by Sean Orr | Only a total dick would tell you that you can’t complain about oil and plastics because you’ve been using them since the day you were born: Lost in all the oil rhetoric is realism. “Another example of the quiet little ‘inconsistency’ that exists for so many of those who condemn the oil industry, especially the Alberta oil sands, is the pension fund they pay into…” That’s blaming someone at the barrel of a gun for not looking away. Sure oil seems ubiquitous and it’s power seems inescapable, but to borrow a quote from Ursula Le Guin, “so did the divine right of kings”.

“The oil and gas economy is here to stay” … except when it totally isn’t: Petronas puts B.C. LNG plant on hold. Was it something we said?

First Chevron snuck into our schools, now Science World couples with LNG. “When the government first approached us, we debated long and hard about the reputation we do enjoy and would it be in danger at all through this participation…” You should have debated longer and harder.

Take the high ground: Fraser Institute: Flee your homes and cities in response to climate change. As laughable as it is that a right-wing think tank that actively refutes climate change is talking about the effects of climate change, there is some strange truth in this: “It’s pretty clear that we’re not going to reverse civilization…”

Baldrey’s statement in the article above that we shouldn’t “think for a moment that shutting down a pipeline is going to have any impact whatsoever, other than easing some guilty consciences” is eerily familiar to Paul Kingsworths‘ line that “civilization [is] approaching collapse and that it [is] time to step back and talk about how to live through it with dignity and honor…”

Question: “How do we respond to those things directly by fixing the incentives that lead people to put themselves in climatically fragile areas both in developed countries and developing countries?” Easy! Just change the entire economy!

Or just buy a bigger boat: Vancouver Archipelago (pictured at top).

How do we fix the incentives that lead people to put themselves in a corner of someone’s living room for $630/Month? Vancouver ‘Bedroom’ Is $630/Month For Your Own Curtained-Off Space.

Barbara Yaffe: Depletion of Vancouver’s tree-cover a ‘nightmare’. I’m sure people will find a way to blame Asians for this…

Will startups in the Downtown Eastside become gentrification villains? Or…

“Are we assholes or what?” A Panel Discussion. #vanpoli #DTES #gentrification http://t.co/xiaZ9AYp4M

— Nicholas Ellan (@njellan) December 5, 2014

Plans for improved bike route on Stanley Park causeway coming today. This prompted a bizarre letter to The Province: “Maybe a dog or a raccoon will get its paw caught in the wire, or maybe a deer will jump the fence into oncoming traffic, or maybe a pedestrian will scrape themselves on a burred wire and get an infection…” There are no deer left in Stanley Park.

But there are bombs: World War II bomb shell removed from Stanley Park.

The power of positive thinking: Hamilton family left corpse upstairs for six months expecting resurrection. The one time you actually want there to be comments in The Star…

Bonus: Strathcona by Super Models.