Well, Obama’s against it.

Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America’s addiction to “dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive” oil if he is elected U.S. president — and one of his first targets might well be Canada’s oil sands.

A senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign told reporters it’s an “open question” whether oil produced from northern Alberta’s oilsands fits with the Democratic candidate’s plan to shift the U.S. sharply away from consumption of carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

“If it turns out that those technologies don’t advance . . . and the only way to produce those resources would be at a significant penalty to climate change, then we don’t believe that those resources are going to be part of the long-term, are going to play a growing role in the long-term future,” said Jason Grumet, Mr. Obama’s senior energy adviser.

The remarks amount to a shot across the bow of Alberta’s oil sands industry, which is planning to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to 3.5 million barrels over the next decade.

The industry has come under sustained attack from U.S. environmentalists over the past year because the production of its heavy oil emits an estimated three times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.

Mr. Obama has cast himself as a champion of green energy during his White House campaign, proposing a national low-carbon fuel standard that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 180 million metric tons by 2020. He has also promised to invest $150-billion in developing alternative energy, and to reduce American dependence on foreign oil by 35% by 2030.

“The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless,” Mr. Obama said in an energy policy speech Tuesday in Las Vegas. “We’ve heard promises about it in every State of the Union [speech] for the last three decades. But each and every year, we become more, not less, addicted to oil — a 19th-century fossil fuel that is dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive.”

“…possibilities of renewable energy are limitless” is vapid. Possibilities of anything are limitless, but they won’t fuel your car.