[Enchante]

"Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world."

That's roughly an area 32 miles x 32 miles, (of course it's certainly not in any perfect square!!) in one of the most desolate parts of the continent (I have been on all sides of that corner of Colorado/Wyoming/Utah.... only right along the Green River itself is there anything to write home about). Can't you just wait to see how environmentalists will suddenly wax poetic about how these scrubby, barren wastelands are suddenly the most precious wilderness in North America????

[Dumb_Ox]

We went from jungle to rain forest, swamp to wetland... What can "desert" be turned into? "Sun-surfeited biome" maybe?

[skr]

The Green people wouldn't have survived the Gold Rush.