This looks like a must read book:
Stupid to the Last Drop by William Marsden
Yes at one time they were considering nuking the Alberta Oil Stands to extract the oil… funny this may have less of an environmental impact than what is currently going on.

Manley L. Natland was sitting alone in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia when an extraordinary idea popped into his head.

It was the end of a long day, and Natland was watching the sun set. Wrapped in thought and a Bedouin turban, the American geologist contemplated the climax to nature’s magic hour. “It looked like a huge orange-red fireball sinking gradually into the earth,” Natland later wrote in his diary. His mind wandered, and the display of the sun’s explosion of light caused his thoughts to take a sinister and disturbing turn along the following lines: sun, heat, 15 million degrees Celsius, energy, thermonuclear weapons. And then the idea struck.

Why not nuke Alberta?

Full review at McCleans.