Buried in all the exciting
sex scandals and
taxation shenanigans of the day, an event occurred of slightly earthier and more concrete proportions. How concrete? Well, visualize yourself filling your gas tank with
gasoline. If you have a typical car, maybe an SUV, it probably holds somewhere in the range of 15 to 25 gallons. Let's assume we're talking about a 20 gallon tank. Picture of yourself filling your tank up from empty to full, squeezing that handle while you tap your feet and stare idly off toward the horizon. Then, when you’re done, picture yourself filling a tub equal in size to your gas tank. Then picture yourself feeling eight more tubs that size. Pumping hat much gas might well take you North of an hour. Now picture yourself pumping that much gas into tanks and tubs for one hour every single day for three years. Then you’d be reaching the 210,000 gallons of oil that spilled from the
Keystone Pipeline in
South Dakota this very day.
You may recall that the champions of
fossil fuels have lauded this
pipeline for years, pressing their guarantee that with its super-advanced construction, it was foolproof against leaks, and would safely and without environmental damage carry
Canada’s oil on down to the
Louisiana coast, where it could be sold off around the world.
So much for those assurances. So much for that guarantee. The pipe sprung a leak, as they always inevitably eventually do. In this instance, the leak came much sooner than anybody expected and to shocking effect. Those responsible for maintaining the pipeline ran around like the proverbial chickens with their heads cut off for
five hours after discovering it was leaking, failing to inform anybody who ought to be informed, for fear of looking exactly as stupid as they were.
Pristine land has been ruined, as we always knew would happen. And just as certainly, this is only the beginning -- the portion of the pipeline from which the leak has spewed is no different than any other length of pipeline along its thousands of miles. Every
foot of it, every
inch, is equally susceptible to such
disaster, and so
catastrophe becomes inevitability.
In unrelated news, the
People's Republic of China now
leads the planet in the generation of
solar power, with solar technology roughly doubling and its generative capacity per unit approximately every 21 months. And elsewhere, completely electric semi trucks designed by
Elon Musk are being road tested, capable of traveling thousands of miles without stop and without a drop of fossil fuel on a sunny Summer day. But
America will surely go on pumping that dirty oil from the dirty ground and running it through dirty pipelines already shown to be doomed to massive failure.
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IRON X