Re: [Paddlewise] Petroleum IS the disaster.

I'm delighted to read this, as it shows an awareness vastly beyond
that of...well, nearly everyone.  Let me share one of my favorite
quotes, which I think is quite apropros here:

	Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet
	been educated into accepting our routine social practices as
	"natural", and so insist on posing to those practices the most
	embarrassingly general and fundmental questions, regarding
	them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long
	forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as
	inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things entirely
	differently. "Where does capitalism come from, mummy?"	is thus
	the prototypical theoretical question, one which usually receives
	what one might term a "Wittgensteinian" reply: "This is just
	the way we do things dear." It is those children who remain
	discontented with this shabby parental response who grow up to
	be emancipatory theorists, unable to conquer their amazement at
	what everyone else seems to take for granted.

	--- Critical social theorist Terry Eagleton in his 1990 essay,
	"The Significance of Theory",

We, for large values of "we", have accepted the premise that we can
exploit natural resources without bound.  We can dig up all the coal,
pump out all the oil, cut down all the trees, dump all the trash, etc.,
and there will be no adverse consequences for us, because the planet
will absorb all of them.  This *might* have been true to a first
approximation when (a) there were a lot fewer of us and (b) we didn't
have the technology to conduct these operations on a large scale, but
it's certainly not true now.

But (a) most of us haven't figured it out yet [1] and (b) some of the ones
who *have* figured it out are busy lining their pockets, reasoning that
they will be safely dead before the consequences become too severe.  Oh,
and there are also (c) some remarkably stupid people who will claim that
all of this is necessary for "safety" and "the economy" and "national
security" because they lack the intellectual ability to work through
the required reasoning to its inexorable conclusions. [2]

So, with an agreeing nod to the Subject line on this message, I would
say that it is *one* of the disasters we have inflicted on ourselves,
and that perhaps we can dare to faintly hope that at least some dim
awareness of that will filter through the collective consciousness.

But even that's not enough: we're up against greed here.  All-encompassing,
mindless, blind, addictive greed.  Why do you THINK that BP passed on
a device costing a mere $500K -- chump change -- while pocketing billions
in profits just in the last quarter?

	Slick Operator: The BP I've Known Too Well
	http://www.truthout.org/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well59178

There really is no operational difference between the business models
of BP and crack dealers.  It's just that BP has better lawyers and
spokesliars.

My point being that all of the awareness, all of the conservation,
all of the trash pickup, all of the effort that each one of us makes in
small and large ways every day *will not matter* until and unless we do
something substantive about the greed.	Because while you are switching
to CF bulbs and I'm picking garbage out of the river, our efforts are
being neatly undercut -- by many orders of magnitude -- by what BP
and others are doing to make piles of money.

So here is what will happen:

	- BP will issue press releases using the completely predictable
	catchphrase of our time

		"No one could have foreseen..."

	neatly ignoring of course that many people foresaw quite clearly,
	but were marginalized because their foresight was inconvenient.

	- The tradition of privatizing profits and socializing costs
	will continue: BP will post a few billion in profits next
	quarter while the US taxpayers pony up for the cleanup.

	- BP will engage its army of attorneys to fight any and all
	claims against it.  (This one is history already: anybody
	else see the stories about their lawyers offering $5K
	settlements along the coast?)  The litigation will drag out
	at least past 2020 by which time many of the people whose
	livelihoods are now being erased will be destitute and desperate,
	and will start accepting pathetic settlements.

	- We will be told that while *this* technology failed, the *next*
	technology will never fail.

	- The mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, self-soiling drooling
	morons who support "drill baby drill" will be back at it soon
	enough.  They will blame conservationists, environmental groups,
	marine biologists, academic researchers for "blowing this out
	of proportion" and will assert that this is a one-time event...
	even though it's clearly not.

	- Instead of using this as a wake-up call to encourage
	serious conservation of petroleum-based products, politicians
	will avoid that difficult path and will instead endorse more
	drilling "with appropriate safeguards" that will of course
	remain as unenforced as current ones thanks to cronyism,
	payoffs, and laziness.  (I trust you've all see the news
	stories about MMS personnel having sex with employees of
	the energy companies they putatively regulate.)

	- An area the size of the state of Maryland is now coated
	in oil.  Leakage is running at about 1.1 million gallons/day:

	http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/gulf-oil-spill-radar-satellite-image.html

	It will get bigger.  It will coat shorelines in LA, MI and AL,
	and possibly FL.  It will destroy fisheries, kill wildlife and
i	adversely affect the health of everyone breathing the fumes.
	Reasonable predictions will be made about the effects, they
	will be decried as "unduly pessimistic", and shortly thereafter
	they will be demonstrated to be unfortunately much too optimistic.

	- Once we strip out all the excess verbiage, the bottom
	line is that nobody has a viable plan to stop this anytime soon.
	("hope" is not an engineering strategy.)
	
	- "No marigolds in the promised land,
	  there's a hole in the ground where they used to grow."

---Rsk

[1] Consider, for example, the inferior people who do not comprehend
and accept anthropogenic global warming.  I suppose the only redeeming
quality these lesser individuals have is that they provide company
for the equally-inferior people who do not comprehend plate tectonics,
the big bang theory or evolution.  We can only hope they're not breeding.

[2] Consider that if a sovereign nation has done to us what BP has
just done that it would be considered an act of war.
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