Keystone Pipeline XL passes first hurdle

[Argus]

Sure they do. I would happily talk about shutting down or dramatically slashing the public service "industry". Thousands of jobs would be lost, but IMO it would be beneficial to the economy as a whole to not have so many overpaid bureaucrats trying to 'save the trees' in between bake sales.

Presumably, you wouldn't mind eliminating all the services those public servants currently are responsible for providing or supporting, right?

[jacee]

The funny thing about Canada's left (and Jacee in particular) is that they hate the most profitable and wealth generating industries in Canada. Jacee's got another thread going where he/she is railing on the banking sector as well. How can you live in Canada and hate both the oil and banking industries?? If it was up to him/her we'd have 40% unemployment in Canada!

For reference, here is a breakdown of Canada's GDP by industry:

http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/gdps04a-eng.htm

A funny thing about Canada's right: They use the word "hate" a lot. Why is that?

The problem with the GDP is that it's too narrow a measure of results. For example it doesn't measure the cost of damage to the environment from extraction industries, or the damage to people's lives from intentional manipulation of the stock market, currencies, etc.

Granted it's what we have to work with at present but that needs to change.

Indicators are extremely important and should be more sophisticated than the GDP is. We're getting a overly simplistic, skewed and incomplete view of our status and progress that is actually misleading ... but that's perhaps another thread, but here' a quick summary:

What Does Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) Mean? A metric used to measure the economic growth of a country. It is often considered as a replacement to the more well known gross domestic product (GDP) economic indicator. The GPI indicator takes everything the GDP uses into account, but also adds other figures that represent the cost of the negative effects related to economic activity (such as the cost of crime, cost of ozone depletion and cost of resource depletion, among others). The GPI nets the positive and negative results of economic growth to examine whether or not it has benefited people overall.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gpi.asp#axzz1XPd5Vlzb

[jacee]

Industries which, not co-incidentally, you feel no connection to because your income is not dependent on it which makes it a self-serving position for you to take.

"public healthcare and public education" are not an industries. "healthcare" and "education" are the industries. Nobody wants to shut down the education or healthcare industry. All they want are these services to be delivered by private industry. People working in the industry would still have jobs.

"Industries which, not co-incidentally, you feel no connection to because your income is not dependent on it which makes it a self-serving position for you to take."

[TimG]

"Industries which, not co-incidentally, you feel no connection to because your income is not dependent on it which makes it a self-serving position for you to take."

It is not clear to me why privatizing these industries would threaten anyone's source of income. The only group threatened by the changes to the current system are public sector unions and people who are ideologically opposed to private sector involvment. Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[CitizenX]

Warning: Propaganda

Who's Behind New Pro-Oil Sands Ad Blitz?

Edited September 9, 2011 by CitizenX

[TimG]

Who's Behind New Pro-Oil Sands Ad Blitz?

Ok? So what? A group connected to the industry starts countering the lies and propoganda of the environmentalists? Its about time. Perhaps the most annoying thing about lefties is they think that NGOs and unions are unbiased sources of the information. There is no moral difference between an ethical oil ad and an ad funded by Suzuki foundation or Greenpeace. Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[CitizenX]

Ok? So what? A group connected to the industry starts countering the lies and propoganda of the environmentalists? Its about time. Perhaps the most annoying thing about lefties is they think that NGOs and unions are unbiased sources of the information. There is no moral difference between an ethical oil ad and an ad funded by Suzuki foundation or Greenpeace.

Tim we have been through this before. I think we all understand why the Oil industry create this kind of propaganda. But my question to you is what reasons do environmentalists have to lie? Is there big money in it for them?

"There is no moral difference between an ethical oil ad and an ad funded by Suzuki foundation or Greenpeace." What world do you live in where you actually believe this?

[jacee]

It is not clear to me why privatizing these industries would threaten anyone's source of income. The only group threatened by the changes to the current system are public sector unions and people who are ideologically opposed to private sector involvment.

I think a substantial number of Canadians would be irate at the prospect, possibly all of them but you.

Perhaps the resource sector should be nationalized ...

Perhaps the public subsidies to the resource sector should be discontinued ... yes they definitely should. The abuse is horrific. Did you know that an oil sands company (which shall remain nameless) received $250m in startup government subsidy and then posted a profit of ... yup, $250m in their first year of operation?

Ya gotta hand it to the private sector. Yup. They know how to squeeze a dollar out of the public pocket into their own 'private' hands. Hilarious, eh? :angry:

[TimG]

But my question to you is what reasons do environmentalists have to lie?

First: money. Big green is big business. They need to attract billions of dollars a year in donations. So they need to manufacture causes - just like a company like MacDonalds or Coke manufactures a market. There is no difference between the two.

Second: ideology. The people who run these organizations are generally ideological zealots who want to convert as many people as possible over to their 'cause'. This means they have no interest in the truth - all they care about is promoting their cause. Doing something out of ideology is no different from doing something for a profit.

"There is no moral difference between an ethical oil ad and an ad funded by Suzuki foundation or Greenpeace." What world do you live in where you actually believe this?

