In Memoriam: Ronnie James Dio (1942-2010)

May 16 marked the end of an era for heavy metal fans, as the legendary Ronnie James Dio, the dynamic frontman of Rainbow, post-Ozzy Black Sabbath, and his own band Dio, succumbed to stomach cancer. He was 67.

Immediately, tributes began coming in from all corners of the metal universe. As if any additional proof was needed, the speed of the response was a testimonial not only to the wide-ranging influence Dio had on metal over the last 30+ years, but more fundamentally, to the fact this this was a man loved and adored by everyone he encountered, and to countless others that he didn't. Always ready to speak to fans, Ronnie was by all accounts a true gentleman, one of the most down-to-earth men in rock. He will be sorely missed.



Metal critic Martin Popoff designated Dio (the band) one of the four pillars of power metal, along with Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and, interestingly enough, Dio-era Rainbow. RJD's double presence on this list is a testament to his vast influence on the genre. The singer was universally and justifiably renowned for his powerful voice - to this day, there's never been another one like it. But his lyrics may have been even more influential. There's a strong case to be made that it was Dio who first introduced fantasy-based lyrics into rock and metal. And once we get past Robert Plant's occasional references to Tolkien in a half-dozen Led Zeppelin anthems, it becomes more and more evident that Dio was THE pioneer in translating fantasy into the metal vernacular.

Initially through his collaboration with ex-Deep Purple axeman Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow, then in a more gothic and gloomy vein for the seminal Sabbath albums Heaven and Hell (the title track may be the Sabs' best song, period) and The Mob Rules, and finally through his illustrious solo career, Dio specialized in fantastic, allegorical tales of good vs. evil, of overcoming the odds and slaying the dragon. It was a formula bound to meet with approval among the faithful metalhead legions, who tend to first embrace the music while grappling with involuntary celibacy during pimply, awkward adolescence. Indeed, throughout the 80s, Dio regularly battled the "Denzel the Dragon" stage prop night after night on stage, eventually subduing the monster with his sword. Quite simply, how much more metal can you get?

All of this may come off to the non-metal fan as cheesy and gratuitous nonsense, the kind of over-the-top stagecraft lampooned so memorably in This Is Spinal Tap. But herein lies the difference between those who like metal, and those who don't. To the adoring throngs who watched the diminutive Dio slay the dragon every night, it wasn't cheesy. And even if it was, that was beside the point. It was fun. It was entertaining. And it served as an appropriately larger-than-life visual metaphor for the appeal of metal itself: of taking the darker side of life, whatever demons may be torturing you, and ridding yourself of it in a triumphant catharsis. For anyone who has ever felt powerless, metal offers an emotional escape, however temporary. The music itself exudes power, but there is also the power in numbers: the knowledge that somewhere out there is a collective force (clad in black t-shirts) millions strong, made up of people just like you: those who feel like outsiders, united in their love of a musical genre which - two decades after pop-metal, power ballads and MTV temporarily made metal commercial - remains resolutely alien to the mainstream.

I don't know if people outside this subculture will thus be able to grasp the magnitude of our current loss. Ronnie James Dio embodied the spirit of heavy metal. It was he who first popularized the "devil's horns", now the universal hand gesture of metalheads everywhere. He played with some of the genre's most iconic players, such as Ritchie Blackmore, and brought out the best they had to offer. He replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath - perhaps the single most influential band in metal, and one of the most iconic frontman - and firmly put his own stamp on the band with their best album. And when he continued with his own band, he made a succession of influential and massive-selling albums all distinguished by his raw vocal power.

At this point, I can't even remember if I ever previously knew whether Dio had stomach cancer. I may have heard about it one point, but if I did, I obviously wasn't too worried about it. My first reaction would be that no mere disease could fell this metal god, that Ronnie would beat cancer and keep rocking well into his 70s or 80s. When I first heard of his death, I was in shock. Michael Jackson may have meant a lot to everyone - including me - but somehow, the death of Ronnie James Dio feels more personal. Dio was not a musician well-known or loved by the mainstream, which tends to fixate on the most bizarre and trivial aspects of celebrity culture. Rather, he was ours. He belonged to all metalheads. He was one of us. Now he's gone, the true man on the silver mountain.

