Thursday, May 05, 2016

Nothing Brings Out the Straw Men Like a Wildfire




There are a lot of curious minds who are denouncing "lefties" for gloating over the fate that has befallen Fort McMurray from early season wildfires. Kinsella did it yesterday. Even Trudeau implied it although, being Trudeau, he just skirted the whole thing. Gary Mason did it in today's Globe & Mail.

The problem is that the orgy of schadenfreude they depict exists only in the murky recesses of their minds. I live on the BC coast. We don't like the Athabasca Tar Sands. We don't like dilbit or the hazmat threat it poses to our marine ecology. We don't like governments, federal and provincial, on the "wrong" side of the Rockies that seem bent on pushing pipelines and supertankers down our throats.

Sure, we don't like any of that stuff. But I have not heard anyone expressing anything but sympathy and concern for the people of Fort McMurray and what they're going through. I went to a liquor store and a grocery store yesterday. Both of them were soliciting contributions at the till for Fort McMurray relief and the people I queued with were chipping in two bucks here, five bucks there.

We're from the west. We know what wildfires are and how devastating they can be. Remember Kelowna you nitwits? Hell even the coastal rainforest has lost most of its immunity to wildfire. Everything is drying out. Even on this island, logging crews get pulled out of the forests in the summer when the fire hazard goes extreme. The climate has changed. Forest fire season begins much earlier than it did historically and it goes on  much longer.  Fires become more common, faster spreading, harder to contain. And guess what? It's expected to get worse.

So Kinsella and Trudeau and Gary Mason, please, take your vile straw men and shove them right back where you found them.

4 comments:

Dana said...

Of course we all know that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer but we can't say with any certainty that any one particular smokers lung cancer was caused by smoking.

Owen Gray said...

No one can gloat over what's happening in Wood Buffalo. Destruction on that scale is a reminder that we don't control Nature -- but we can do it damage.

Lorne said...

All any of the deniers have to do is look at the pattern, Mound. To suggest that the Fort McMurray tragedy should somehow be exempted from such considerations is intellectually and ideologically dishonest.

askingtherightquestions said...

Boreal forest tinder dry in the first few days of May? Incendiary conditions that caught everyone by surprise? Certainly not asking the right questions and perhaps not paying close enough attention to the environment surrounding. Very commonly recorded problem in extraction camps. Is anyone else sick and tired of hearing the oil fuelled hypocracy of the people who have spent the last ten years obfuscating...cannot really call them deniers any more because even they recognize the evidence is too strong, I call them climate "draggers" because they are intent on blocking any meaningful response.
Yes, yes help the burned out Fort Mc refugees. But please stop whining about pipelines to tidewater, we face an existential crisis of climate that CANNOT continue to be treated as a political hot potato!