Open letter to Yukon Party ministers:
I am ashamed that intelligent, grown-up people treat each other and our environment with such disrespect.
Without clean water there would be no life. No oil or gas can replace this precious source of life. No amount of money and effort can bring back the copious amounts of water that will be lost forever from the water cycle due to fracking.
Why is this technology in such big demand in the last 10 years? Because the world is running out of conventional fossil resources. Wouldn’t it be wiser to direct funding to renewable resources instead beating a dead horse?
Where do you get your information that fracking is so safe and no threat to the environment? Comic books? I don’t think so; you get this one-sided information from the very industry that is so destructive.
Why is it that farmers go broke where fracking is done? Why do people get sick all over where fracking is done? Why is it that First Nations all over North America lose their way of life because their natural food sources are dead?
How much more destruction do we need before the eyes of politicians and regulators are opened? When will you educate yourselves from neutral scientific sources about fracking? Why is it that you were not listening when the NDP’s Jim Tredger presented all the scientific facts?
We can live very well without oil and gas; we did for millennia and prospered. The industrialization of our economies took a wrong turn just for greed. Efficient and renewable technologies got suppressed by the greedy oil and money industry for the last hundred years. In this short time we wasted a natural resources that took millions of years to develop and are not renewable. We should have used it more wisely and should not have affected the world climate by wasting it.
You, as legislators, have the chance and a duty to change this insane trend. You can say no to oil and gas development in Yukon.
If you are a responsible person and have any respect for future generations you have to say yes to the motion for a moratorium on fracking.
If you are scared to lose your job, because you decide against party policies or the demands of the oil industry, cross the floor and become responsible Independent member of the Yukon Legislature and represent your constituents! Your party majority is not real - 60 per cent of Yukon voters did not vote for this party.
Please do the responsible thing, stop this insane development.
Werner Rhein
Whitehorse