We had it coming
When I bought my first brand new car, I bought a stick shift. Why? Because I learned to drive on a stick, and I enjoyed it. Shifting gears is more fun. More interactive. Pushing the engine's power curve to maximize that feeling of acceleration was fun. On some level I knew it was dangerous, but I did it anyway.
It wasn't until I spun out while merging onto a wet freeway and bounced off a Volvo that I changed my behavior. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
These days I drive an automatic, I don't try to pretend I'm Mario Andretti, and I'm a much safer driver.
By my reckoning, it has been about thirty years since worries over global warming started to enter the scientific mainstream. I remember articles in Science Magazine on carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect as far back in the early '80s. We've had three decades now where we've known that, collectively, burning up fossil fuels is dangerous.
Three decades of driving too fast, pushing the curve of energy use to maximize that feeling of economic development. Dangerous, but fun.
And now we have untold millions of gallons of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, and no solid plan for stopping it. There's a Twitter account that has gained 44000 followers in about a week that does nothing but put out snarky, satirical statements posing as BP's global public relations arm. Greenpeace has a competition going on Flickr for re-designs of the BP logo. Everywhere you turn, people are concocting new meanings for BP's acronym: "bad people," "big poison," "big pollution," "burning planet," "boycott petroleum."
(For the record, BP started life as "British Petroleum," but a few years back undertook a branding exercise and greenwashed themselves into "Beyond Petroleum." Nice one, guys!)
I understand people's anger. BP hasn't exactly come out blazing to Do The Right Thing here. The Gulf will never be the same again. The economic damage wrought by this utter disaster could well push us into a second recession. Talk about kicking us when we're down.
But I can't say we didn't have it coming. Yes, this leak is BP's fault. And TransOcean's, and Halliburton's. (Halliburton: the company that just keeps on giving!) But it's also the fault of every member of Congress or Parliament who let the politics of the day override long term concerns for the future. It's the fault of every voter who let themselves be distracted away from the big picture by comparatively trivial wedge issues. It's the fault of every one of us who hasn't stood up to demand better. To demand energy that won't destroy the planet.
I needed a wakeup call--a loud and ugly one--to change how I drive. We--the big "we", humanity--needed a wakeup call to refocus us on the big picture. The long term. On what matters. I only hope the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico is loud enough and ugly enough to finally change the world's attitude to oil. I hope so. At least then some good can come out of this horror.
How ironic: should that come to pass, BP will have lived up to its branding exercise and finally done something to push us once and for all beyond petroleum.
It wasn't until I spun out while merging onto a wet freeway and bounced off a Volvo that I changed my behavior. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
These days I drive an automatic, I don't try to pretend I'm Mario Andretti, and I'm a much safer driver.
By my reckoning, it has been about thirty years since worries over global warming started to enter the scientific mainstream. I remember articles in Science Magazine on carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect as far back in the early '80s. We've had three decades now where we've known that, collectively, burning up fossil fuels is dangerous.
Three decades of driving too fast, pushing the curve of energy use to maximize that feeling of economic development. Dangerous, but fun.
And now we have untold millions of gallons of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, and no solid plan for stopping it. There's a Twitter account that has gained 44000 followers in about a week that does nothing but put out snarky, satirical statements posing as BP's global public relations arm. Greenpeace has a competition going on Flickr for re-designs of the BP logo. Everywhere you turn, people are concocting new meanings for BP's acronym: "bad people," "big poison," "big pollution," "burning planet," "boycott petroleum."
(For the record, BP started life as "British Petroleum," but a few years back undertook a branding exercise and greenwashed themselves into "Beyond Petroleum." Nice one, guys!)
I understand people's anger. BP hasn't exactly come out blazing to Do The Right Thing here. The Gulf will never be the same again. The economic damage wrought by this utter disaster could well push us into a second recession. Talk about kicking us when we're down.
But I can't say we didn't have it coming. Yes, this leak is BP's fault. And TransOcean's, and Halliburton's. (Halliburton: the company that just keeps on giving!) But it's also the fault of every member of Congress or Parliament who let the politics of the day override long term concerns for the future. It's the fault of every voter who let themselves be distracted away from the big picture by comparatively trivial wedge issues. It's the fault of every one of us who hasn't stood up to demand better. To demand energy that won't destroy the planet.
I needed a wakeup call--a loud and ugly one--to change how I drive. We--the big "we", humanity--needed a wakeup call to refocus us on the big picture. The long term. On what matters. I only hope the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico is loud enough and ugly enough to finally change the world's attitude to oil. I hope so. At least then some good can come out of this horror.
How ironic: should that come to pass, BP will have lived up to its branding exercise and finally done something to push us once and for all beyond petroleum.
# Posted by Jason Black : 12:40 PM
Comments:
The wake up call first came in the 1970s, (energy/oil crisis, Santa Barbara, etc.) but we hit the snooze button.
Obama doesn't have the power to prevent or even clean up after these planetary disasters, unless and until we Americans decide to dismantle the banking monopolies, nationalize the oil and other energy industries, and divert the flow of capital from the hands of the oligarchs into democratically controlled government agencies, and we all know Americans won't let that happen. The government is broke and deeply in debt. The banks and oil industry, and their majority shareholders, are wallowing in hundreds of billions of dollars. They use their financial power to corrupt and weaken government and shape the consumption patterns, values and attitudes, the consciousness, of most Americans.
I'd like to know who are the oligarchs in America. Who are the few dozen families who own majority shares in Goldman, Exxon, Chase, Haliburton, BP, big coal, big pharma, big ag, big everything, who own the corporations that dominate our lives, who start the wars, who spill the oil and destroy habitats globally, who corrupt the political and judicial process, who used Reagan, Rove and Limbaugh, etc to manipulate the public to hate government and praise or just ignore corporations?
Who are they? Who appoints and directs their boards to hire their CEOs to order the priorities and policies of their holdings to maximize short-term return on investment (ROI) regardless of human or planetary destruction.
WHO ARE THEY?
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