Increasingly, these extreme extraction methods—blasting oil and gas out of rock, steaming oil out of tarlike dirt —are being used together, as when fracked natural gas is piped in to superheat the water that melts the bitumen in the tar sands, to cite just one example from the energy death spiral. What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the
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