This idiot article appeared in one of Canada’s national newspapers, the Globe and Mail, wherein a guy named Lawrence Martin tells Justin Trudeau to quit with the sentimental enviro talk and build some pipelines already.
How on earth are articles like this still being written? Is this effectively climate change denial? We are long past the moment for building more pipelines, Lawrence, unless you disbelieve what NASA is telling us. Do you not understand we’re on the brink of climate change so disastrous we’ll have no functioning economy at all?
There’s a strange double standard in which individuals are expected to tolerate a staggering magnitude of change under neoliberalism (displacement, wage theft, gentrification, real estate speculation and precarity—and when they protest, they are accused of failure to be resilient in the face of change), yet the “economy” and its banana republic habit of raw natural resource extraction & exportation (since we are in Canada) must trundle along changelessly regardless of the global ecological consequences. Where is the resilience in elites and their corporations?
Update: a day after I wrote this the National Energy Board review panel for one of the only two pipelines in Canada that has a chance, Energy East, quit en masse. Which leaves the Kinder Morgan pipeline which would end not far from my house and whose toxic dilbit solvent oil mix from the Alberta Tar Sands would then be shipped past my house in tankers that have to travel through treacherous waters. That assessment process isn’t going smoothly either, though mainly because its hearings are hearing plenty of opposition, not because the board is on the verge of quitting because of the appearance of bias. Though there’s plenty.