northern frontier town into Canada's wildest city -- McMoney, as people call it now. The tar-sands metropolis sits at the confluence of two majestic rivers, the Athabasca and the Clearwater, and used to be the kind of place where people could bump into trappers at the grocery store or spot a wolf in their backyard. But in 1996 record oil prices and the 1 percent royalties the companies pay the provincial government started the boom that rapidly erased McMurray's remote northern character. The town's new, sprawling suburbs bear names like Thickwood and Timberlea; most wouldn't seem out of place in Denver or Las Vegas. In the past 10 years the city's population has jumped from 36,000 to 64,000. The cost of living here is the highest in Canada.

Hydrocarbons define and shape the tenor of everyday life in Fort McMurray. People wake up to the smell of money (sulfur dioxide or ammonia), drive everywhere in oversize trucks (hardly anyone walks) past welcome signs that read We Have the Energy, eat at restaurants with names like Fuel, attend spirited hockey games played by the Oil Barons, get drunk at the Oil Can, and gamble away their wages of $89,000 (U.S.) a year at the BoomTown Casino. As thousands of camp workers (mostly single males) from China, Mexico, Hungary, and Canada's Atlantic provinces have poured in to construct one mine after another (30,000 itinerant camp workers now moil and toil in the bush), the number of pages in the phone book devoted to escort services, promising "exotic delights" and "mature and classy" companions, has grown from one to 10.

Housing is the central problem. The price of a three-bedroom home has skyrocketed from $191,000 to $483,900 (U.S.) in the past three years, prompting workers to pitch tents by the Athabasca River, rent out garages, or purchase trailers. As many as nine people might share an apartment. Some guys even sleep in their trucks. The city is so short of affordable housing that hundreds of homeless men and women, many of them crackheads, walk the streets like zombies.

Crime, too, has exploded. Fort McMurray boasts an assault rate 89 percent higher than the rest of Alberta, a 215 percent higher rate of drug-related offenses, and a 117 percent higher rate of arrests for driving while impaired. Detox centers are generally full, and if you need suicide counseling, well, you might have to wait four months. Camp workers say that approximately $6.5 million (U.S.) worth of crack cocaine travels up Hell's Highway every week. The Hell's Angels are the corporate distributor of choice.

Last year Fort McMurray's mayor, Melissa Blake (one of the few people in the region who own a hybrid Toyota truck), bluntly described the problems of her city to a parliamentary committee: "Our wastewater treatment needs exceed capacity. Our water treatment plant will be at capacity next year. Our recreational facilities are overtaxed. Our landfill site is full. Fort McMurray is 2,800 housing units short of current demand. Our health care system needs a 100 percent increase in on-site doctors."

Blake recited similar statistics to Alberta's provincially appointed Energy and Utility Board (EUB), the agency responsible for approving tar-sands projects -- 69 or so since 1996. During hearings last year for three developments worth more than $20 billion, proposed by Suncor Energy, Imperial Oil, and Shell Oil, Mayor Blake politely called for a slowdown to give the urban infrastructure time to catch up.

That's not what she got. The board admitted that "the capacity of existing infrastructure...has been depleted." It also found an "apparent lack of a coordinated response among government departments and various levels of government." Yet in the end it ruled that risks to air, water, and human health were "acceptable" and that everyone should "adaptively respond" to the region's corporate anarchy. When a prominent Fort McMurray businessman told Brad McManus, acting chairman of the EUB, that development was "out of control," McManus replied, "We're the regulator. We can't say that."

Just about everyone in Fort McMurray has a different take on the hydrocarbon revolution. Sue Pearce, a representative for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, moved to McMoney from Newfoundland more than three years ago with her husband and four children to escape a depressed economy. She comes from a long line of Newfoundlanders who, as she put it, "persevere and do whatever it takes to make a living."

Three things about Fort McMurray startled Pearce when she arrived. The first was the 12-hour shifts. "That was a surprise, to have people away from their home such long periods of time," she said. "It's actually 14 hours if you include the commute time to the mines." The second was the abundance of Filipino nannies looking after the kids while their parents worked those long shifts. And the third was the scale of the industry -- the size of the equipment, the bleakness of the landscape, and the smell. "But it's the smell of money and what we do."

Unlike the camp workers who openly call Fort McMurray a hellhole, Pearce likes the place, warts and all; she particularly loves the alarmingly blue Alberta sky and the annual Blueberry Festival. She'd like to see a slowdown in development but doesn't expect one. I asked her if ordinary folks really had time to consider the environmental impacts of the world's largest energy project, and she said no. "The average worker is here to work. They want to spend time relaxing and some time with family and friends. There is no time to think of all that."

One place to think about "all that" is on a boat in the middle of the Athabasca River. The 950-mile waterway rises in the Canadian Rockies and courses through the tar sands before emptying into the world's most extensive boreal delta, on Lake Athabasca. Every fall and spring the delta serves as perhaps the largest nesting and rest area for migratory birds in North America. After paddling the river in 1906 all the way to the delta and beyond, the American naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton dubbed the majestic waterway the "Missouri of the North."

During a recent visit I ventured out on the river with John Semple, a trim, fit man in his 50s. Semple arrived in Fort McMurray as a firefighter from a small town in the Northwest Territories in 1976 and has since made his living as an outfitter. He survived an earlier, smaller tar-sands boom in the 1970s but described the current frenzy as unprecedented: "This growth is unbelievable," he said. "Anyone who wants to build a plant can do so." Most young folks avoid the river these days, he told me, because "they're too busy with their heads down and butts up in the sands."

Like most environmental indicators in the tar sands, the river is ailing. Since the 1970s the total summer flow downstream of Fort McMurray has declined by nearly a third. Yet every year the tar-sands operations withdraw 250,000 Olympic-size pools of water from the Athabasca. That's enough water to service a city of two million people. (On average, it takes three barrels of fresh, potable water to make one barrel of oil from the sands.) One company alone, Syncrude, uses enough water each year -- 2.5 trillion gallons -- to supply the needs of a third of the residents of Denver.