Desmond Tutu’s fire and brimstone oil sands sermon based on emotion — not facts – by Michael Den Tandt (National Post – June 2, 2014)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is, since the death of Nelson Mandela, perhaps the world’s best-known defender of human rights. He is also, unfortunately, a hypocrite, and a symbolist, for whom imagery and headlines matter more than facts and truth.

Saturday in Fort McMurray, Alta., Tutu, flown in for the occasion by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, delivered precisely what was expected of him by his hosts: fire and brimstone, directed at the despicable Alberta oilpatch, which has become to global anti-energy activists what Conrad Black once represented to the U.S. Justice Department; a large, delectable target too inviting to ignore.

Therefore Tutu unleashed, along with some inspiring humanist philosophy (“You can’t be human all by yourself. You need other people to be human,” The Canadian Press quoted him as saying), some absolutely astonishing attacks on the Canadian energy sector and, by extension, all that stems from it. “The fact that this filth is being created now, when the link between carbon emissions and global warming is so obvious, reflects negligence and greed,” Tutu said.

Filth, negligence and greed. Well then. If the oilpatch’s very operations are filthy, negligent and greedy, across the board, then we’ve entered into a new post-Neverland phase of this debate, which was already debased almost beyond belief by the near-constant refusal of the anti-pipeline lobby to be truthful about the actual causes, and likely solutions, to excessive carbon emissions in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is a dialectic that has become almost entirely fundamentalist in its grounding; logic need not intrude.

We know, for example, that in 2013 in Canada — this according to veteran auto journalist Jeremy Cato, writing in The Globe and Mail — that Ford’s F-series pickup truck was the best-selling vehicle, outpacing sales of the most popular small commuter car, the Honda Civic, by more than 100%.

Yes, that’s right. Highly urbanized Canada, with 80% of its population clustered in cities of varying sizes, and more than two-thirds living in large metropolises, is in love with the good old gas-guzzling pickup. Small SUVs are also very popular. Fuel-efficient subcompacts? Not so much. They weathered a slump last year. This, as fuel costs soared.

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