I was reading something in a sidebar at another site when I saw a link to the following story.
This is a publication dedicated to getting the most money out of oil and they are having a sad about not being able to get oil prices back over the $50/bbl mark — which doesn’t bother me in the least.
Gas money is post-tax dollars being taken from my pocket and those who want by any means available to jack those prices up, to make shitloads of profit while not actually doing anything AND taking that post-tax cash directly out of my pocket for no good reason can just get ill and lapse into a coma. I need this money, you don’t.
But I digress because below this little whinefest about not being able to take enough of people’s hard-earned cash from them through doing this, there was this blurb:
Canadian wildfires rage but move away from key oil sands facilities.
The massive wildfires in Canada continue to spread, encompassing more than 1.25 million acres, but cooler weather and efforts from firefighters have kept the blazes away from oil sands sites.
More than 1 million barrels per day have been sidelined over the past two weeks, and the inability to get the fires under control has temporarily shelved some plans for restarts. The Alberta government said this week the 80,000 residents of Fort McMurray could start to return in increments beginning in June.
Look at that for a moment.
Let it sink in.
I split it into two pieces for some processing: First — I am bitterly amused at their apparent cluelessness: I mean where did these massive wildfires come from in the first place?
They are artifacts spawned by “global warming” and “climate change”.
No one knows exactly how the fire began—whether it was started by a lightning strike or by a spark provided by a person—but it’s clear why the blaze, once under way, raged out of control so quickly. Alberta experienced an unusually dry and warm winter. Precipitation was low, about half of the norm, and what snow there was melted early. April was exceptionally mild, with temperatures regularly in the seventies; two days ago, the thermometer hit ninety, which is about thirty degrees higher than the region’s normal May maximum. “You hate to use the cliché, but it really was kind of a perfect storm,” Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the CBC.
Though it’s tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the past decade. In some areas, “we now have year-round fire seasons,” Matt Jolly, a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, recently told the Times.
Bolding is mine.
I posted this because here we have all these rich people concerned about oil sands facilities being shut down by and “threatened’ by outrageous wildfires that are hard to NOT attribute to “global warming” and “Climate Change”.
I get a perverse kick out of their focus on the ‘efforts of firefighters’ keeping fire away from their profit-producing facilities, that are, themselves, a contributor to global warming and climate change.
One just cannot make this up.
Secondly:
More than 1 million barrels per day have been sidelined over the past two weeks, and the inability to get the fires under control has temporarily shelved some plans for restarts
Oil sands/’tar sands’ oil — whatever — is a very dirty source of fossil fuels, as most anybody who is even dimly aware of the reasons for climate change should be aware.
That we have all this concern for these facilities being protected and anticipation of getting them flowing again being presented as the main concern and “controlling the fires” as some secondary concern to getting the profits back into the pipeline while the forests burn out of control is something one could just not make up. Damned fires burning a hole in our profits!
Fossil Fuels contribute hugely to ‘global warming” and “climate change”. Lots of people get this.
Oil companies get it — Exxon’s people have known for ages and still denied it in the quest for obscene profits.
by the 1990s, it was clear that API had opted for a markedly different approach to the threat of climate change. It joined Exxon, other fossil fuel companies and major manufacturers in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group whose objective was to derail international efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions. In 1998, a year after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted by countries to cut fossil fuel emissions, API crafted a campaign to convince the American public and lawmakers that climate science was too tenuous for the United States to ratify the treaty.
"Unless 'climate change' becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts," according to the draft Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan circulated by API.
API and GCC were victorious when George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto agreement. A June 2001 briefing memorandum records a top State Department official thanking the GCC because Bush "rejected the Kyoto Protocol in part, based on input from you."
So yeah, a leading oil company publication would breathlessly worry about an oil sands facility being shut down and possibly damaged by a wildfire their business has helped to create and with policies have helped circumvent management of climate-changing dynamics.
Like I said, you just can’t make this crap up.