[Vision2020] Plenty of reasons to protest movement of megaloads

[Tom Hansen]

FYI , V-Peeps . . .

This Letter to the Editor was written by Alexandra Amonette of Richland, Washington.

Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still.
But first you must learn to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon

> On Dec 27, 2013, at 1:54 PM, Tom Hansen <thansen at moscow.com> wrote:
> 
> Courtesy of today's (December 27, 2013) East Oregonian (Hermiston, Oregon).
> 
> ----------------------------------
> 
> LETTER: Plenty of reasons to protest movement of megaloads
> Why would people pray, sing, get arrested, stand in the freezing cold at night, and try to stop megaloads of oil refinery equipment on their way to the Alberta, Canada, tar sands? Or protest the Keystone XL pipeline or coal/oil export terminals?
> Here are seven reasons:
> 1. The Warm Springs and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have not been consulted nor given their approval for the megaloads to come through their territories.
> 2. The fossil fuel industry is causing indigenous and other local populations to get and die from cancer.
> 3. The tar sands are under the last magnificent boreal forests. You can’t just drill a hole and pump it out. It’s solid-mixed in with sand and shale so they rip off the trees, then strip off the top soil. The huge amounts of water required is then contaminated and dumped into massive tailings ponds that pollute and destroy the land, rivers, water, people and wildlife.
> 4. Turning tar sands oil into crude oil produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil.
> 5. The fossil fuel industry is going after unconventional fuels: oil in the deep icy Arctic Ocean, hydrofracking for natural gas, massive strip mining and mountain-top removal for coal and the tar sands, where these equipment megaloads equipment are headed.
> 6. We know that the greenhouse gases we have added to the air have caused a planetary energy imbalance and global warming, already 0.8 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. It’s increasing extreme weather, from heat waves and droughts to wildfires and stronger storms. We must keep maximum global warming close to or below 1 degree Celsius.
> 7. “We are getting close to the dangerous level of carbon in the atmosphere,” our leading climate scientist, James Hansen, warns us. “If we add on to that unconventional fossil fuels [like tar sands], which have a tremendous amount of carbon, then the climate problem becomes unsolvable.”
> I urge my fellow citizens to:
> 1. Oppose the megaloads, Keystone XL pipeline, and the coal/oil export trains/terminals.
> 2. Support a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend with a border tax adjustment (www.citizensclimatelobby.org). Contact your representatives and urge them to enact this best first-step legislation to reduce emissions, encourage fuel efficiencies, promote private investment in alternative energy projects, create jobs, and begin our transition to a clean-energy/non-fossil-fuel economy.
> 3. Learn about climate change. Don’t be fooled by the campaign to deny scientific findings about it.
> 
> ----------------------------------
> 
> Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .
> 
> "Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
> http://www.MoscowCares.com
>   
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
> 
> "There's room at the top they are telling you still.
> But first you must learn to smile as you kill,
> If you want to be like the folks on the hill."
> 
> - John Lennon
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