Don't Worry, That Black Liquid Creeping Up Your Driveway and
Choking Birds Isn't Technically OilS  So you live in Mayflower,
Arkansas, where that ExxonMobil pipeline sighed open last
Friday, and now your street's been full of a stinky dark tar
slurry, like diarrhea of the gods, spitting forth a stream of
Canadian tar sands crude on your crape myrtles.  Relax. Be zen
about this. There is no oil, dude.  Thanks to an obscure 1980
federal regulation, that black devil vomit killing your begonias
and the neighbor dog is considered dilbit, a tar sands sludge,
and not oil.  Why the hell does that matter, you ask?  Oil
companies are required to pay taxes into a special federal
kitty, the Oil Spill Liability Fund, which defrays the cost when
government agencies have to clean up the industry's petroleum-
based eco-fuckups. The corporations pay 8 cents into the fund
for every barrel of oil they transport.  Only tar sands
dilbit—the muck gushing through the Ozark brush right now, and
the stuff that's supposed to coarse thr