Desmond Tutu -- The Devil In The Tar Sands

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By Desmond Tutu & Jody Williams

08 November, 2011
Project Syndicate

CAPE TOWN – On Sunday, November 6, thousands of people encircled the White House as part of the ongoing effort to press US President Barack Obama to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. If the nearly 1,700-mile pipeline were to be built, it would run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, through the heartland of the US, all the way to the Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico. Should the project go ahead, Obama will have made one of the single most disastrous decisions of his presidency concerning climate change and the very future of our planet . . .

Opposition to the pipeline throughout the US is growing in intensity – from the activists arrested in Washington, DC, to the governor of Nebraska, who is seeking state legislation to stop the pipeline from running through America’s biggest aquifer, to members of the US Congress, who have petitioned Obama about the project. The outpouring of opposition surprised the oil industry, its highly paid lobbyists, and especially TransCanada Corporation, which would build the pipeline. So, like many huge corporations facing public criticism, they and their allies are responding with a dubious new marketing effort.

The pipeline’s defenders proclaim that Canadian oil is “ethical,” whereas oil from suspect countries is “unethical.” US Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, has picked up on the theme. “We have a supply to our north that, to me, is just like finding it in America,” he said. “Dirty oil is buying oil from someone who takes the money and sponsors terrorism and tries to make the world a dark and sinister place to live . . .”

The claim that Alberta’s fossil fuels are “ethical” because Canada is a friend is a specious ploy aimed at perpetuating the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. There is no such thing as ethical fossil fuel, regardless of geographical origin. The ethical choice is to move as quickly as possible away from fossil fuels, period . . .

Obama campaigned and was elected in part on a pledge to address climate change. He spoke of seas that would stop rising, and of shifting the US away from fossil fuels to new sources of clean energy. He now has the opportunity to make good on those promises by stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.


read more: http://www.countercurrents.org/tutu0811111.htm

[tabatha]

1. I am glad Tutu is still speaking out.

He is a voice to hear.