The irony is sharp enough to hurt. Americans are driving less and using less gas when we do drive. U.S. carbon pollution is down. Just about every car dealership in America is offering affordable, practical high gas mileage or zero gas mileage cars. Automakers are making them and the sales numbers show that Americans are buying them. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and automakers are poised to do even better with new standards that will double mileage again and slash pollution from our cars and trucks.

America is on the road to moving beyond oil, but the oil industry hasn’t gotten the message, and there’s no better evidence than its obsession with tar sands.

We don’t need tar-sands oil from Canada, yet Big Oil is determined to force it down our throats anyway—or at least force us to let them pipe through our nation so they can export it abroad. And now we’ve got some pretty shocking evidence of just how high a price we could end up paying for their greed.

In 2010, more than 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River was transformed into an environmental disaster zone by a cracked tar sands pipeline and a tar sands pipeline company that neglected to turn off its pumps. Since then, a monumental $700 million cleanup effort has removed more than a million gallons of tar sands crude, along with 17 million gallons of polluted water, and 190,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris. Last week, after two years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially reopened the affected section of the river.

Now, though, a just-released in-depth report from Inside Climate News today shows that this massive cleanup effort was in fact a debacle—a failure that reinforces the reputation of tar sands as the dirtiest oil on earth, exposes the weakness of regulatory oversight, and casts an ominous shadow across the thousands of rivers and ...