Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Reinventing Fire maps pathways for running a 158%-bigger U.S. economy in 2050 but needing no oil, no coal, no nuclear energy, one-third less natural gas, and no new inventions.
Planned expansion of mining the Florida-sized Alberta Boreal Forest for tar sands bitumen crude oil, destroying habitats and indigenous societies, will continue despite the delay in the Keystone XL pipeline.
Keystone XL, touted to bring jobs and energy security, will do neither. Even if the pipeline never spilled, even if the tar sands weren’t an environmental atrocity, this would still be a bad deal for the US public.
While thousands surrounded the White House, a hundred people marched through downtown Los Angeles in solidarity calling for Obama to reject the 1,700-mile tar sands oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast.
Canada is the number one oil supplier to the US and is pushing to increase that role using the Alberta Tar Sands, slated to mine and strip an area of Boreal Forest the size of Florida, impacting land resources and indigenous communities, producing bitumen-crude that will foul the global climate.
President Evo Morales signed into law in 2017 that stripped protection from the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory, known as TIPNIS for its Spanish initials, opening it to highway construction and other development.
The world’s dirtiest oil is produced by strip mining the Athabascan Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada, destroying an area of Northern Boreal forest and wetlands the size of Florida, with toxic settling ponds that pollute rivers fished by First Nations people, requiring pipelines to the Gulf Coast and hauling routes through the Northern Rocky Mountains.