Canada

Syncrude Canada is one of the leading players in the big, dirty business of extracting oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta. It is a joint venture owned by an investment trust and a group of six U.S., Canadian and Japanese oil companies, among them the Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil. The company has been targeted by environmental groups because of its large volume of greenhouse gas emissions, but Syncrude has experienced a higher degree of controversy over an incident in 2008 in which some 1,600 ducks were killed at one of the company waste ponds.

Production at Canada’s largest petroleum company is dominated by the highly controversial process of extracting crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta. Suncor has invested billions of dollars—and plans to invest many billions more—to make North America more energy independent, but uses methods that generate large quantities of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. Suncor, which in 2009 swallowed its competitor Petro-Canada, says it is trying to reduce those emissions, but the company is still a target of frequent climate protests by groups such as Greenpeace.

Through a series of aggressive mergers, Goldcorp has transformed itself into one of the world’s largest gold miners. Its operations are all in the Western Hemisphere, including northern Ontario, parts of the western United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Argentina. Like other big mining companies, Goldcorp has been criticized by human rights groups for mistreatment of indigenous communities. It has also faced labor and environmental controversies in numerous countries.

Over the past decade, Brazil-based Vale has evolved from a large but little known producer of iron ore to one of the world’s mining leviathans—the only one based in the global south. The major factor in its growth was the US$19 billion acquisition of Canada’s big nickel producer Inco in 2006. It also made an aborted effort to acquire the Swiss mining giant Xstrata. Originally a government-owned firm called Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (literally, “sweet river valley company"), Vale was privatized in 1997.