In Canada, the environment dies while the press stands by. Why Harper gets away with it.
Via Occupy Canada
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/why-nothing-sticks-harper.html
Thanks to a hyperactive press, the energy baron agenda continues unabated. It’s a dangerous endgame indeed. You’ve heard the buzzwords involved – Enbridge, tar sands, Keystone XL – but maybe only as a jumble, a sick constellation no news official connects the dots to. And such is the consequence of a “watchdog” news industry with no teeth. We’re forced to connect the dots ourselves.
Meanwhile, the State facilitates the madness of capital as the west coast hangs in the balance. Again, the mainstream news cycle misses the gravity of what’s really in store for North America, the continent, the planet. The reality we face is that, in the name of progress, profit logic, and “job creation,” massive projects predicated on fossil fuels will proceed, including the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline to Kitimat BC – and the Kinder Morgan Transmountain Pipeline to the Burrard Inlet. From here, nearly a tanker a day will transport Alberta’s crude oil to Asia, increasing the odds for oil spills off the coast. Already etched on the public consciousness are “Exxon-Valdez” and “Deepwater Horizon” (which exploded on Earth Day for god’s sake). Thanks to coverage after the fact, images of petroleum-slick sea life can still be recalled. How soon until the next catastrophe? We need coverage now. We need awareness of the evils of enterprise.
Corporate collusion equals dying ecosystem. There’s no way around it. Economists can muster all the apologias they want, but such is reality. Now we’re at a tipping point for environmental health. But the direness, the desperation needed to explain the situation is lamentably not found in the paper.
If you question whether the conditions are desperate, go to where the rubber meets the road, in Kitimat, say, or northern Alberta – where machines the size of McMansions gut the earth for sludge, blast it with superheated water, and send it west as a ware for China. As an added irony, tanker traffic must traverse the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in order to reach foreign markets. Ships transporting fossil fuel are forced to sail through trash – if it weren’t so deplorable, it’d almost be funny. But such is the Alice in Wonderland world wrought by capitalism.
(More at the link.)