There are so many classic songs Dio sang on, it's hard to pick any clear favourites. "Stargazer" and "Man on the Silver Mountain" from the Rainbow period, and of course his work with Sabbath - "Heaven and Hell", "Neon Knights", "Children of the Sea", and "Die Young" are all amazing songs. "Rainbow in the Dark" and "Holy Diver" are the legendary tracks from Dio's 1983 debut, and the former may be my favourite Dio song. It's certainly the catchiest. "Don't Talk to Strangers", of course, is the epic:



The lyrics, like so many of Dio's, are somewhat opaque, but sound awesome and can be interpreted as a commentary on whatever personal demons the listener is battling. Hearing Dio sing the opening lyrics, we find him at his most delicate, addressing in his allegorical way the vulnerability that exists at the core of metal (and metalheads') tough and aggressive exterior:

Don't talk to strangers, 'cause they're only there to do you harm
Don't write in starlight, 'cause the words may come out real
Don't hide in doorways, you may find the key that opens up your soul
Don't go to heaven, 'cause it's really only hell
Don't smell the flowers, they're an evil drug to make you lose your mind
Don't dream of women, 'cause they'll only bring you down

...and with that last word, Dio's soft narration becomes a mighty roar of defiance, joined by the crashing thunder of electric guitar, bass and drums. We are now in prime metal territory, and from here on, his voice sears with a seething aggression, the equal and opposite reaction to the intro's delicacy. He continues:

Hey you
You know me, you've touched me, I'm real
I'm forever the one that lets you look and see and feel me
I'm danger, I'm the stranger
And I, I'm darkness, I'm anger, I'm pain
I, I'm master, the evil song you sing inside your brain drives you insane

Some words of caution:

Don't talk
Don't let them inside your mind, yeah

And the need to escape:

Run away, run away, go

Vivien Campbell takes Ronnie's advice and goes for the guitar solo. The climax of any metal song, the solo is the release for all the tension that's been building up to this point. Ronnie offers one last nugget of wisdom as a means of defeating all those that would oppress one's individual conscience:

No no
Don't let them in your mind or catch your soul

Like a lot of metal, much of the song's appeal is about how you say something rather than what is being said - and when we're talking about a voice like Ronnie James Dio's, that's all the more true. Yet the lyrics, vague as they might seem, always have a certain mystique and particularly evocative imagery. "Don't write in starlight"...I just love the way that sounds.

Ronnie James Dio may have passed on, but his legacy is a reflection of how great art immortalizes the artist. Although the man is no longer with us, we can hear him whenever we like, just by listening to his music. Dio's powerful themes are universal, reflected in great literature throughout the ages. As Martin Popoff wrote, summing up his lyrical appeal: "through the man's demons and wizards imagery and his passionate parables for the downtrodden and outcast, Ronnie is now seen as a sort of metal sage, champion of hope, poet of the punters, a classic and classical rock Merlin."

Yet the last word must go to Dio himself. He may have been silenced on earth, but his voice has been preserved for all eternity. I'm going to end with "The Last in Line", the title track from Dio's second album and a song that I think embodies not only his approach to lyrics, but his overall warmth, humanity and affinity with the oppressed. You probably won't be able to watch the video without laughing, but maybe that's the point: Dio, like much of traditional metal, was always about entertainment. It may have sometimes addressed serious issues, but it didn't take itself too seriously, and personally, I could use a bit of that humour right now. The legend explains:

I write songs for people, how people feel about being lonely, for being pecked at for not being the greatest physical specimens on earth; things like that just happen. So this one for me describes people who persevere through all the stones and slings and arrows that are tossed at them. The last in line, that's usually where people like that are placed, the end of the line. But to me, just because you're at the end of the line doesn't mean that you can't succeed. And I usually find that the people who are willing to stay there at the end of the line will succeed.

Rest in peace, Ronnie. \,,/



UPDATE: A few other thoughts have come to mind in the past day of mourning. As I read the CNN story on messages of condolence to Ronnie's family, I listened to "Man on the Silver Mountain" and was blown away by its power all over again. The song is Dio's calling card, the first track on the first Rainbow album, which largely introduced his distinctive sonic signature to the world. Whether performed by Rainbow or the band Dio, its simple, pounding riff, matched with Ronnie's fantasy lyrics, is a perfect song to mourn to, mainly because it'll instantly pull you out of your sadness with its pulse-pounding, hair-raising, headbanging awesomeness, again reminding us of the empowering qualities inherent in Dio's music.



