Just a Matter of Time

 


How Enbridge and its Tory handmaidens want Canadians to see the Northern Gateway/Kitimat supertanker route:


That's it. Nothing to worry about. Wide open waters all the way to China. The Douglas Channel? No problem.

Here's what that passage looks like on a marine chart:


And here's what it looks like from the air:


Now, imagine what that looks like when waves more than 30 metres tall driven by truly diabolical winds of 80 to 160 knots per hour sweep down the Hecate Strait, winds powerful enough to expose the seabed.

By the way, the Hecate for whom the strait is named was the Greek goddess of magic, witchcraft, the night, ghosts and necromancy.

As I once learned to my terror while fishing these waters, the sea can be calm as pee on a platter and, within 15 minutes, turn into an absolute nightmare. Those waters swallow small boats whole.

One pipeline or two, it's treachery either way.

Comments

  1. Northern PoVSeptember 1, 2021 at 7:32 AM

    The media in the UK helped portray Corbyn as an anti-Semite. And it worked.

    The selling of the cheatin', bible-thumpin', secret-American Scheer was a bridge too far, but still enough to eke-out a plurality of the votes in 2019.

    Anodyne O'fool offers electoral trinkets like a tax-holiday or a 'carbon-holiday' (ie return to Harper's target, revive dead-fossil-fuel projects) and we lap it up from our media, both social and mainstream.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Disaffected LibSeptember 1, 2021 at 10:15 AM

    The body politic in Canada is ailing, NPoV. Yet we wonder at the number of disaffected citizens who can't be bothered to vote.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more