Thursday, July 03, 2014

The Irony of Save our Steel

Save our Steel, a United Steelworkers project against the dumping of tubular steel by foreign countries, especially South Korea, shows the failure or lack of any rational Industrial or climate policy by the United States. The steelworkers are not at fault as they merely try to withstand the brutal world economic system with little help from our government, or more often, as they fight our government from not selling off half the country from under our feet. The irony is this; Fracking, with both known and unknown environmental consequences, is akin to scraping the corn stalks off a field and boiling them for food. It is a hydrocarbon refrigerator of  month old leftovers for supper, and many of the direct consequences may not not be known from some time. It is also a perfect example of capitalism's irrationality,  maximizing the extraction of carbon while climate change works constantly in the background. Thus the irony; citizens and workers forced to fight for the right to save their jobs while destroying the very planet they live on, piece by piece. This shows how much humanity has overextended itself; one part of the population destroying a  part of the world so another population somewhere else can use what they take from it in exchange for their own destructive extraction.

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