Love in the time of bitumen

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford expounding on the Alberta tar sands, politics, and what's going on in techtopia, all to a yoga backdrop. The kid's been busy.

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?
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Such as: an item about just what a Mitt Romney-shaped Supreme Court might look like (three words: worse than Bush). Or that little Grist.org piece about how violently Romney’s energy policy differs from Obama’s, particularly in how Romney fellates the oil companies, hates the environmental movement and will give your kids cancer from all the rollbacks, gutted protections and worship of projects exactly like the tar sands.

Would a Mitt Romney presidency ruin American? Of course not. Would he make it much nastier, bleaker, far less conducive to the healthy progress of the species? You know the answer.

Yes, you do.