Secondly, last night I finally got around to listening to Heaven and Hell's 2009 album. If you want a more depressing, gloomy affair than the usual Dio, it's right up your alley. This is the doomiest Black Sabbath or Dio has sounded in ages, and for that you have to give them credit for doing something as anti-commercial as possible. Plus, just look at that cover! 'Nuff said.


Finally, yesterday I stumbled across an intensely fascinating analysis by composer Andy DiGelsomina on the Wagnerian and existential aspects of Rainbow's 1976 classic "Stargazer". I've heard that song a million times, but never got it to the extent that I did after reading this piece. Not just another wizard rock epic, Dio's lyrics can actually be interpreted as a metaphor for religious belief itself. Heavy.

Solidarity With The Greek Workers!

Hats off to the Greek proletariat, who put into action what too many of us on the left merely talk about by directly protesting their government's austerity plan as it angled for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Since the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008, capitalist governments around the world have reacted at the bankers' behest with ubiquitous austerity packages which aim to make the working class pay for the crimes of high finance, through a combination of wage freezes, pension cuts, slashing entitlement benefits and taxing consumers with measures like, say, the HST. Among those with a more advanced class consciousness, the only possible solution has always been a mass mobilization of the working class, at the very least to protest these cuts, and in the most optimistic perspective, to begin the transition to a socialist mode of production in which resources are communally owned and geared to serve the needs of society as a whole.

Unfortunately, to apply a coldly realistic reading of the situation would reveal that protests in the wealthiest industrialized nations leave much to be desired, and many would-be activists too often spend their time complaining on the sidelines rather than leading the charge in the streets (guilty as charged, but keep in mind that I live in Kingston, Ontario). In Greece, on the other hand, workers have risen to the occasion, as their corrupt government plans to make them pay for their country's fiscal crisis. The fact that the Greek austerity measures are being spearheaded by the "social democratic" PASOK administration of George Papandreou is highly emblematic of the decay of reformist politics in general. Like the Socialist Party in France or the Labour Party in the UK, PASOK purports to be a centre-left party with a traditional constituency of the working class. But in recent years its policies have swayed sharply to the neoliberal model of increased privatization and shifting the tax burden to those least able to bear it. Now, like the French and British social democratic parties, PASOK is bailing out the wealthiest members of society on the backs of its public servants, youth, the poor and the working class.

The rage felt by the protestors as riots engulfed Greece is understandable. The country's elite, like so many others, has long enriched itself at public expense, plundering state coffers for bribes while dodging taxes. Admittedly, the country did embark on a bit of a spending spree over the last decade, hosting the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, renovating archaeological dig sites and constructing imposing new buildings. These projects were largely fuelled by debt, which is why Greece finds itself in its current precarious position. Yet the austerity measures demanded by Papandreou and his backers - the parasitic financial/business class and the international bankers - are designed to reduce the country's deficit on the back of those least able to afford it, those who had the least to do in expanding Greek debt. The case is the same in every capitalist country, where the cash-fattened elite lecture workers on the need to tighten their belts. Simple justice demanded a reaction from workers, and now the Greek proletariat have led the way.

Incidentally, the tragic death of three bank employees after the Marfin Bank in Athens was firebombed is not an indictment of the protests themselves. Molotov cocktails hurled at the bank may have been the work of police provocateurs. But even if that were not the case, it should be noted that while the bank employees did not wish to work (since their union federation had joined the general strike) this was refused by management, who locked the building's doors. Ostensibly a security measure against protesters, the move ultimately prevented the building's occupants from escaping when the fire began.

In any event, Greek workers have thrown down the gauntlet. If there is to be any resistance to the international power elite's program of draconian austerity measures, we need to follow the Greek example and take to the streets. Only when the full power of the masses is unleashed will the elite finally be forced on the defensive.

The Relevance of Labour Unions Today

Originally published at Kingstonist.

In spite of national peculiarities the labor movement has overleaped national boundaries. Economic conditions are swiftly becoming the same the world over…As trade becomes international and the market a world market, the labor leaders in the several countries tend to draw together to exchange ideas, work out programs for common action, and protect the workers of each country against the competition of other countries.

