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Are there any more sanctimonious and hypocritical people in the US than Californians?
Crude reality: One U.S. state consumes half the oil from the Amazon rainforest
As oil companies carve up more of the rainforest, a new study says no place in the world uses more oil from beneath the Amazon than California.
This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.
YASUNÍ NATIONAL PARK, Ecuador — The bulldozers rumble through after sunrise, clearing out massive amounts of trees in this remote and remarkable section of the Amazon rainforest.
It’s a place where giant otters patrol the waterways and endangered white-bellied spider monkeys swing from tree to tree. Where a dazzling array of birds — upward of 600 species — nest in the dense canopy. Where more than 60 kinds of snakes and 140 different frogs and toads inhabit the ground below.
The Yasuní National Park is home to one of the most diverse collections of plants and animals on the planet. But beneath this 3,800-square-mile swath of forest lies another kind of treasure: crude oil. More than 1 billion barrels of it.
Over the past 50 years, oil companies have extracted immense amounts of crude from the Amazon, causing the destruction of rainforest crucial to slowing climate change and jeopardizing the Indigenous tribes who rely on it.
Read more:
https://www.nbcnews.com/investigatio...orest-rcna7284
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