So, Fort McMurray is burning. The tragedy is deep and powerful. A settlement, actually an “urban service area” en.wikipedia.org/... - completely dependent upon the extraction of tar sands from the boreal forest, is being destroyed by fire. The property and possessions of more than 80,000 people who came to live within that wild boreal forest because “that’s where the jobs are” are being burned up in this conflagration.
At this point , fires had displaced so many workers and crippled so much infrastructure that tar sands production in the region came to a grinding halt. As of early Thursday morning more than 640,000 barrels per day of the climatologically volatile synthetic crude had halted. Representing more than 16 percent of Canada’s crude production, the fire-forced cuts were significant enough to drive oil prices in the global markets as high as 46 dollars a barrel in trading early Thursday. More production shut ins were likely with other major tar sands extractors scrambling to slash oil flows as the Fort McMurray blaze became ever-less predictable. Near Anzac, the southern extent of the fires threatened a 30,000 barrel per day Conoco Philips tar sands production facility in the Surmont region — forcing a production halt and the evacuation of all tar sands workers
Whoopie! The price of oil is rising! The stock market likes this! And what’s good for the stock market is good for the USA! (For some reason the market has been rising and falling with the price of oil so the devastation of the lives of job seekers in the Alberta Tar Sludge Deadzone is a “good thing” then, in the perverted economic logic of short term profit making, which, apparently is all that matters to our great civilization.)
The profound ironies of this situation are too much for me to handle. I apologize for this. I was hoping to lay them out in their sparkling perversity, but I find I simply cannot handle it. The dirtiest of dirty fossil fuel operations has contributed to a climate catastrophe that has come to it’s very own nasty home to burn it down and high frequency algorithms run by a select few and sophisticated profit centers on wall street are making money off it.
There’s so much more to this but I’m just not up to expressing it in writing.