- Mary Beard, A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1921)

The Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts, a weeklong event designed to encourage social change by bridging the gap between artists and workers, hit Kingston last week. In addition to the Mayday Festival in Skeleton Park, tours of the working class Swamp Ward, screenings of labour-oriented films such as coalmining epic Matewan, and art exhibitions at the Artel and Modern Fuel, the celebration also featured lectures on issues like sexual harassment in the workplace and the social stigma faced by sex workers.

Of these lectures, perhaps the most pertinent to the broader future of the labour movement was last Tuesday’s discussion panel on “The Relevance of Labour Unions Today” at the downtown public library. Upstairs in the Wilson Room, an audience of around 20 people gathered to hear a trio of speakers talk about the role of unions locally and internationally. If there were broad themes to be found, they were the importance of organizing, tying labour to local communities through social justice, and creating an international movement of workers to combat the influence of transnational capital.

Each of the speakers was either active in the labour movement or had researched it extensively. The panel included Debi Wells, president of the Kingston and District Labour Council; Shell Sweeney, regional organizer for the Public Service Alliance of Canada; and Andrew Stevens, a PhD candidate in sociology at Queen’s University.

Wells spoke first. Besides her work with the KDLC, which represents 40 local unions in the Kingston region with a membership of over 10,000 workers, Wells is first vice president of elementary teachers at the Limestone District School Board and sits on the Board of Directors as treasurer for the Kingston Economic Development Corporation. She began by relating the experience of Hamilton during the “economic heyday” of the 1950s through to the 1970s. During this time, non-union workers at the Dofasco steel plant received relatively high wages and benefits – mainly due to the fact that unionized workers at rival Stelco had raised the bar by exerting pressure on their employers.

Kingston, said Wells, had a similar experience.

DuPont [chemical company] never had an independent union, and they always got paid a little more than Alcan [aluminium company]. I’m talking pennies an hour more than Alcan, which was always well-organized, and they too benefitted from having unions.

Wells explained how unions began as a form of workers’ protection in the early industrial era, when workers were seen as expendable resources (a trend she warned was making a disturbing comeback via the term “human resources”). Labourers pooled their money together to ensure compensation in the case of death or injury: thus, she said, “if you lost an arm in Ottawa at the lumber mills, your family would get some money.” Wells went on to say:

I think that what sometimes we forget to appreciate is that the standards that many of us enjoy for wages and safety and benefits in our workplaces comes from unions and comes from people who’ve fought for them and negotiated them. Not just wages, but benefits and also rights – the right to not be fired for no reason at all, the right to not be discriminated against for an ever-lengthening list of things, the right to have seniority respected, the rights to return to a job after maternity leave.

Today, globalization has led to dangerous backslides in workers’ rights, as transnational corporations have embraced outsourcing as a means of shifting production to countries that employ dirt-cheap labour at slave wages. With domestic workers increasingly facing part-time, temporary employment, Wells admitted that the past decade had not been a progressive one from labour’s perspective.

Outsourcing is a way to lower wages. It’s a way to save money, and to sidestep the need for safety standards, to not have to deal with benefits. It’s really quite lovely – just send the work elsewhere. There are many instances in industrialized countries now of unions working with the employers trying to get around that, because the employers find that they can’t do all of the work in other countries.

One of the questions about the relevancy of the union movement is that they’re not keeping up with the whole globalization movement – they’ve not being globalized. I disagree. I think the union movement is trying, and I think that we’re going to get there. I know that in Canada and in the States and in Europe, the union movement…[is] fighting, for example, in Colombia, where union organizers are being killed. We’re fighting for fair trade agreements, we’re fighting for fair trade goods. We’re fighting against child labour in other countries, and I think that’s the direction we have to go.

People have to be organized for their own protection. And not just in third world countries – here. People have to be organized, for their own protection, whether you’re migrant workers or whether you’re in an industry or a sector that’s not well-regulated. We have to fight for that. The robber barons in the 19^th century – they didn’t just decide to be nice and share. We took it from them. And there were some big fights about that. But now they seem to want it back, and I think that we have seen a lot of very smart attacks against unions.

She pointed to recent attacks on pensions. Governments around the world (including Ontario’s) are currently pushing austerity measures to make workers pay for the global economic crisis, which has helped fuel the ongoing riots in Greece.

