Comment on Oilsands

-
My good friend Andrew Barley is a huge Neil Young fan. He also happens to live in Fort McMurray and work in the energy sector. Here is what he had to say.
Disclaimer: if you're interested in winning friends and influencing people, don't do what I'm about to do.
Dear friends on both sides of the oilsands arguments, we all suck. If you aren't going to be objective in how you deal with the topic of environmental stewardship and the mining of oil, you should probably just stop talking about it. Yes, I get it, Neil young hurt your feelings or you applaud the things he's said. The good/bad news is that your emotions don't matter in the discussion. What
Source: Financial Post
matters is objective reasoning and sound science. People need to use FACTS not OPINIONS. Supporters of oilsands(I am one, for the record), you need to accept that there are LEGITIMATE concerns that HAVE to be addressed and stop shoving your fingers in your ears and singing lalala when faced with opposition(that response actually makes us look worse, not better). Anti-oilsands folks you need to drop the rhetoric and name calling and be open to the fact that oilsands companies ARE spending tons of money on r&d to improve environmental impact and until you are willing to commit to decreasing the DEMAND you create for oil the oilsands will continue to SUPPLY it.

I guess, in short, I'm just trying to say I'm sick of the useless back and forth. The passive aggressive rhetoric on Facebook will not do anything to make the world a better place. Be objective in your research...or start researching in the first place. We ALL need to be more open about the facts and act accordingly.

P.S. I don't agree with most of what Neil young said(tho he was incredibly accurate in other parts), but I'd also appreciate if people would stop acting like he can't have credibility because he's "just a musician". Noam Chomsky was "just a linguist" when he wrote some of the most credible books on politics ever written. A persons vocation does not limit their mind and ability to understand things. It hasn't limited mine and I doubt it's limited yours, though I'm starting to wonder about some of you.
I guess, in short, I'm just trying to say I'm sick of the useless back and forth. The passive aggressive rhetoric on Facebook will not do anything to make the world a better place. Be objective in your research...or start researching in the first place. We ALL need to be more open about the facts and act accordingly.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How are you feeling?

-
Response 1: "I'm not sleeping again. It turns out my body might be reacting to antidepressants. The annoying symptom? Night sweats. We thought it might be lymphoma. It wasn't. That was a fun couple of weeks. I'm terrified. I'm terrified that this won't be the end of it, that the next medicine will fail too, and those absolutely terrifying impulses to harm myself and the thoughts of failure that I tell myself I am over and over and over and over and over and over again will one day be too much. Will these thoughts that only seem to stop in short intervals darken into complete mental breakdown? My biggest fear isn't snakes or falling, it's that I will end up on the street and lose my intellect and sanity, being mocked by people who don't know what mental illness is like. I'm afraid that the loneliness I seem to NEVER break from free from will enslave me into a life of dependence on others. I was doing so well but maybe wellness is just an illusi...
Read more

My Response to "Why I Am a Six-Day Creationist" by Tim Challies

-
Image
A friend of mine recently started a pretty huge debate regarding evolution on his facebook page. I normally try to stay out of these debates because I find them quite frankly, irrelevant to the Christian faith. There was a time when I spent a lot of time reading and researching the different views, but as I've gotten older, they've seemed like a side show to the gospel. I am quite aware of the claims by certain fundamentalist that if you reject a literal creation, you somehow undermine the entire truth of scripture. I've sat through several Ken Ham lectures, and read lots of books on creationism, and this is certainly an all or nothing, black or white claim I find extremely frustrating. For this reason, I very much appreciate you saying: "I do not make belief in a six-day creation a  necessary  mark of orthodoxy or a  necessary  mark of a Christian." There certainly are people who do, and I appreciate this viewpoint entirely.  However, I've been wanting t...
Read more

What's This All About?

-
Image
I'm pretty sure I've been a Christian my entire life. I'm not really sure when I really became a Christian. I don't really remember making a decision to follow Jesus Christ in a single moment in time. I remember being taught things, understanding them to make sense in the sphere of human reality, and believing in them. As a teenager I was baptized, which is the closest thing I personally have to the start of my personal relationship with Jesus Christ. There has been tension within my faith ever since. I know I am a human being. Now, that might seem very obvious to you (well, depending on how well you know me...) but to me, that is at the forefront of everything I understand about existence. Zarathustra's greatest crime wasn't an attempt on the life of God, it was an attempt on the existence of the human soul - that which makes all of us true human beings. The invisible quality of my existence is immaterial. I can never be persuaded that I do not exist, that ...
Read more