Ask your MEP for more pollution

You’re probably thinking that you’d have to be fucking nuts to ask your MEP for MORE pollution. Me too. How disappointing, then, that we have to remember the existence of oil lobbyists. These a-moral fuckers have been out and about fucking things up again and making enough noise to ensure we don’t think of the alternatives.

Having successfully persuaded the Canadian Government to  deliberately exclude data indicating a 20 per cent increase in annual pollution from Canada’s oilsands industry from a report on climate change that it was required to submit to the United Nations, now they are moving on to Europe.

The MEPs are trying to pass a Fuel Quality Directive to improve sourcing and sale of fuel in the EU.

Tar sands were originally named in draft proposals from the European Commission which were drawn up to ensure that member states were able to meet the legally binding target of reducing greenhouse gas by 6% by 2020.  But by last year – following intense lobbying from the Canadian government – all references to tar sands were dropped.

The pollution from Canadian oilsands production alone is greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of all the cars driven on Canadian roads.

So lots of MEPs are trying to raise the bar for sustainable sourcing and say that tar sands are just too fucking polluting to be worth even considering. However, lots of MEPs are also naive, stupid, ill-informed of alternatives, and pressured to compromise. You need to make sure they hear your voice and know that if you’re going to pay their fucking wage, they’d better fucking man-up and save the world, or at least prevent things from getting worse.

So, yes, you’d have to be fucking nuts to ask your MEP for MORE pollution. However you’d also have to be a bit silly to have read all this and not to  take the extra minute to ensure they hear you asking them for less.


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