Hypocrite Neil [Oil sands] – by Ezra Levant (Toronto Sun – January 13, 2014)

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Neil Young, the ’60s-era folk singer and drug lifestyle icon, has come to Canada to lecture us about the oilsands.

Young was born in Canada, but left us to make it big in Los Angeles. Environmentalists know that’s North America’s smoggiest city, a city that runs on conflict oil imported from Saudi Arabia.

Young jetted here to wag his finger at us. And to have a series of Blame Canada concerts attacking the oilsands and all those who work in it.

Like any concert, Young’s requires an enormous number of staff and equipment. They drive a diesel-powered bus from town to town. Young is a multi-millionaire telling us that we can’t have well-paying oil and gas jobs.

His net worth is estimated to be $65 million. He’s not a one-percenter. He’s a one percenter of the one-percenters. So he can waste enormous sums of money on goofy schemes, like his custommade “Lincvolt,” a remade antique Lincoln with two motors in it: A regular combustion engine, plus an electric engine.

Of course it’s just for show — he’s an important man, and doesn’t have time to drive across the continent. He jets.

His Lincvolt is an attempt at reducing his carbon footprint. But one night it added quite a bit of carbon to the atmosphere.

In 2010, while the contraption was charging one day, it caught fire, and caused more than $500,000 damage to the warehouse it was parked in.

But that was the good kind of carbon, right? No normal person can live like Young — 40 years of drug and alcohol abuse, plus goofy hobbies that cause massive fires. He’s got enough money to cover up his own contradictions and hypocrisies.

But not all the money in the world can hide the fact that Young has never protested against the world’s largest oil companies — like Saudi Aramco, or Venezuela’s PDVSA. Young doesn’t protest against dictatorship oil, conflict oil, terrorist oil or union-busting oil.

If you’re against oilsands oil, by process of elimination, you’re for OPEC oil.

For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.torontosun.com/2014/01/13/hypocrite-neil