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Page added on November 9, 2013
Have Our Servants Become Our Masters?
There was a time when coal, oil and natural gas served us well; powering our vehicles, heating and cooling our homes, generating our electricity and keeping our industries going.
While they may still be doing all of those things, there’s been a huge, even sinister shift over the generations since the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
World populations have skyrocketed, along with our expectations. Our lust for more and more of the things these fossil fuels can give us – electronic gadgets, power boats and quads – has turned into a life-threatening addiction.
Conservation and moderation are now dirty words. Consumption is the new religion — with no thought for tomorrow. Sadly, even our schools and churches are doing little to counter this kind of mindset! Parents are even drilling it into their children, at home.
Make no mistake. Fossil fuels, which once served us well, are no longer our friends.
The more of them we burn, the more heat-trapping emissions are produced. These greenhouse gases are rapidly changing the very makeup of the biosphere — the air upon which we and all other creatures on earth depend, for life itself.
It’s been said that, if Earth were the size of a soccer ball, that biosphere would be about the thickness of tissue paper! Yet we treat it as if it is indestructible, relentlessly spewing our filth into it like an open sewer.
As a result, our planet is heating up, spawning terrible storms, wildfires, droughts, flash-floods and rising sea levels due to melting ice-caps and glaciers.
It’s gotten so bad, hardly a day goes by any more without news of another terrible event occurring somewhere in the world which can be laid directly at the feet of our addiction to oil and its treacherous cousins, natural gas and coal.
In Canada alone, the awful flooding in Alberta and the tragic and deadly train accident in Quebec recently, are painfully fresh in the minds of many. Surely both are examples of our “fossil fuel demons” coming back to bite us in different ways.
Reliable experts in the field are saying that climate change caused by humans, likely contributed to the flooding.
And it was crude oil, now being moved in increasingly massive amounts around the globe, that ignited when a runaway train rolled into that quiet little Quebec town on a fateful night this summer, bringing with it such terrible loss of innocent life and human misery.
Despite all of this, our leaders, whether they be politicians, journalists or industry moguls, are now all a-flutter over a proposal for a new, west-to-east pipeline. Apparently spawned during a corporate wet dream in the boardrooms of the energy giant, Trans-Canada Pipelines, the line (if approved) would move sludgy, sticky, corrosive, climate-destroying tar from Alberta to Atlantic Canada.
In so doing, it would travel much of the way through existing pipe which now carries natural gas. (Natural gas destroys the climate, too, just not quite as well.)
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Harper, Canada’s premiere “fossil fool,” is four-square behind this reckless, misguided project. “It’s safer to move oil by pipe than by rail,” he pontificates, shamelessly using the recent Quebec tragedy to his own political ends.
Which mode of travel is safer, of course, is not the point. It is, rather, how can we stop being the fossil fuel junkies we have become and find new energy sources which don’t destroy us all?
Sadly, Mr. Harper displayed his willful ignorance of the basic science of climate change when commenting on this year’s terrible flooding in Alberta.
“I never imagined we could have a flood of this magnitude in this part of the country,” he declared, preposterously!
Apparently you can be the leader of a great nation and still be oblivious to the warnings which top climate scientists from around the world have been sounding for decades. On second thought , it was not surprising coming as it did from one who thinks climate change is a “socialist plot!” And not surprising either, given that this is a Prime Minister actively muzzling climate scientists if they speak the truth on the matter.
Meanwhile, Trans-Canada’s slick bigwigs are promising that “environmental” concerns will be taken into consideration in the new pipeline project, as if they had a clue as to what that word even means, let alone cared. And “environmentalists” are once again being treated as quaint creatures who need to be patted on the head, then dismissed. What fails to get mentioned is, it is the environmental movement which has science on its side, not the vested, profit-driven interests of Big Oil.
It was James Hansen of NASA, the world’s foremost climatologist, who warned a year or two ago, it would be “game over for the climate” if the XL pipeline is built to carry tar from Alberta to the Texas coast. So, are we to somehow believe that this latest brainwave (the west-east pipeline) will somehow be less harmful if it as aligned across Canada, rather than south into the ‘States? Give me a break!
Even I am not suggesting we can go “cold turkey” on fossil fuels. Junkies, of course, need time to “taper off” from their habits. But surely we need to be seeking alternatives like wind and solar way more aggressively than we are. (And, don’t forget, despite earlier promises to remove them, the Harperites have kept those disgraceful subsidies to the “poor, impoverished” oil industry in place, costing hard-working Canadians well over a billion a year in tax dollars!)
Trouble is, zealots like Mr. Harper, other members of his “team” like my own MP, Robert Sopuck and their friends in Big Oil, don’t want that. They want it all. And, i f that means the degradation or even destruction of Canada’s precious wild places which so many of us hold dear — not to mention the planet itself – then, so be it!
8 Comments on "Have Our Servants Become Our Masters?"
GregT on Sat, 9th Nov 2013 11:59 pm
Stephen Harper is not our ‘leader’. He is nothing more than a puppet for Big Oil, Big Banks, and Big Corporations. No different than the vast majority of today’s ‘politicians’.
action on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 12:19 am
As a child I worried about running out of tap water and our extravagant use of it. Explosions in movies with black smoke spewing into the air worried me about the atmosphere. Seeing these things made me feel bad and instinctually it felt wrong. I child can tell you this is not right by such a long shot. It’s sad, but it’s game over for climate change. There is a lot of ignoring going on right now, and a lot of jumping on the band wagon with not caring about our actions, because everyone thinks they are special and that life was made for them to exploit and juice out all the happy feelings.
rollin on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 12:27 am
Greed and greedy people are our masters, not oil or other fossil fuels. Many billions of dollars of marketing over many years have convinced people of the advantages of this way of life.
Certainly no opposing group is spending huge amounts of money to convince people to transistion to a better and safer way of life.
BillT on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 2:55 am
Actually, YOU are addicted to oil and it’s cousins. It is NOT the master of most of the human race. Billions do fine without it, or use it in such small amounts that they can walk away if necessary.
It is the West and the ‘Western wannabes’ that are having problems. You can walk away also if you really want to, but you don’t. Cocaine is similar to oil in that respect.
The West is to the point of killing to keep the drug coming. soon it will be to the national suicide level, if it is not already there.
Norm on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 3:02 am
Oh ya, wind and solar, two hollow words strung together, sounds good but its a cliche and a platitude. dont produce much energy. How about and electric plant that burns up old steel belted radials and garbage. Put a great big chimney on it, belching black smoke and sparks flying out all night. Now that would be a great alternative energy source.
Arthur on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 2:56 pm
Oh ya, wind and solar, two hollow words strung together, sounds good but its a cliche and a platitude. dont produce much energy.
Think again:
http://tinyurl.com/mt6kdzo
BillT on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 3:04 pm
Pretty chart, but meaningless without perspective. Also, it represents some intermittent electric sources that still require nuclear or hydrocarbon backup. Just because you get the backup from another country, like France, does not make you ‘independent’.
Arthur on Sun, 10th Nov 2013 4:35 pm
Pretty chart, but meaningless without perspective. Also, it represents some intermittent electric sources that still require nuclear or hydrocarbon backup.
Think again:
http://tinyurl.com/aopecyt
tinyurl . com/m4vs2a3
tinyurl . com/oc8hvog