Originally posted on Mastodon June 7, 2024.
Sent to the National Post and Suncor (info@suncor.com) June 8, 2024.
(this letter is more than 200 words… but so be it)
Dear Editor,
“Not one less lemming will jump off the cliff if we don’t also jump off the cliff”, so said the millionaire chief of the Proud Order of Lemmings Society, from his office in a high tower.
“The world will not consume one less barrel of oil simply because Canada chooses not to provide it.”, said Suncor CEO Rich Kruger over video conference.
It was in response to an MP who asked, non-rhetorically, how he sleeps at night knowing his oil company and industry bears primary responsibility for the climate induced catastrophes in Canada and around the world.
“You’re actually attacking hundreds of thousands of workers”, he predictably deflected, “I don’t know how to answer that question”.
And that’s perhaps the most honest answer he could give.
Because people like him, people who run these companies and make these deflections, can only do so because they cannot – they are incapable – of conceiving of anything else.
They are so beholden to their own wealth and the illusion that they are imparting wealth onto others by extracting oil, that they cannot possibly know how to answer a question whose premise is that their unearned wealth is inherently destructive.
Their appeal for empathy for the oil worker is a ruse because an empathetic person would know the oil worker is just as vulnerable, more so in many ways, to climate catastrophe than anyone else.
The worker or other energy dependant person is not a lemming because the average person understands consequence when they see it.
This CEO has no consequences for his actions today. He thinks he is safe in his tower but he and his temporarily powerful peers are the lemmings galloping to the cliff.
When the day comes that they near the edge, no oil worker or other person will stand in the way.
Chris Alemany
Port Alberni BC