Can Carbon Capture Clean Up Canada’s Oil Sands?

[GliderGuider]

6. Why all the long faces and cynicism?

Instead of viewing tar sands, shale oil, fracked natural gas and deep water drilling as signs of desperation – Hail Mary passes in the last minute of play – perhaps we should see them instead as signs of success.

Our monomaniacal lust to drill out and burn up these last, marginal stores of ancient carbon even as the world disintegrates around us is a sure sign that we are very close to discharging our thermodynamic obligation to the universe. We came into being, along with our brains the size of planets and our consciences the size of mustard seeds, in order to dissipate all the energy gradients we could; to fling the universe headlong toward its final date with equilibrium

I, for one, am enormously proud of my species for doing such an exemplary job in just a few thousand short years. After all, the rest of the biosphere didn't accomplish a tenth as much in over three billion years! Humans are the most successful species the planet has ever seen, so why all the long faces?