I’m seriously annoyed with the press coverage devoted to the oil gusher. BP is bad, bad, bad. Evil they are. No wait, they are incompetent, lazy, greedy corporate bastards at best, evil fish killing, baby seal clubbing, agents of the apocalypse at worst. It’s stuck in my craw, I tells ya, this BP bashing. It’s so convenient to sit on our asses and bash bash bashidy bash.
Where does our complicity in this spill start for the average global citizen? How do we, as a society, divorce ourselves from the problems that arise when we are addicted in a gluttonous fashion to free flowing black crude? We need cheap food, because we demand value. Farmers must consolidate their production farther and farther from the centers of consumption. They must use fertilizers fabricated from petroleum, transport it long distances using petroleum, to supermarkets lit with electricity derived from petroleum, purchased by consumers driving their little metal bubbles powered by petroleum. It’s in our plastics, toys, cars, winter warmth, food, and freedom.
Oil is in our freedom?! Quick get a skimmer to get that shit out of there. You can’t, and you know it. It has flowed into America’s freedom wetlands, soaked into the sand of liberty, and been choked down the gullets of our winged agents of change. Its slimy mess has turned to a thick oozing muck and seeped in so deep, extraction is impossible.
BP is evil though, we muse, and we continue to sit and wring our hands about how bad Big Oil is and how good we are because we care about the fishies, and the birdies, and the little shimpies, and those poor shrimping families that can’t feed themselves now. Oh boo hoo; let’s go to Wal-Mart and buy a bigger TV so we can watch bluray.
Forget the news coverage. Forget BP. This tragedy makes two things clear:
- We are addicted to oil, and it is our collective fault, not only BP’s.
- We should not be doing deep water drilling at all if we can’t manage a worst case scenario. To paraphrase Ralph Nader, oil drilling currently seems to be unsafe at any depth.
OK, now I feel really guilty for not getting that push mower!
Yeah, you big wasteful American you, he says from his air conditioned home.
There was at least one good thing that came out of it. The Norwegian govt. and oil giant have decided to postpone drilling in our fish resources until more research has been made on safety, risks etc.
I know they’ve just postponed it, but maybe they can find a way to do it better.
That human beings would suddenly stop pumping out oil is irrational. Even with everything solar-powered you’d still need oil. Let’s just not compromise our sustainable resources (fish and wildlife) at the same time. That’s extremely short-sighted and you can’t eat money when the food’s gone)
Modern journalism is narrowband medium…only the simplest ideas pass through, and they better not be new ideas demanding new narratives and discourses. What’s scary is that Big Oil has the marketing budget to make you think they founded Greenpeace, and the lobbying muscle to make sure nothing really changes at the end of the day. Look, everything is our collective fault, yet we are trapped through the structure of money, power and ideas.
Yeah, I totally agree, Marcos. It’s frustrating and I don’t see any change, but it does piss me off that we play the blame game without actually seeing our complicity. We can do something. I know we can’t do everything, and surely oil will always be important, but we can do something, see ourselves as part of the problem.
Same thing Sigg3 said, we can’t stop, but we can reduce. And we should be. Our collective will is weak, because oil is comfortable. Only now we’re finding out there are severe liabilities.
There was a re-take on the Fermi paradox on /. this morning. Here: A new Take on the Fermi Paradox
I thought that if they came all the way over here they would be honing for a take-over/colonization of the big blue Earth. They’d probe around a little (pun intended) and go: “Let’s just wait 500 years. That’s all they need.”
Also, I had some really bad fajitas yesterday and today my stomach is all gassed up. I blame BP.