Friends of Extinction
36 X 48”, Acrylic on canvas
Another aspect of the Seaton Land development was that the Pickering Airport that was proposed by Prime Minister Trudeau in the early 70s was resuscitated and the Greater Toronto Airport Authority (GTAA) tried to make it fly.
This segment of my research led me to the discovery of CHEMICAL WINTER – the real environmental disaster that is camouflaged by Al Gore and the media and completely ignored by everyone else.
To help themselves get the environmental approval necessary, the GTAA commissioned a sinister cooked study of the Pearson Airport that ostensibly showed there was no threat due to living near an airport. They published the study in four big books. The study cost the GTAA two million taxpayer dollars to prepare. I requested a copy. That was refused but I was given access to the one book on hand at the GTA. I had to go there and review it in their office. I did that.
Once again I found was that the study was a fake. For the most critical time the air was being sampled, the recording equipment was broken. Even when working, it was located upwind from the emissions so the emissions couldn’t be captured. No effort was made to use real health impact data from their own staff or from the one tiny community located directly in the path of the emissions or in downwind Toronto.
In tiny fine print in the back of one of the books, in a footnote, it was stated that the study didn’t include the chemicals of concern – Volatile Organic Compounds – the chemicals that cause cancer. In short, the study wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on yet the GTAA planned to sell it to the public to make a case for the Pickering Airport. That died when I threatened to make the contents of their fake study public.
Before I went to the GTAA office, I decided to call Health Canada and talk to the person “in charge” of alerting the public to the hazards of chemical emissions. He would only talk if I promised not to reveal his name.
The gist of the conversation was this: according to Health Canada, there are no health consequences from living down wind from an airport where a person can expect to have their homes saturated in kerosene emissions. Kerosene is what is used for aviation fuel because it’s the cheapest grade of fuel that can be derived in bulk from crude oil.
In 1989, Texaco was the last of the major oil refineries to make an important change to the jet fuels they sold to commercial airlines. They added Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) to the mixture and sold it in two different grades: J4 and J8.
The addition of VOCs which are solvent distillates derived from crude oil was the chemical replacement for lead that was phased out of automotive fuel in the mid-seventies when it was discovered that, like the ancient Romans, we were repeating history and poisoning the population by emitting lead into the atmosphere. The lead particles were finding their way into human tissue and one of the early discoveries was that the lead poisoning was causing a sharp rise in cancerous brain tumours.
The lead in fuel was a lubricant that prevented internal combustion engines from self destructing by becoming a soft cushion between moving parts that kept those parts from fusing together under high heat and pressure. The removal of lead demanded another equally economical solution and the solution was VOCs.
But VOCs were introduced into the marketplace without long term studies on the health effects of the newly formulated fuel emissions. Eventually, VOCs were found to be at least as bad for human health as lead had been. In fact, much later, assembled science could be used to show that VOCs were far worse than lead could ever have been.
When the negative effects of VOCs in ground transportation fuel were finally recognised, the amount used in formulation of gasoline and diesel was substantially reduced. The aviation fuel industry had a problem – what to do with the surplus product? The answer they found was to add it to aviation fuel.
Jet aircraft use more fuel than any other form of transportation vehicle and burn it off faster. In effect, aircraft are giant spray bombs and what they’re spraying the planet with is VOCs.
Research in other directions soon led me to investigate other uses for VOCs – notably insecticides and herbicides. It didn’t take long to find out that the active ingredient or the ingredient that makes modern insecticides and herbicides so effective is the inclusion of VOCs in the recipes.
Putting two and two together took a cosmic blip. Aircraft are not just enormous spray cans, they’re enormous pesticide applicators. The entire planet is undergoing a continuous, never ending application of bug spray.
At the time I figured that out in 2005, I was familiar with the discovery by Karen Lips regarding frog and toad extinctions in Costa Rican jungles. Other frog and toad die-offs were occurring in other locations around the world. What was so dramatic about Karen’s discovery was that the frogs and toads Karen discovered were new to science and they were dropping dead practically as she watched.