Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is rebutting comments environmentalist and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore made about Alberta's oil sands to reporters in Toronto this week.
"The comparisons he's using are absolutely wrong. In fact, they are preposterous," Mr. Stelmach told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday.
He was referring specifically to Mr. Gore's assertion that "gasoline made from the tarsands would give a Toyota Prius the carbon footprint of a General Motors Hummer."
Mr. Gore, an internationally acclaimed climate change crusader, also told a reporter his opinions on the oil sands, which involve a carbon-intensive extraction process, won't make him "popular" in Alberta but are "simply a fact."
"A lot of money is at stake, but a lot of lives and the future of human civilization are also at stake,' he added.
Mr. Gore was in Toronto for a speaking engagement on Tuesday, and spoke to several media outlets during his trip. He recently released a new book on the environment entitled "Our Choice."
In 2007, Mr. Gore won an Oscar for his documentary on climate change, called An Inconvenient Truth .
Mr. Stelmach said it's disappointing Alberta's oil sands has become a prime environmental target for many Americans such as Mr. Gore, and that they should look in their own backyard before finding fault abroad.
"I believe you can remove a lot of focus on the big issue in the United States by focusing on the oil sands, and their big issue in the U.S. is coal-fired electricity generation," he said. "It's the big elephant in the room there, and quite frankly it's our No. 1 elephant here."