A Ted Talk to share

If you happen to have 17 and a half minutes, watch this. 

I am opposed to this project. I am opposed to expanding the tar sands. I fully recognize the dissonance in those statements against the natural gas furnace that has kept me warm these last few minus 30 days, and the little, but gasoline powered car in my driveway. I do not purport to have the answers. But I am fully prepared to help look for the answers. I believe that we could live without oil if we wanted to. And I believe that more people are willing to entertain that idea.

Knickers in a Knot

My Knickers are in rather a lot of knots at any given time. It makes them damned hard to wear.

My current knot is the Northern Gateway pipeline.  I was mad all day Thursday  when my local CBC early morning radio show played an interview with someone from Ethical Oil. I had certainly heard of Ethical Oil, the organization, the book, its author. It has sounded ridiculous to me from the get go. Yes, women are probably oppressed in other oil producing nations. I am not in favour of oppressing anyone ( oh, maybe I am in favour or oppressing monstrously wealthy corporations bent on development and money to the detriment of all else...), but frankly, I cannot see what that has to do with anything. We in Canada are filthying up the environment and we are trying to build a pipeline through a magnificent wilderness.  I don't see how saying we don't do one bad thing (don't we?) somehow excuses other bad things. We mine and export asbestos. That is bad. We treat our First Nations abysmally. That is bad too. I see nothing special to distinguish our oil from someone else's oil.

But what really got me storming around and swearing like a pirate so that the BF, the cat and the fish were all looking for cover, was the idiotic assertion that the opponents of the pipeline were getting funding from "foreign" sources. And that the whole debate was between Canadians. Fuck. What a load of unmitigated shit. There are foreign interests in that pipeline. Enbridge has partners in China and the bitumen is going to China. When the oil companies (and the government?) have no foreign partners in the debate, then they can contest the pipeline opponent's foreign contingent.

However. Even then, I think it is a stretch, 'cause the environment matters to all of us. Even the climate change deniers. It matters very much, even if we think it doesn't. My own personal opinion is that anyone who is trying to save a corner of this planet for the sake of saving it has a better right to that effort than anyone trying to make a buck off that same corner. Life trumps money to me. Always.