You raised a good point: there is the allegation of overall human engineered climate change which seems hard to prove considering the warming-cooling-warming cycles which have been on going for thousands of years. 
Then there is the fact of pollution and poisoning our environment. As you wrote, "using hundreds of millions of litres of fresh water to create tailings ponds larger than PEI, killing untold numbers of wildlife, not to mention burning natural gas to create DIRTY OIL."
The latter is not debatable and is worth all our effort; when people can't breathe in their own city and the environment is being destroyed.
Problem is the politicians look at the mess as another chance to create a new tax instead of actually trying to find the most cost effective measures and policies to deal with pollution.