But, they were idling using biodiesel! That makes it okay then!
I think mixing First Nation rights and environmentalism together is pretty dumb; it strikes me as the kind of thing that would play well for people who aren’t very well-educated on either issue.
For the record, here’s what Neil himself has said about the Calgary Herald/Sun News articles about him running the buses’ engines - partly spoilered for length.
Now, I don’t know enough about the design of his buses to know whether it is possible to plug in and run off someone’s electrical supply.
I also haven’t had a lot of time to be following this story - CD launch, website launch and opening night for the show I’m understudying in have rather occupied my mind these last few weeks. It’s all happy news for me, but my goodness - what a lot of effort all this stuff seems to take!
I think the focus on his idling buses (or running generators) is taking the focus off the real issue - that Neil Young is over-simplifying a very complex issue that affects virtually all Canadians directly or indirectly. Let’s also not forget that Neil Young has lived outside of San Francisco for about the last 40 years - I’m not sure why he feels the need to visit Canada and pretend that he still has a say in how Canadians do things. Isn’t there anything going on in the US that he could protest? We sure saw a lot of oil derricks off the California coast last September!
Legend has it–and I can neither confirm nor deny–that he spent some time as a student at the high school I attended some years after Young would have been a student there. (I’m unable to go through the school’s yearbooks.) His father was a sportswriter for Toronto media–I seem to recall Scott Young writing for the Toronto Telegram; and later, the Toronto Sun, though that’s all going on memory.
Regardless, Neil Young does have many Canadian connections: he lived in Toronto, Omemee (Ontario), and Winnipeg; and he is obviously a Canadian citizen. That, it seems to me, gives him a say. However, he may now have been out of the country too long to offer an informed opinion of current affairs in Canada.
I would agree to that. I guess you could argue that global warming is a global problem (hence the name) and it’s of concern to citizens of the whole world, but again, he’d be better off focusing on the real issues here rather than the red herring of treaty rights.
While I most times will disagree with a lot of what political/environmental/what-have-you activists purport, I am glad these people have voices.
While the collective voice of Neil Young et al. isn’t likely the one of reason, it definitely echoes of conscience. Nothing wrong with that. 
Bah. It’s an ill-informed, elitist point of view and is contemptuous of the over 100,000 Albertans directly employed in the energy sector. People need jobs and people work hard to put food on the table for their families. How dare he wander into to town and wag his finger at people wanting to make a living. The very same people who buy his albums and concert tickets.
I’m all for free speech, and I agree he has the right to his opinion. I happen to disagree with him.
It remands me of John Lennon’s bullshit about “give peace a chance” and “all you need is love” and inviting the press into his peacenik bed-ins with Yoko. Yeah, if you have £500,000,000 in the bank perhaps all you do need is love. The rest of us need jobs and shit.
Our entire planet requires petroleum in order to function. Everything from gasoline to kerosene to plastics to food production, and on and on. If Alberta didn’t supply it, it would come from Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela, or Iran, or Iraq, or Kuwait, etc.
It’s basically a big oil spill that we’re cleaning up and reclaiming the land. 
I think 100,000+ is drastically underestimating how many Albertans are employed in the energy sector, or are directly affected by ups and downs in the energy sector. I know in my family and circle of acquaintances, virtually all of us are either employed by an oil & gas company or in an industry that exists because of the oil & gas industry. You take the oil sands away, and you negatively affect 4 million Albertans - it seems to me that the people who want to criticize the industry don’t seem to get this.
Well, I got the number from here; it’s near the bottom.
Science team identifies tipping point in climate change: 2047 (Written by my friend Ivan.)
Canada’s carbon emissions projected to soar by 2030 - Tar sands expected to help drive 38% increase in emissions, Harper government admits in submission to the UN
I’m coming up on 52 years old, and I don’t ever remember anybody credible saying that we can continue to pollute indefinitely without serious consequences.
I have a tremendous respect for hard-working people, but - the world needs to stop burning fossil fuels and it needs to stop manufacturing plastic that gets thrown away after one use. In the 1970s, there were a lot of hard working tobacco farmers who were afraid their way of life had no future. I’m sorry for them, but the country is better off now that fewer people are smoking.
I just can’t advocate increasing our carbon emissions when the future is in green technologies. An unsustainable environmental practice is an unsustainable economic practice.
By the way, I’ve heard this “we’re cleaning up nature’s oil spill” before. Inthis picture, the image on the left is the ‘before’, the image on the right is the 'after. That’s a very poor clean up.
