Keystone Pipeline = death

We know you’re going to hell, but do you have to get there on a speedboat? 

My older brother used to say this to my sometimes reckless younger brother during our teenage days. His words come to mind as the Keystone Pipeline debate burns even hotter through the new Republican Congress. 

The pipeline’s supporters claim it will help produce jobs.  Manufacturing and dealing heroin also provides jobs, many of them well-paying. Should we rush to promote more heroin production?

 When oil and coal companies promote their offerings as job producers, let’s consider what they are peddling. These are products that heat up the air, which make it harder for food crops to survive. 

That’s what we should be talking about more when we talk about carbon pollution. Using oil and coal harms our ability to feed ourselves. Perhaps we should adopt for new use the old Gay Men’s’ Health Crisis posters that protested “Silence = Death” back in the 1980s, to say “Oil = Death” and “Coal = Death.” 

Public discussion of carbon pollution and climate change should be about more than the survival of polar bears. It should about us “mindlessly destroying the biosphere,” as E.O. Wilson so frighteningly put it in his book, “The Social Conquest of Earth.”

Columnist Joe Nocera of The New York Times said in his Jan. 17 article that tar sands oil is coming to the United States whether Keystone is built or not. This is unfortunately true. However, it misses the point. The president’s decision to veto the pipeline would send a powerful message that destroying the habitability of our planet and our ability to feed ourselves is not OK. 

I like to eat. I’m pretty sure everybody else does, too. If we continue to accelerate the use of fossil fuels, as we have been doing, we may not be able to grow food.