Grow up. The Suzuki foundation or Greenpeace are just corporations out to sell a product. If they don't sell the product they go out of business. Their self interest will trump the public interest all of the time. Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[CitizenX]

First: money. Big green is big business. They need to attract billions of dollars a year in donations. So they need to manufacture causes - just like a company like MacDonalds or Coke manufactures a market. There is no difference between the two.

Where is the proof of this? Environmentalists are tied to Big Green Business? Nice try.

Second: ideology. The people who run these organizations are generally run ideological zealots who want to convert as many people as possible over to their 'cause'. This means they have no interest in the truth - all they care about is promoting their cause. Do something out of ideology is not different than doing some for a profit.

Yaaaa OK, now your really reaching. Zealots have no interest in the truth they just want to promote their cause. How can you have a cause you don't believe in...ohhh unless your a big oil company that has huge profits on the line.

Absolute. The Suzuki foundation or Greenpeace are just corporations out to sell a product. If they don't sell the product they go out of business.

What? What products, T-shirts, and bumper stickers?

The reason you can't give me proper answers is because you can't understand why anyone would do anything for free. The only thing you believe in is money and getting yours.....Sad.

[TimG]

Where is the proof of this? Environmentalists are tied to Big Green Business?

That is not what I said. I said environmental organizations ARE big business. You want proof look at Greenpeace's annual report (not a lot different from Exxon's in terms of look and feel). They need generate $220 million euros every year to cover their operating expenses.

It IS a big GREEN business.

Zealots have no interest in the truth they just want to promote their cause. How can you have a cause you don't believe in.

That is the problem. They believe in the 'cause' so when the real world facts don't actually support an ideologues cause he will ignore them and, if necessary lie.

What? What products, T-shirts, and bumper stickers?

They sell a service. Like a bank or an insurance company or a radio station. In big green's case they sell 'papal indulgances' to wealthy people so they can carry doing what they always do without guilt.

The reason you can't give me proper answers is because you can't understand why anyone would do anything for free

I can understand perfectly well by people do things for free. The difference is I don't put ideologically motivated actions on a pedastal. Ideological motives are not morally superior to profit motives. A corporation motivated by ideology is just as evil as a corporation motivated by profit. Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[CitizenX]

Ideological motives are not morally superior to profit motives. A corporation motivated by ideology is just as evil as a corporation motivated by profit.

I don't understand this, an idea that is altruistic is morally superior to profit motives. You just don't believe that environmentalists are altruistic. In my mind Red cross, and Green Peace is morally superior to BP. Their concern is for others not profits. What is your concept of morality?

[bush_cheney2004]

I don't understand this, an idea that is altruistic is morally superior to profit motives. You just don't believe that environmentalists are altruistic. In my mind Red cross, and Green Peace is morally superior to BP. Their concern is for others not profits. What is your concept of morality?

Oh great...that kind of twisted thinking would have residential schools in Canada "morally superior" too. Good grief....

[TimG]

You just don't believe that environmentalists are altruistic.

I have yet to seen any evidence that they are. Ideological environmentalists, for the most part, hate humans and think the planet would be much better off if humans did not exist. They seek to stop any human activity that causes change to what they see as the natural world. Concerns like the welfare of people are secondary. IOW - they are exactly the opposite of what I would call altruistic. They are self centered and narcissistic.

In my mind Red cross, and Green Peace is morally superior to BP.

For starters the Red Cross is an organization that actually tries to help PEOPLE. So if your looking for an organization that is altruistic it is a better example. But even the Red Cross needs to preserve its own existence. Do you think the Red Cross acted altruistically when it was confronted with its responsibility for the tainted blood scandal in the 80s? At their core all human organizations are motivated by desire to preserve their own existence. This desire trumps all other concerns and makes them fundamentally amoral. Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[jbg]

The current Keystone Pipeline goes through Manitoba. This one will cut across Saskatchewan.

Where it will pose a serious danger to marine mammals.

[CitizenX]

Oh great...that kind of twisted thinking would have residential schools in Canada "morally superior" too. Good grief....

Morality is not a Christian concept. Morality refers to that code of conduct that is put forward by a society. I'm sorry but it is more moral to help people than to profit from them. How can you dispute this?

[bush_cheney2004]

Morality is not a Christian concept. Morality refers to that code of conduct that is put forward by a society. I'm sorry but it is more moral to help people than to profit from them. How can you dispute this?

Because it's not true...more people are actually helped by commerce and economic prosperity. Are you really defending residential schools as morally superior to refining and selling motor vehicle and aircraft fuels? Do you have any idea how many critical products come from a barrel of oil?

[CitizenX]

Because it's not true...more people are actually helped by commerce and economic prosperity. Are you really defending residential schools as morally superior to refining and selling motor vehicle and aircraft fuels? Do you have any idea how many critical products come from a barrel of oil?

I am well aware of all the products that come from oil. If more people did and understood that it is a finite resource they would probably kick the ass of any suburbanite driving around in a hummer.

"more people are actually helped by commerce and economic prosperity" What kind? At what price? And what people are you talking about?

