The Dirtiest Pit on the Planet

 

Just for fun, I asked 12 people 

if they ever heard of the Alberta Tar Sands?

One out of the 12 heard about it, but didn't know what or where it was. I then asked if they ever heard of Keystone Pipeline? Five heard about it, but again didn't know exactly where it was. Two of the five heard it would provide jobs and none knew what kind of sludge it would be transporting or where. 

I continued with my probing questions and asked if they ever heard of Dancing With the Stars, the Kardashians? It's always amazing to me, how little we know about the stuff we should, and how much we know about the mindless and the useless. So much for my survey.

Here's some more fun stuff to think about

 The Athabasca River in Canada was one the cleanest rivers in the world, but due to the run off from Alberta's oil sands hardly anything lives in it now because of acidification. The growing levels of acid rain consequentially leading to an increase in water contamination in the area. Acid rain will cause Canada's lakes and rivers to become further acidified. 

These industry-made contaminates now contain 187 billion gallons of sludge that includes phenols, arsenic, mercury, cancer-makers such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and fish-killing naphthenic acids and threaten water quality in the world’s third largest watershed, the Mackenzie River Basin. Their determined accumulation also confirms a genuine state of regulatory neglect in the tar sands, the world’s largest energy project and number one supplier of U.S. oil. 

The size and scale of these leaking ponds are striking. About a dozen “ponds” rise 300 feet above the ground and cover 80 square miles of boreal forest and wetlands.

The findings ran 'contrary to claims made by industry and government in the popular press', and that the sector was 'substantially increasing loadings of toxins' to the river, which is linked to high incidences of embryonic mortality and deformity in fish.

COMMON SENSE

The fact remains that we do not need this oil. The only people who need it are big oil, but especially the Kock brothers. They own over 1 million acres in Alberta's tar sands region. Roughly the size of Delaware. If the Keystone Pipeline is approved they stand to make over 100 billion dollars. The oil will not benefit the U.S. but will be exported to other countries with very little environmental regulations. We will be stuck with the cleanup when the pipeline breaks, and experts have assured us that it will, and some have said it will be largest environment disaster ever.

Does any of this information ever make to mainstream media news? Not hardly. The reason it doesn't is because it's controlled by the same corporations who have a stake in the Keystone pipeline getting completed, and the pit itself. It's unlikely they are going to bite the hand who feeds it.

The Kock brothers are on a crusade to buy congress and it appears they are doing a good job. 25 million dollars in campaign contributions in just the past couple months alone which is a drop in the bucket for what they have planned. 

And we sit by and let them do it, because most of us are riveted to the real TV programs, biting our nails waiting to find out who will win Dancing with the Stars, or who Kim's next husband will be. And that's by design. Dumbing down and keeping viewers clueless is what's considered "fair and balanced" news. And based on the ratings of some of these programs -- it's working.