The oil sands have always hit me in a weird way. Just looking at them is disquieting.
But then you talk to the working class Joes who rely on the good wages they get working there, coming from economically impoverished regions of Canada in order to feed their families, breaking their backs in the middle of nowhere to do a job they know is harmful to the environment because they can’t make ends meet otherwise, and things just get complicated.
It’s hard to know what to feel, or what to think, because you’ve got this just awful thing that is literally allowing people to scrape together a living who otherwise would suffer greatly.
That said, I don’t think anyone seriously believes that these sorts of sites aren’t horribly destructive to the environment, so I don’t understand why the idiots who run the places would try to suppress scientific studies everyone already knows the conclusions of.
All this does is invoke the Streisand Effect - by getting caught trying to quash this study, they give it far more exposure and impact than it ever would have if they had done nothing. Plenty of people are already inclined to accept the environmental impact in exchange for the economic one knowing full well what they’re giving up, as sad as that is. I seriously doubt any of them would be swayed very much by the study on it’s own, without the enhancing effect of opponents trying to discredit it.
I guess it’s a good thing that the people ruining the world aren’t smart enough to know how to handle this more in their favor?
But then there’s an old french saying I am reminded of - “Rogues are preferable to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest” - and I start to second guess that thought…
