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Time to demand a new road

April 27, 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Here is the brutal truth: there are no excuses, no actual reasons, for laying pipelines that deliver fossil fuels, especially bitumen. There are no virtues in claiming that every precaution against spillage and disaster have been considered and promised. It doesn’t matter a damn if huge sums of money are being collected from shipping lines, set aside from the public fund for “clean up” in the B.C. harbours.

Not if but when there is a dump of bitumen or any other poisonous crud in those waters or on that sacred land, when that happens, the money won’t matter! It won’t be able to fix the problem nor ever, ever clean up the mess. No amount of your tax dollars will repair the damage that the slightest slip, omission, over looked mistake – no endearing, long-winded apology will make up at all for the damage that will be done when one of those pipeline links fails, one of those state-of-the-art ships fails, and they will, nothing will compensate to the ocean life, to the wildlife and the land, the next disaster we inflict on them.

Have a look at the history of oil spills – even the word tries to mitigate the hurt  – you spill a cup of tea; spill a glass of wine (and that’s bad enough); a child spills his/her milk; this word pretends it is “only” a spill but one that causes chaos and loss for ever.

It is time, long, long overdue, to take the cost of building the pipelines, to finally admit there are other energy sources which are virtually clear of pollution, and invest that mountain of money into developing them.

Time to bite that bullet and begin, with real rapidity, to get off fossil fuels, lazy, stupid fools that we are, and take the rescue of our planet and our own selves seriously. Scientists around the world are blowing horns, banging on drums, shouting as loudly as they can to tell us, to warn us about the pending ultimate ruin of our very lives, our own sweet earth, upon which we depend for everything.

Yet, we yak on about changes taking place with a timeline a generation long as though there were that kind of time available to us, without looking around to see how quickly things are changing, not waiting for us to change.

When we talk about oil, pipelines, industry, we talk first and foremost about money; we blackmail each other with assurances of jobs and economic benefits that will make no difference in the long term when the storms wipe away all we own and take the lives of our loved ones.

There are so many other ways to produce energy, to fuel our vehicles which are still running on internal combustion engines, on tires made with petroleum, of plastics using the same source. Everything – nearly – we use is created with harmful ingredients and becomes sinister waste matter. 

It seems, as a improved method of harnessing energy to create power comes along, there is much to diminish and devalue – wind power, use of animal waste methane to create fuel; true recycling and  garbage of every single kind can be re-formatted and reused for road paving from tires; paper, running shoes; food wrap –

We don’t have to waste anything! We are able now, without inventing a single thing: to power our world, overhaul completely our modes of transportation, grow our food sustainably.

The pollution and rot with which we fill our environment with rubbish housing – not a solar panel in sight – is unforgivable and our politicians – week-kneed, bending to the easy money and obvious solutions which are not solutions – it is all unforgivable.

A walk on the wild side: even cold fusion. It is radical for sure. Everything fundamentally important is radical. It is not a new idea, although it still creates division of opinion on the part of physicists. However, those against it may soon see otherwise as research and development in India and America continue.

Dr. M. Srinivasan, in India, began working with cold fusion 29 years ago and, at about the same time, in the USA, Dr. Martin Fleishman and  Stanley Pons began experimenting with cold fusion. Basically, using low energy nuclear fusion with heavy water (look it up) has been dismissed as not possible on one hand and is creating renewed interest still both in India and the USA, as Japan and Italy enter the field.

Cold fusion, were it to be established, would provide unlimited free energy, once the infrastructure was built. That would cost money for a unimaginable global transition.

Well well. In them meantime, we are constantly being encouraged to look the other way; we are dragged into the addiction of social media, drunk on the irrelevant so as to be indifferent to the cataclysms coming our way.

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