The idea that you could have an economic crisis caused basically by banks blamed on the union movement, because people make too much money and they’ve put too much aside in their pensions, is actually sort of stunning. Unions in good faith negotiated those pensions…[management is] reneging on deals here.

I think that the right to grow old in dignity is not too much to ask for. I think that safe working conditions are not too much to ask for. I think that unions will be relevant as long as business interests put profit ahead of human interests.

Next up was Sweeney, representative of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. The PSAC is one of the country’s largest unions, with more than 172,000 members from coast to coast working in the federal government, its agencies, and the broader public sector (including universities and women’s shelters). Sweeney explained her union philosophy thusly: “it really is no more complicated than having fairness and respect in the workplace, and then connecting to the community.”

She detailed how she got her start as a union organizer while a grad student at the University of Western Ontario. Involved in student politics, Sweeney volunteered to be union steward and attended a local labour council, where she talked about homelessness and international solidarity to a stony response from the local – essentially, “what does that have to do with us?”

Those who wish to affect large-scale social change, she argued, need to prevent lines from being drawn between labour and community organizing. Having previously worked with Burmese human rights organizations, Sweeney knows that unions must fight a perpetual battle against corporate media and big business, which tend to characterize strikes as money-grabs by greedy workers.

It’s nothing new. Now the rhetoric has shifted to ‘in these economic times…’, that there’s no longer a role for unions and we all have to get along and everybody has to give up their bit. We all know it’s bullshit…I don’t pretend to be the expert. All I know is why workers are choosing to organize, and it’s because of the fear of contracting out, the fear of privatization.

She criticized the prevalence of so-called “public-private partnerships” (PPPs), more often than not a euphemism for contracting out government functions to the private sector. Yet Sweeney was not completely opposed to the idea in principle.

I think we need to keep working really hard to build bridges between the public and private sectors as well, and we’ve seen some nice examples of that with respect to the Vale-Inco strike up north…in Sudbury. Again, big business, big company overseas…comes in, total disrespect for Canadian labour laws, and they know that it’s a challenge for us to stick together and figure it out. Hence the importance for international solidarity, which is why, again, it always comes down to building community.

Rounding out the speakers was Andrew Stevens, who drew on his research into outsourcing to offer a more international scope on the state of unions. That research began in 2003 when the campaign to unionize teaching assistants at Queen’s got off the ground. Stevens quickly found that attempts to unionize TAs here encountered similar problems as efforts to unionize call centre workers in India – namely, a widespread perception that self-declared “professionals” did not require unions.

The usual question that comes up is, ‘what is the relevance of unions?’. They don’t see it. ‘We don’t need unions, we’ve got laws, we’ve got an apparatus that protects workers’ rights.’ And I said, ‘well, who do you turn to in the event of unjust dismissals and grievances without a union?’ Call a labour board and they’ll tell you that there are really few recourses for action unless you have the capital to actually hire a lawyer and take on the case yourself. And so, what I think has actually happened is there’s this removal of the culture or tradition of unionism in certain sectors.

In describing the need for an international workers’ movement, Stevens dug up the quote from American historian and campaigner for women’s suffrage Mary Beard shown at the top of this article. Internationalism, he said, did not mean the abandonment of national orientations, but rather recognized a working class solidarity that transcended those borders. He urged the creation of global union federations (GUFs) as a means of combating transnational corporations, enforcing an international law for the implementation of labour codes, and creating a commonwealth for labour initiatives.

"I guess the best analogy I would use is thinking about the global union movements as the body," said Stevens. "The local or the regional campaigning and the organizing is certainly the backbone, and the international federations I think operate in many respects like the nerve centre, coordinating different parts of the body and communicating limbs with the brain, etc. So this isn’t yet a structure in which we can say there’s a massive international union, but it’s slowly coalescing into something more concrete compared to what has existed in the past."

He emphasized that workers must be seen as a united force in order to build a movement from the ground up with GUFs. The ongoing strike of Vale-Inco workers in Sudbury could be seen as a model; workers might also build support across different demographics by addressing social issues. Finally, the labour movement must recognize the transitory, often temporary nature of modern employment and adjust its perspective accordingly.

