Just noting that the Alberta Oil Sands are in an unpopulated, undeveloped area. Extracting the oil means moving huge amounts of tar sands to the refineries ie. open-pit mining.
They sometimes say the Great Wall of China is the only structure you can see from space. Wrong, you can't see the Great Wall but you can see the biggest open pit mine in the Alberta Oil Sands.
Eventually the mines will be reclaimed but the total area that will eventually be open-pit mined covers thousands of square miles.
Don't know if the folks in Utah would tolerate this.
Conservative philosophy is all about tradeoffs. Conservatives tend to view environmental issues in terms of costs and benefits.
I don't know any conservative who wants to pave the whole country. I certainly want Arches and Canyonlands preserved as they are now. The benefits we could get from any mining there aren't worth the cost of a loss of a unique landscape.
My problem with environmentalists is when they subsitute Gaia-worship for good analysis. For example, no environmentalist has ever been able to explain to me the environmental harm taking 200 square miles out of the 34,000 thousand square miles in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. The main complaint is that it "spoils a wilderness." Will any species go extinct? No. Will any land of special value be destroyed? No. Will most of the caribou even notice? No.