The premiers of the Eastern Canadian provinces and governors of the New England states are meeting at the Bretton Woods Resort in New Hampshire this Sunday and Monday for an annual conference to discuss how the neighbors can cooperate.

Sunday afternoon, outside the conference venue, the Tar Sands Free Northeast Coalition hosted a “No Tar Sands!” People’s Conference to call attention to the threat of dirty, carbon-heavy tar sands in the northeast.

Organizers say that New England currently faces an invasion of dirty tar sands in the form of the proposed Portland-Montreal Pipeline reversal, the proposed Energy East pipeline, and other projects. In fact, a recent study shows that if nothing is done to stop these projects, as much as 18 percent of the region’s petroleum-based transportation and heating fuel supply could be derived from tar sands, the dirtiest, most carbon-heavy fuel source on the planet.

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