Neil Young pans Keystone pipeline, likens oil sands landscape to Hiroshima

OTTAWA – Canadian music legend Neil Young has waded into the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline with inflammatory comments that compare Fort McMurray, Alta., to the scene of an atomic bomb strike.

Young told a press conference in Washington that he had visited Fort McMurray, home base to northern Alberta’s oil sands development, on a driving tour within the past two weeks and he called it a wasteland that looks like Hiroshima.

His comments came the same day that Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was in the American capital talking up Canadian environmental policy and TransCanada’s Keystone project, which is designed to carry Alberta bitumen to refineries on the Texas gulf coast.

Young told an event supporting ethanol and the National Farmer’s Union that he is against Keystone “in a big way.”

He likened the jobs that will be created by the $5.4-billion pipeline project to a job digging a hole that people cannot climb out of.

Young said he drove his 1959 Lincoln Continental, which runs onethanol and electricity, up to Fort McMurray while traversing the continent from his California home to Washington over the last two and half weeks.