Puleeze!

"The fact that this filth is being created now, when the link between carbon emissions and global warming is so obvious, reflects negligence and greed."
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Alberta

Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Athabasca Chipewyan Chief Allan Adam on May 30 in Fort McMurray. CBC News

The man's a natural. He takes to grandstanding and grandiloquent phrases like one tutored from birth to take his place on the world stage. And the stage of the world welcomes him, adoringly taking in his pithy, purposeful statements, on the cuff and sincere and platitudinous and uninspired and playing to the public. Wind him up and he giggles and prattles.

How did the great man get from South Africa to Calgary? He spurns filthy oil and all its byproducts, did he levitate and then engage in some furious paddling through the atmosphere to propel himself to Canada? Does he, perchance take advantage of an official limousine in the country of his birth, despite his retirement from active public office?

Alberta's oilpatch stirs him to oratory. The plight of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation who hosted him in Fort McMurray wrenches at  his heart. He will, doubtless, arrange a truth and reconciliation event between First Nations and the wicked oil pirates desecrating the soil and the soul of Alberta when the time is right. Who better to officiate than Archbishop emeritus Tutu?

The Conference Board of Canada projected combined federal-provincial tax revenue of about $80-billion from oilsands investment before 2035 with total investment over the next quarter century estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Over 120,000 Albertans work in oil and gas extraction. Employment and national wealth.

Without it how might government make up the shortfall. How to afford a growing population's need of social programs, health care, education? Divert oilsands production to what, exactly? Archbishop Tutu's intervention so far from the dire living conditions, crime and social disequilibrium of South Africa is celebrated by like minds of anti-growth anti-pipeline variety.

No pipeline? Fine then, straiten the environment by moving oil products on rail lines and trucks. How efficient is that as an alternative? How dangerous is that in the reality of moving the product that will, despite all environmental blatherings at home and abroad, increase in an energy-hungry world?