 the project would have carried oil from the tar sands of Canada down to the Gulf Coast. This turned into the biggest civil disobedience action about anything in this country in a very long time. 1,254 people went to jail. Including McKibben, who insisted that tapping Canada's tar sands would have meant game over in the fight to slow climate change. He says many people arrested were well beyond their 60s. As McKibben likes to joke, they were the fossils against fossil fuels.