His guitarist in Crazy Horse might be dealing with a fractured hand, but Neil Young threw some verbal punches this week when he compared the oilsands in Fort McMurray, Alta. to Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb drop in August 1945.
The Globe and Mail today reported Young was in Washington, D.C. yesterday when he told those attending an event for the National Farmers Union about oilsands development and its environmental impact.
“The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima,” he said, as shown in a YouTube clip. “Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuels all over — the fumes everywhere — you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tarsands work is 25 to 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”
Young also said he recently visited Alberta where “much of the oil comes from, much of the oil that we’re using here, which they call ethical oil because it’s not from Saudi Arabia or some country that may be at war with us.”
In another clip featuring a different portion of Young’s speech yesterday, the singer — who said he’s “still feeling” the lengthy, two-week trek in his LincVolt car — professed his love of ethanol and his dismay at oil companies.
“It’s a beautiful fuel,” he said of ethanol. “But we don’t have freedom of choice. This is a basic American thing along the federal interstate system. There’s a monopoly in existence right there alongside the road.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/10/neil-young-oilsands_n_3901454.html