If we don't stop Climate Change, we'll break the sky and humans will go extinct. That is what the science says. Runaway Climate Change means planet death. If one hasn't had a terrifying vision of human extinction from runaway Climate Change, one doesn't understand the science.
Climate activists have been reluctant to motivate people with grim visions of planet death, lest they get too depressed to get involved. Climate scientists tend to talk in sleep-inducing language that doesn't convey the emergency. We've been under-scaring the children. I understand not wanting to infect people with terribly sad visions of everything you love and care about dying. It's wicked sad that Humanity is on a doom course. Staring at these grim realities should make you weep occasionally like a little child. I understand folks wanting to live the culture of Make Believe and pretend it's the 1950's and America will still be awesome if we only stick with what's worked, so "Somebody put on a Kingston Trio record and let's get this party re-started!" But that's the past. Today is 2012 and we live in the Era of Climate Crisis and Vermont has no snow and last summer we had a hurricane!
The Keystone XL pipeline is a product of this ahistorical fantasy culture. Un-constrained by history, science or common sense, the radical oily corporationists want to build the biggest industrial project on the planet to painfully extract oil that we need to leave in the ground to survive as a species! Fossil fuel company executives should be seen as backwards, radical, extreme energy fundamentalist terrorists. If Exxon Mobil executives had beards, turbans and an unpopular religion, our society wouldn't have given them 9.4 billion dollars last quarter, but rather, we'd be ordering drone strikes in Dallas! These same oily terrorists are plotting to ruin America's water supply in the next decade with hydro-fracking.
Tar Sands oil requires 4 barrels of water to produce on barrel of oil. Native peoples of Alberta report that their lakes are dropping and people are getting cancer from contaminated ground water. People get run over by the massive industrial trucks clogging their country roads. Alberta is like a real life version of Pandora from the movie Avatar. The human costs is so high, and yet these sociopathic corporations put all these costs down as 'externalities' while winning all the poker chips for themselves. There is a touch of evil on the Tars Sands XL pipeline project, a heartless diabolic cruelty to the Earth and poor people.
Our society is spiraling towards a new morality and Law based on the truth of the Climate Crisis. Tim DeChristopher, Bidder 70.org, in jail now for disrupting an oil lease auction, should be seen as a hero for pushing on the Law to catch up to Climate science. There are growing calls for an International Climate Justice Tribunal, modeled after Bertrand Russell's International War Crimes Tribunal. These citizen processes prepare the way for full legal proceedings, and hopefully someday we'll see the Koch brothers at the Hague's International Criminal Court.
Soon, when humanity finally realizes how serious a pickle we're in, there will be a demand for justice and a call for heads on a plate. In 10 years, a history of advocacy on Climate will make you look like Nostradamus. And in 20 years, obstructionism in dealing with Climate will be a crime worthy of retro-active punishment. Government people who take money from the American Petroleum Institute in 2012 will someday have to answer for it in court. I look forward to the day when TransCanada's executives are afraid to go to Spain for fear of arrest.
Media people called Tar Sands protesters "environmental radicals" which got Bill McKibben asking "who are the radicals here?" The people who came to the protests were the kind of radicals who talk about Gandhi, eat organic and sing "This Little Light of Mine". The real radicals are the oil companies who are changing the chemical composition of the planet in a real time experiment on all of us, like nazi planet doctors. Que the Nazi accent: "Ya, ve have seen what happens when we break a bone 15 times in the same spot on gypsy prisoners. Now, the Reich will use it's technological prowess to make sky warmer so that the Homeland has climate as pleasant as Jamaica."
The Keystone XL pipeline and the Tar Sands are an immoral, ahistorical, radical experiment in Extreme Energy. Tar Sands mining is the ugliest, earth-hating kind of industrialism. They want to scrape off the skin of Mother Earth on an area the size of the Britain. Then they want to build nuclear power plants to heat the oil out of the sand. Then they want to ship it across the continent over the Agualla Aquifer, then sell it to China. Pure unhinged sociopathic Wall Street boardroom madness without a whiff of ecological literacy.
Please help get the US government off the teet of Big Oil. Please help advance laws that reflect the reality of the Climate Crisis. Please stand against the XL pipeline and the Tar Sands.
