Love in the time of bitumen, Mark Morford

[madokie]

Hey, I know you. You claim to care more than a wee bit for the tone and shape of the world, the overall spirituo-karmic direction of our pale blue dot, as contrasted with our innate, addictive sense of imminent and apocalyptic doom. Right? Don’t you? I thought so.

I have fabulous news: Few things will bitch-slap your long-term, life-is-wonderful, all-is-as-it-should-be spirit better than reading all about the immeasurable horrors, complicated politics and dazzling ethical apologetics that make up the infamous, almost unbelievable big-oil mega-spectacle known as the Alberta tar sands. I know! Exciting!

Stay with me for a second. Surely you know of the tar sands? Those massive, land-raping, multi billion-dollar oil developments now decimating vast swaths of Canada? The brutal gouge-and-extraction processes by which sticky, black-death bitumen is blasted and pounded and ripped from the Earth like Satan tearing into a steaming burrito of pain, massive underground strata of black rock which are then hauled by trucks five stories high to massive, jaw-dropping facilities that belch enough poisons into the sky to black out the sun?

Ahh, the tar sands: the source of the Keystone XL pipeline controversy; one of the most harrowing energy ponderables of the modern era; easily one of the most environmentally rapacious, shamelessly destructive efforts of humankind in our short and shocking history. Heard of them now? Because you really should.

The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/10/02/revolting-tar-sands-of-love/

[madokie]

1. Kick

[flamingdem]

2. K&R

[Brickbat]

3. Here's what I got out of this column:

I read about the tar sands; they're gross. Reading gross things made me read about more gross things, like desperate techies snorting coke and eating pizza. It was all too, too depressing, so I drank some whiskey and ate some hipster treats in a fashion totally unlike desperate techies snorting coke and eating pizza, and it was awesome and you should do it too if you can swing it. The end.

I've never read him; does he usually go on like that?

[madokie]

4. One of the best around

Heres a link so you can read more Morford and make up your own mind

http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/