Game Over O' Canada!

The Tar Sands in Alberta: Now that the US pipeline is delayed, Robert Redford, at a Toronto Film Festival, exhorted his Canadian colleagues to save Canada, by stopping the Canadian government from permitting a western pipeline route, over the Rockies and the Cascades, through British Columbia's pristine wilderness and an unspoiled coast, to export the dirty oil to China.

Maybe he was wasting his breath. Canada may be more liberal than the US in some ways, but its parliamentary Federal government has been more thoroughly taken over by Karl Rove's type of conservatives than, so far, in the US: both chambers are controlled by absolute Conservative majorities. The Prime Minister closely controls the majority, even vets every public statement made by his Ministers.

And who paid for the Conservatives? Western (Canadian) oil interests (probably also the Kochs, etc.), the interests turning swathes of Alberta's boreal forest into a wasteland, while they mine and cook the tar sands.

The tar sands will still be piped out. Capitalism will hang us all, even after a hard-fought, much touted victory by environmental groups, spearheaded by Bill McKibben's 350.org, to persuade Obama to stop the XL Keystone pipeline from being built from the tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. Obama, under pressure, put off a decision till 2013. Republicans will probably yell that Obama gave American jobs to Canadians.

But the real point is: that tar sand oil is going to be developed, no matter what Obama decides, or climate scientists say. It was James Hansen, formerly NASA's top climatologist, who said that if the tar sands are exploited (the equivalent of Saudi Arabia's oil, but much, much dirtier) that for the climate it's "game over."

I hope I'm wrong, but unless there is a massive popular protest in Canada, that physically blocks the westward pipeline, James Hansen may prove prescient. We already see climate change all around us. In the US northeast, there was both freakish weather, including over a foot-deep snowstorm in October with thunder and lightning, and trees turning color later, or curling up brown weeks too early. We've had too much rain, while Texas was literally burning up with drought this summer. Violent storms and tornadoes became more frequent, and hurricanes strengthen more easily.

There is no conspiracy of scientists pushing global warming theory so that governments will be forced to become more socialistic. The money is all on the denialist side, as it is in Canada.

Protests in Canada are just as violently repressed as in the US, and their Prime Minister, Harper, is a fundamentalist Christian. This is what the US will look like if Republicans win both houses of Congress and the Presidency.

The environmental disaster caused by the Roman Empire (Mediterranean deforestation and desertification) will look miniscule compared to the destruction of our benign and livable global climate, unless, somehow, the tar sands exploitation is stopped.