A Brief One from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
Years of shunning science and soaking up the now-gone Harper government’s pro-tar sands propoganda has apparently left more than a few Canadians not knowing the difference between lush expanses of boreal forest and open craters full of filthy black dust and goo.
Here’s a nice view waiting for all of the tar sands fans and climate change deniers out there
That loss of ability to distinguish between green landscape and something that looks like a gateway to Dante’s Inferno – Hmm. Could it be another form of ‘Harper Derangement Syndrome’, only this time infecting mostly card-carrying Conservatives? – reached Code Red this past November 6th when senior members of U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration called the raw ‘bitumen’ that would be transported from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands to refineries near the U.S. Gulf coast through a proposed Keystone XL pipeline Obama had just rejected the “dirtiest oil on the planet.”
It was a jaw dropping development for longtime Harper Conservatives like Rona Ambrose, a former Environment Minister in Harper’s cabinet and now the party’s interim leader. It even left Alberta’s recently elected NDP Premier Rachel Notley showing a symptom or two of the syndrome as she called the ‘dirty oil’ reference “disappointing.”
The perfect retreat for members of the old Harper gang with a vista that beckons.
Then again, Notley, unlike Ambrose and other Harper diehards who can’t get enough of the dirt and have called on Canada’s new Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to keep the push for the Keystone pipeline alive despite the rejection, made a quick recovery with the following statement; “It was not necessary to be quite so critical in the way they described our energy product,” she added of the dirty oil remark. “But it also underlines the fact that we need to do a better job in terms of the work we do here in Alberta on climate change.”
As for Harper’s old stock of climate change deniers and tar sands fans, I’ll say this. Even if you can’t bring yourself to read any of the science, just do a search for some of the many aireal shots of tar sands in operation and try telling the rest of us again that what comes out of there isn’t the dirtiest oil on the planet.
And if you still think that the gases and grime rising up from these monstrous pits where old growth forest used to stand is so great and of no harm to us, here’s an idea I’ll leave you with.
Give up on any idea you may have had to live out what’s left of your years in one of those high-rise condos along the water, forget about that.
Leave access to what’s left of the shorelines to the rest of us and see if you can talk some of those petroleum tycoons you seem to like to support so much into building condos with a nice view overlooking the craters.
Move in and invite the kids and any kids they may have over. And no breathing masks. That would be cheating.
For more information on the Obama administration’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline and Canada’s ‘dirty oil visit – http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2015/11/249249.htm .
Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary for and from the greater bi-national Niagara region.
(NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. Niagara At Large encourages you to share your views on this post. A reminder that we only post comments by individuals who share their first and last name with them.)
Niagara At Large 
I know the Alberta tar sands has the eye and nose appeal of something of an environment behemoth – Huge, bad, and ugly.
But again, to blame this all on the now-departed “Harper government” is not so well justified. Sure, they cultivated and watered it, but like many big business ventures with large impact industrial momentum, it has been pretty much its own animal, no matter who’s been at the tiller.
Commercial production of oil from the Athabasca oil sands began in 1967, with the opening of the Great Canadian Oil Sands (GCOS) plant in Fort McMurray.
It was the first operational oil sands project in the world, owned and operated by the American parent company, Sun Oil Company. When the $US 240 million dollar plant officially opened with a capacity of 45,000 bpd, it marked the beginning of commercial development of the Athabasca oil sands.
So this has been a North American initiative, from the get-go controlled mainly by U.S. big business money, when machines came to engage in the “dirty” extraction process of oil from the naturally-occurring bitumen. President Obama coined the term “dirty” and it has been a buzz word ever since, amplified by the media, for environmental activists and attackers of big business.
I find no oil “dirtier” however, than the kind our people have been dying for, literally, in foreign lands under mission titles of “freedom”, but where the people indigenous to those regions prefer to live in the Stone Age with their archaic laws of brutality, while the sheiks’ riches grow via the blood of our soldiers in the sand.
Until practical transitions are made to adopt new and better, and yes, environmentally friendly and compatible energy sources, I say let the Alberta oil juggernaut continue, in response to the billions already invested.
LikeLike