Canada Tar Sands Hits Bump in the Road

Arguably the single worst industrial project in the world, the Canada Tar Sands is so big that if Canada stopped all other industrial projects, it still wouldn’t reach Kyoto Protocol Requirements. But the Tar Sands might be given a rest, as plucky residents of Idaho and Montana refuse to have their roads expanded to meet the transportation needs of Big Oil. “I have never really seen so many people have such a unified voice against a project,” said Nick Stocks, a co-founder of Northern Rockies Rising Tide, a climate change advocacy group in Missoula, Montana. The proposed route would shave thousands of miles off the transportation of huge machinery from manufacturer in the US to point of oil production in Alberta, but protesters and residents see this as a political choke point—no more road expansion, no more tar sands, no more climate change. As one advocate stated in a New York Times article on the subject,“We’re really very nice people… Unless you’re a big oil company.”