Behold! Canada's most disgusting export
Nothing like Alberta's's revolting oilsands to destroy your optimism
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Are you having one of those days? One of those moments where you feel like you've endured a simply relentless onslaught of negative news and economic hardship coupled to endless rounds of cretinous politicians -- all of whom enjoy fully paid health care on your tab -- debating whether or not you'll be able to afford to see a doctor ever again, all to the point where you say, you know what? I need just one more.
Just one more really good, depressing story to put me over the top, ruin not just my day but maybe taint my entire month, a tale so vicious and disheartening I immediately start yelling at my girlfriend for no real reason and slam the cupboard because I realized I'm out of peanut butter, and I absolutely refuse to smile at anyone because they're all clearly complicit in making this world a bleak and miserable hellpit of oh my God you suck.
Why, sweetheart, step on over here for a moment. I have just what you need. You need to read a bit more about Alberta's infamous oilsands.
Have you heard? Have you taken even a cursory peek lately into the oversized eco nightmare that is Canada's monstrous, pollutive, disgusting hellholes of rapacious greed and pollution and destruction and sheer capitalistic joy? I bet you have.
They are, you might say, the finest example we currently have of a massive, soulless industry and a major first-world government shoving a giant middle finger in the face of all notions of progress and environmental integrity. They're not the only ones, to be sure -- the coal industry's middle finger is downright callused from flipping everyone off so aggressively -- but for sheer gall, for shamelessly stomping a greasy black boot heel into the face of environmental progress right now, the oilsands simply can't be beat.
They are true wonders, testaments to mankind's remarkable power to continue -- against every hunk of knowledge and common sense -- to rape, maul and utterly devastate everything we supposedly hold dear, all in the name of filthy profit.
Despite whatever good vibes you might've been feeling from all those rumors of a healthy global push toward sustainability and alternative energy, the oilsands remind you: no one really gives a flying f--k. Not when hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. You cannot help but be perversely impressed.
Some argue the oilsands are the future of synthetic petroleum. Experts say there's enough black gold stuck deep in that greasy bitumen -- spread across a region the size of Florida -- that it could last us until we lose what's left of our souls and/or entirely block out the goddamn sun, whichever comes first. The problem, of course, is getting the toxic gunk out of the ground.
The numbers are simply astonishing: The amount of land, water, natural gas, and CO2 emissions required to produce a single barrel of synthetic oil from the oilsands is staggering enough, but when you add in all the contaminated rivers, the toxic tailing ponds (2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools' worth, and counting), the decimated landscape, the dead animals, the increased cancer rates among anyone living within a 100-mile radius, well, you've got more than enough charming data to effortlessly destroy any glimmer of positivism you might've enjoyed from composting your pizza boxes.
But that's not the ugliest part. The ugliest part is, the oilsand project is expanding as fast as inhumanly possible. It is already, according to various reports, the largest energy project in the world. Bigger than Saudi Arabia. Bigger than Wal-Mart. Bigger than Jesus.
So ugly and rapacious are the oilsands, so generally repulsive are the before/after images of what's being done to the land, you think there must be something wrong, like this can't really be happening; surely this must be illegal, you think, imagining a team of U.N. inspectors returning from Alberta any minute now and recommending immediate sanctions, military action, a coup against the government. You think this way because you are all sorts of adorable tofu utopian cotton-candy cupcake. You are also viciously naïve.
I was recently skimming the latest issue of Esquire, which I admit I subscribe to in the apparently futile hope that someday, someone will invent a men's mag that's remotely relevant to my life, and which will feature something other than overpriced watches, awful Perry Ellis sweaters and useless articles about Megan Fox, the new football season and how I can really mix it up at the office by wearing pinstripes and colorful socks. But that's another column.
I fell across this little advice column about investment opportunities, about where to look in this bleak, merciless fiscal landscape for signs of hope and growth, just where your average clean-shaven, beer drinking, football loving man's-man who still has a job can maybe make a bit of green, so as to maybe afford the Rolex Oyster Perpetual on page 55 or the Infiniti coupe on page 112 to try and impress the jaded, nonexistent, impossibly Photoshopped Gucci model on page 67.
You can guess the answer. It's oil, lovebug. Not only that (the advice continues), but if you can handle a bit of risk in your portfolio and if you're confident that we as a nation/planet are still very much on the fast-track to hell -- read: you're convinced we'll be addicted to oil for generations to come -- the oilsands are a white-hot investment indeed.
It's a wonderful line of pure capitalist thinking, completely divorced from ethics and humanity as a whole. It's a bit like saying, "Hey, seeking some quick profit? Why not invest in some Irish Catholic orphanages, like the ones where all those priests and nuns beat, abused and sexually molested countless thousands of poor children for about 75 years straight, forcing them into workhouses to make rosaries to sell to tourists. It's cash money, baby!"
Do not misunderstand. Well do I know the worlds of investment and petrochemicals are designed, de facto and a priori, to be ruthless, even cruel, entirely devoid of moral compass. Happily will I admit the oilsands are but one of a myriad of eco nightmares you don't want to examine too closely lest you feel your heart shrivel and be reminded of an even uglier fact: that we are, all of us living and shopping in first-world luxury, somewhat complicit in the creation of these disasters. In too many ways, the oilsands are us.
But there's something deeply wrong with the oilsands, something sadder and more disturbing than any other similar project in recent history. It's this: the oilsand projects are new. They reflect decisions that industry leaders and politicians are making today, right now; incredibly, violently stupid actions akin to a doctor reaching into our collective chest, pulling out a black and shriveled lung and holding it aloft. And the world went, "Huh, isn't that interesting?" And then lit up another cigarette.
Mark Morford's column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/10/07/notes100709....
