There must be solutions with less severe tradeoffs than shale gas and tar sands oil.

FORBES: Frack That! The Innovators in Maine Have Plans to Power the Entire State with Offshore Wind

While there are legitimate environmental worries, replacing gas exports with tar-sands oil is vital for economic growth, argues Matthew Akman, an analyst at Scotiabank.

ECONOMIST: Energy in Canada

These pipelines will distribute gas from the fracked shales and deliver oil from the tar sands, giving us the biggest energy boom in 60 years.

FORBES: Energy And The Election

Meanwhile, back in North America, new techniques were being developed to extract oil and natural gas from shale formations deep underground, from tar sands in Canada, and from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico.

WSJ: China Foothold in U.S. Energy

And Canada is still fighting for an exemption from a rule inserted into the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act that bars the American government from buying fuels whose production causes more greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional petroleum sources, as producing oil from tar sands does.

ECONOMIST: Stephen Harper looks to Washington, not Alberta

Some hours north of where I am on a trip with BACKROADS, a travel company based in Berkeley, California, sits the vast and controversial Canadian tar sands containing vast amounts of oil and natural gas, which are some day going to be sent through an 1800 mile pipeline to the Louisiana Gulf Coast that the US State Department has just approved.

FORBES: Canada's Magnificent And Priceless Water Supply

Unconventional sources of oil and gas that are set for further exploitation include Canada's tar sands, shale and coal-bed methane deposits around the world.

ECONOMIST: Drilling on Wall Street | The

Production of oil from tar sands bitumen produces between three and five times the greenhouse gas pollution of conventional oil production.

FORBES: How Bridgestone's Innovative New Tires Will Save You Fuel