For union network internationals, it has actually been about looking for ways of regulating markets and regulating labour markets, providing a union that goes with you from workplace to workplace given the very flexible and very footloose nature of employment in certain sectors, from graphic designers to engineers. This whole idea of lifelong employment is really receding in certain sectors…what the union movement has said is that we need to create flexible unions that actually carry services and benefits and the capacity to resist throughout certain regions.

Following these three presentations, an hour-long question and answer period rounded out the evening.

Calling Captain Planet

The massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, product of a British Petroleum oil rig explosion, continues to grow in size and danger. Recent estimates put it at roughly the size of Ireland. On Friday, the slick finally made landfall in Louisiana. As if the state hadn't already suffered enough from Katrina, now vital economic functions will be severely hobbled by the massive influx of crude oil, in addition to the incalculable environmental damage that will affect sensitive wetland areas. To top it off, the slick is now moving north towards the Eastern Seaboard. As the days pass, we can expect the wider ramifications of this disaster to become chillingly evident.

If there's one good thing that might possibly result from this growing catastrophe, it would be for President Obama to realize the idiocy of his plans to expand offshore oil drilling. It was already obvious when he made that particular announcement that more drilling was not the solution to the nation's energy problems, but rather a means to placate Big Oil, suck up to conservatives and by extension "punch the hippies", i.e. Obama's political base. I was not surprised to find the media's favourite dim bulb political celebrity, Sarah Palin, driving home the view that, by God, the last thing we should do after such a disaster is stop drilling for oil off the coast. Any politician in the pockets of the energy industry, such as Barack Obama, would say something similar. The Prez made a typically symbolic gesture to hold off on future development until proper safeguards are established, but the Louisiana disaster will not seriously affect his habit of capitulating to corporate interests at every opportunity.

The administration previously failed to create appropriate regulations for BP's operations:

Why BP and the federal government did not take immediate precautions to cordon off the explosion area in the immediate aftermath of the explosion is just one of many questions that have emerged.

It has also been revealed that the Obama administration had buckled before BP and oil industry pressure, failing to implement new safety and environmental regulations under consideration last fall. A BP executive wrote a letter to the administration stating that self-regulation was adequate.

Among the regulations that BP and other oil concerns were able to block was the inclusion on all oil rigs of a device called an acoustic switch—commonly used in other oil-producing nations—that sends impulses through the water that can trigger an underwater valve to shut down the well in the event of a blowback. BP found the costs of these units, about $500,000, excessive.

The oil giant reported $5.598 billion in profits for the first three months of 2010.

It is revealing of the collusion between government and corporate power that both the Obama administration and BP initially denied there was any oil spill at all. Later BP suggested that "only" 1000 barrels a day were being expelled into the coastal waters, until it was forced to admit on Friday that the figure was closer to 5000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons per day. 11 workers were killed in the initial oil rig explosion, but that was only the beginning of the myriad ways in which this "incident" - now likely to surpass the 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill as the biggest oil spill in American history - will affect life in the surrounding area.

While BP and the federal government fumbled in their initial response, the expanding oil slick was wrecking havoc on delicate ecosystems. The coast of Louisiana contains around 40 per cent of American wetlands as well as important spawning grounds for fish and birds. The region is host to hundreds of animal species, and oil that gets into the oyster reefs and fragile grass beds will be almost impossible to remove without destroying those natural areas.

Beyond the catastrophic environmental effects, the slick will have a tremendous effect on the Gulf's economy. As the WSWS reported, the port of New Orleans is the busiest in the United States in terms of freight tonnage. Should the slick block shipping from this port, economic losses would be considerable. In addition, the dramatic effects to the multi-billion dollar coastal fishing and tourism industries will likely lead to increased layoffs and job cuts.

If there is one overriding lesson we should learn from this, it's that drilling for oil in delicate coastal areas is a recipe for disaster and a leap backwards at a time when we should be investing in research and development of sustainable energy for the future. The lack of funding for solar, wind and geothermal energy sources is ludicrous given the scientific consensus behind man-made climate change and the massive potential for environmental degradation inherent not only in dramatic, headline-grabbing events such as the Louisiana oil spill, but in the general extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Let this be a wake-up call to any pols and industry types who would still deny it: the path to a glorious clean-energy future does not involve further drilling for the dirtiest and most dangerous forms of old energy.