Oil Doesn't Cause Fires. Oxygen Causes Fires.

The Oil and Gas Corps have a lot to learn from the firearms industry when it comes to public relations and buck passing. Thanks to the PR professionals at the NRA, every good American now knows that semi-automatic pistols, military assault weapons, and bazookas are no more inherently dangerous than any other tool or piece of sporting equipment left lying around the house. The oil industry needs to learn from this; they need to point out that just as every trigger needs a trigger finger, every derailed freight train filled with crude needs an ample supply of oxygen to enable combustion.



The force fanning the West Virginia flames shown above obviously lies with the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the evil wind-power industry.

Language Matters: Redefining "Eco-terrorism"

Why should we just sit back and let Fox News, the American FBI, and the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research define "eco-terrorism", when it's obvious that the real eco-terrorists are those who would poison our pristine Catskill water with fracking fluids or hunt endangered marine mammals or contaminate the Gulf Coast with millions of barrels of oil or ... well, the prize has to go to those who would remove entire mountains in West Virginia to get to the coal underneath.
The following ABC News story is from last July, but it presents this barbaric eco-terroristic practice of mountaintop removal in a concise horrifying summary.


Note that mountaintop-removing Representative Nick Rahall (D-WV) is a prime example of why I am NOT a registered Democrat, and fracking profiteer Dan Boren (D-OK), who made this recent appearance in the Times is another. While the GOP may be more predictably anti-environment, many -- if not most -- representatives of both parties are consistently more interested in "serious" issues like money and cost-effective energy procurement than in the "frivolous" issue of protecting our earth.
Despite government-sanctioned definitions of eco-terrorism, ask the next generations looking at a flat "reclaimed" West Virginia landscape of toxic ponds, Walmarts, and Waffle Houses if the real eco-terrorists were the short-sighted people in suits who removed the mountains, or the people of ELF and ALF who torched the occasional Hummer and released lab rats.
"Eco-terrorism," in the TrueBlueLiberal dot org Style Guide, is used to describe those who would HARM the ecosystem, not those who attempt to protect it.