Python Pipelines Live by Strangling

I’ve decided that I will always refer to the vast infrastructure of deadly and environmentally damaging pipelines for crude and bitumen as ‘Python Pipelines’.

Once they come to be, they will strangle us until we can no longer resist them.

Pipelines serve to provide one thing:  institutionalized dependence.  As soon as they’re operational, there’s no going back.  There’s no dismantling or ripping out once pipe has been laid, regardless of how much they leak, spill, explode or fail.

Once pipelines are in place, we become strangled economically, socially and environmentally, much like our 400-series highways have become the stomping ground of mass truck transit.

We forget how to stop these things once they start.

We forget that there’s a better future or renewable energies, including wind, solar, geothermal, hydro-electric and other options that aren’t based on burning carbon resources, like cave men in the dark.

Our lives will be buried in bitumen, burning black tar until the end of time because it’s endless in Alberta.  Why would we turn away from something so ‘precious’, like the One Ring that will bind us all?

The only good news is that some day, we’ll have a government that believes in equity and justice for Canadians and not just being slaves to big oil.  When that happens, we’ll have a nice juicy pipeline tax waiting!