Utah contest's message to kids: Earth Day is about exploiting the Earth, not preserving it

[wtmusic]

"Earth Day is April 22, and today is the last day children in Utah can send in their submissions for the state-sponsored Earth Day poster contest lauding fossil fuel production.

This year’s theme is 'Where Would We Be Without Oil, Gas & Mining?'

Last year’s theme was 'How Do YOU Use Oil, Gas, and Mining?'"

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/20/1751301/utah-schoolchildren-asked-to-make-earth-day-posters-celebrating-fossil-fuels-and-mining/

[Nihil]

1. Way to go Utah ...

> The contest is literally made possible by fossil fuel interests. This year’s sponsors
> include the Salt Lake Petroleum Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and
> the Utah Division of Oil, Gas & Mining. Last year’s sponsor list was longer, including
> Arch Coal, Anadarko Petroleum, and Rio Tinto/Kennecott Utah Copper.

> The children were not asked to make posters about the climate impacts caused by
> those same fossil fuels: drought, wildfires, and warmer winters.

Corporate run denialist fuckwits.


Nice editorial comment though:

> Appropriately, the winners of the Earth Day poster contest will be notified on April Fool’s Day.

[Downtown Hound]

2. And Utah wonders why it has a pollution problem. n/t

[defacto7]

8. People in Utah don't know they have a polution problem.

Facts are dismissed here when it does not coincide with the corporate/church position. Blindness is a virtue in this state.

[savebigbird]

3. Where would we be without oil, gas, and mining?

I think we wouldn't have ever-increasing cancer rates in the U.S., for one.....

[siligut]

4. Utah has all of that shale oil

Lots of lucre and damage to the environment.

I am convinced that Utah is the RW's experimental control group for propaganda and brainwashing.

[wtmusic]

5. Proposed theme for Earth Day 2014:

"Some Want to Put Limits On Oil, Gas & Mining. Why Do Those People Hate America?"

[crim son]

6. If my kid brought that assignment home

I know exactly how we would approach it.

[Art_from_Ark]

11. Title of poster: "If it weren't for oil, there might not even be an Earth Day"

The poster shows a huge oil slick, and at the bottom, in big letters,

"Santa Barbara, 1969"

[RoccoR5955]

7. Look at the sponsors of the "contest."

It's a who's who of mining, oil, and gas companies.
Nothing but corporate propaganda is what it is.

[defacto7]

9. I guess it's time

to join the anti tar sands protest in SLC on Saturday.

[revmclaren]

10. I guess in Utah you could call it

'Rape The Earth Day!'

Welcome to The United States Of Corporate Greed!

[GentryDixon]

12. The air is so foul people with breathing problems cannot go out.

The pollution hangs in the air like a blanket. The "beautiful" people who fly into the valley to ski go to Park City and they are above the blanket. They do not need to deal with it on a daily basis, so that is why Utah can claim "The greatest snow on earth". They don't mention the foul air they must travel through to get to the slopes.

Our Legislature is so filled with Real Estate agents and big business whores, they care not one whit whether their neighbor can breathe or not The smoke stacks of Kennecott Copper belch over the mountain and deposit their pollution into the valley I live in. It is disgusting, and life threatening. The newspaper prints the red, yellow or green alert.

[wtmusic]

14. I was in Salt Lake City in 1973

and everywhere was beautiful blue sky. I can hardly imagine it the way you describe.

[Stainless]

15. Winter Inversions trap pollution in the Salt Lake Valley

Utah Politicians are involved in a criminal conspiracy with the Polluters to ensure that they all get rich while the little people who live in the gunk suffer from their refusal to help. I moved to Southern Utah when I retired to escape the pollution in the air and the BS coming from the legislature. The majority of Utah voters are members of the Mormon church which frowns upon critical thinking and acting in one's own self-interest.

[dorksied]

13. I live in Southern Utah, the air is not horrible, usually. In Northern Utah, though....

Last time I was up there I had a headache for 3 days afterwards, from all the crap I breathed in. Its bad...

[hatrack]

18. Now take that, and multiply by 10 to get an idea of Bejing back in January

(insert coughing noise here)

[gadjitfreek]

16. How people who live in one of the most beautiful states in this country...

...can be so callous and sadistic about it boggles the mind. Destroying the natural beauty of Utah would be as horrifying and amoral as vivisecting a nursery ward of babies for fun and profit. There are days when I long for the extinction of our species for the sake of the rest of the world but then I remember that we are speeding headlong into a self-made extinction and relax a bit. As long as greed, hatred and religious fundamentalism (which includes the unabated and unabashed worship of money) continues to be the main driving force of human nature, we as a species are eventually doomed to fall under our own headman's axe.

[Ilsa]

17. Equating financial success with being in

God's good graces is how they manage to deceive themselves and their flocks. Unbelievably short-sighted of them, and terribly unChristian of them to subject their brethern to such pollution.