[bush_cheney2004]

I am well aware of all the products that come from oil. If more people did and understood that it is a finite resource they would probably kick the ass of any suburbanite driving around in a hummer.

Not likely...oil is a resource that must be extracted and refined to do its magic, not just sit in the ground.

"more people are actually helped by commerce and economic prosperity" What kind? At what price? And what people are you talking about?

At this abstract level, I am talking about the billions more people benefiting from commerce than "moral" handouts. Your kind of "morality" has also been used to justify all kinds of evil.

[TimG]

"more people are actually helped by commerce and economic prosperity" What kind? At what price? And what people are you talking about?

Go to the ICU at any hospital. Every patient there is depending on oil based products to keep them alive. From the tubes in IV drip to plastic casing on the computer chips in the heart monitors. Is our dependency on oil worth it for them? They would dead otherwise. Aren't the oil companies acting morally by finding ways to keep the price of oil as cheap as possible and saving more lives in the process? Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[jacee]

Ideological environmentalists, for the most part, hate humans and think the planet would be much better off if humans did not exist. They seek to stop any human activity that causes change to what they see as the natural world.

Cite please.

[TimG]

Cite please.

David Suzuki:

most people in the world are content to stay as first or second level maggots.

Here is an entire book on the topic but it is not online:

http://www.amazon.ca/Beyond-Environmentalism-Philosophy-Jeffrey-Foss/dp/0470179414#_

You want chapter 4: Environmentalism Anti Human Bias

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reisman/reisman28.html

A few more choice quotes:

This [man's “remaking the earth by degrees”] makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth's biota a tame planet, be it monstrous or — however unlikely — benign. McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value — to me — than another human body, or a billion of them.

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line — at about a billion years ago, maybe half that — we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.

It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. (David M. Graber, in his review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday, October 22, 1989, p. 9.)

Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[jacee]

What I see is anti-environmentalist propaganda, I assume perpetrated by those who stand to gain from environmental destruction.

If these suicidal environmental looneytoons actually exist, other than in anti-environmentalist propaganda, they would be out in the bush somewhere, not using computers and writing to other humans.

There is a certain amout of drama and satirical exaggeration involved in teaching. Don't be fooled by anti-environmentalist looneytoons who interpret such things literally and catastrophize about it.

The mainstream environmental movement is very much concerned with protecting the earth and its systems so that our descendants can continue to live here safely , ie, sustainability for human purposes. Having said that, there are still lots of things we don't know about the earth and we may not know when we are making an irreversible error.

An Indigenous spiritual leader told me of their beliefs that

All of the earth's components have functions in sustaining earth's systems so that life is sustained, that coal, for example is the 'liver' of the earthearth and cleans out toxins.

We didn't always understand that gravel moraines and wetlands do the same for water, clean it of impurities that harm life. Indigenous people knew that, at least some who managed to retain the ancient oral knowledge.

Will there be one last dynamite, one last drill, one last clearcut that will tip the balance so the earth begins to rumble and shiver and shake and the world as we know it now will change forever? We don't know.

Indigenous people say it will.

[TimG]

If these suicidal environmental looneytoons actually exist, other than in anti-environmentalist propaganda, they would be out in the bush somewhere, not using computers and writing to other humans.

Denying it does not make it any less true. Here are some pro enviro sources

http://web.uvic.ca/~stucraw/Lethbridge/InterestingArticles/CANCER.HTM

James Lovelock, who propounded the Gaia hypothesis in 1979, initially rejected humans' cancer-like impacts as a corollary, declaring flatly: "People are not in any way like a tumor" (Lovelock 1988, p. 177). But before long he modified this view, observing: "Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor or neoplasm" (Lovelock 1991,p. 153).

Others have stated the connection more strongly. "If you picture Earth and its inhabitants as a single self-sustaining organism, along the lines of the popular Gaia concept, then we humans might ourselves be seen as pathogenic," Jerold M. Lowenstein, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has written. "We are infecting the planet, growing recklessly as cancer cells do, destroying Gaia's other specialized cells (that is, extinguishing other species), and poisoning our air supply....From a Gaian perspective... the main disease to be eliminated is us" (Lowenstein 1992).

Then your have the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" (Motto: "May we live long and die out.") praised on that reliable enviro site Grist.

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-07-15-want-to-join-the-voluntary-human-extinction-movement

But like racism, the anti human beliefs of enviros rarely surface obviously but you see it in their endless opposition to any development and an dogmatic insistance that anything natural should be left the way it is. They see no value in human construction or technology even if that construction and technology improves the lives of humans.

The fact is every animal changes its environment to suit its needs. Humans are no different. We obviously cannot ignore the ecological aspects to what we do, on other hand, we should not treat every human caused change as a bad thing. There are many times when wiping out an ecosystem to create places to live and grow food are good things and we should not worry about it.

Edited September 9, 2011 by TimG

[waldo]

A few more choice quotes:

Don't be fooled by anti-environmentalist looneytoons who interpret such things literally and catastrophize about it.

jacee... will the introspection of an anti-environmentalist looneytoon, fool... or fuel... himself?