Do you get from city to city in an air balloon or what?
We’re working around the clock on alternate technologies, but we don’t have the complete picture yet. In the mean time, what do you propose? Serious question. We have no choice. We really have no choice.
Here’s a picture of a remediated oil sands (not TAR sands!) well. Looks pretty good to me. Where’s your link from? (ETA: Treehugger.com. Seriously?)
I don’t mean to sound hostile; I hope we’re all friends here, but we have absolutely no choice but to use fossil fuels for the time being. Canada may as well participate or else we’re just burning oil from another source.
And in the mean time Canada’s CO2 emissions account for less than 2% of the global total: noise.
I don’t disagree with any of this (except tobacco farmers and oil sands aren’t a very apt analogy); I hope no one thinks that it’s possible to just instantly stop processing oil out of the oil sands and tell the economies of Alberta and the rest of Canada that you’ll have to get used to it.
Come to think of it, I don’t think NAFTA would allow us to just stop processing oil out of the oil sands; we are not allowed to unilaterally stop exports to the US, and they are our best customer for oil.
I also think developing alternative sources of energy (with a heavy emphasis on nuclear) is not only a great idea, but something we’re going to have to do. It is my opinion that we’ve already passed peak oil, and it’s just downhill from here (not to mention the whole fossil fuels emissions thing). I would like to see oil and gas companies getting into the alternative fuel industries, but they would seem to be 100% invested in business as usual and they don’t even want to consider that their oil money is going to run out someday. I would also like to see all levels of government forcing polluting industries to do better, but Big Oil is also Big Money, and money makes the laws.
I wondered about this myself. Back in the 1980s, a co-worker’s brother was a tobacco farmer in southwestern Ontario. According to my co-worker, his brother was initially worried about the decline in tobacco consumption, but soon realized that he had acres of land and lots of topsoil, and that other crops could grow just as well as tobacco. I’m not entirely sure if the oilsands can be switched over as easily.
I agree. I remember in about 2001, when Ontario put one windmill near the Pickering nuclear plant, and crowed about it; you can imagine my surprise when I visited Alberta shortly after and found wind farms made up of dozens of similar windmills. Later, when I moved to Alberta permanently, I would find other such wind farms on my explorations. I have heard (but cannot confirm) that the power for Calgary’s LRT is entirely supplied by electricity generated from wind power. I was similarly surprised to find that Alberta has no nuclear generating stations.
And you have every right to not utilize fossil fuels going about your life. Let us know how that works out for you.
In the mean time, I’d prefer not to support the Saudis, preferring instead to support local business and people. You know, your fellow Canadians?
I wonder how committed China is, to all this? China makes, or has the capacity to make, everything. No wonder they are going batshit crazy to buy our oil, they are doing the world’s manufacturing.
I know people here are pissed about the pollution. Politicians seem to be concerned about it, but if it translates into action remains to be seen.
Not yet. http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Canada-Considering-Nuclear-Reactors-in-Alberta-Tar-Sands-Fields.html
The idea has been bandied about for a while now and the small reactors that the article references would definitely be the ticket assuming gas prices rise sufficiently to offset the cost. I hope that doesn’t happen personally because paying $70/mo. for gas vice three times that for electricity to heat my house, relatively cheap gas makes me happy. If/when we move to an acreage, I’m looking at running a gas line to the house and generating my own with a mix of solar and NG fired generator, especially with ATCO charging $12k/ pwer pole.
I’m not sure that the Treaty issues have even remotely been addressed. The First Nations got royally screwed over by successive British and Canadian administrations. Candice Savage’s A Geography of Blood makes a compelling case, and even a cursory glance over Canadian History shows this to be true.
It’s a complex issue, that people seem to want to reduce to convenient sound bites and sniping at the other guy’s points rather than proposing any real solutions.
As complicated as this discussion here is getting, we have barely scratched the surface of all the issues involved here - “convenient sound bites” really do these issues a disservice. I suspect the rest of Canada thinks Albertans are rolling in oil money and never thinking about the cost of that money in ecological terms and what’s going to happen once the oil’s gone, but we do.
ETA: Speaking of Albertans rolling in oil money, the majority of the companies involved in oil sand production are foreign, with the profits leaving Canada. I think we have PM Trudeau to thank for that.
Thank Mulroney, not Trudeau. Mulroney sold Petro Canada back to the fascists.
