Thursday, January 26, 2012

"Spill? What Spill?"



Here's more evidence of the accuracy of the theory that if you give people enough money, you can get them to say and do whatever you want.

On April 20, 2010 an explosion on an oil rig owned by British Petroleum killed eleven men and inaugurated the worst man-made environmental disaster in history. By the time the gushing undersea oil well had been successfully capped three months later, hundreds of millions of barrels of oil had been released into the ocean, doing severe and lasting damage to the Gulf's delicate ecosystem and paralyzing the sea-based economy of five US States. We all got to learn new terms like "oil plumes," so I guess it was educational, anyway.

To "disperse" the massive oil slick, tons of chemicals were poured into the ocean. The effect of all these chemicals was to push the slick to depths at which it could not be easily detected from the surface. Where it could no further harm, based on what I believe is Isaac Newton's Third Principle Governing Royal Corporate F-Ups: "Out of Sight, Out of Mind."

And now the real nastiness arrives, far oilier and less palatable than even the spill itself. Prompted by infusions of cash from British Petroleum, small business owners and the Gulf Coast tourism industry line up to sell their souls, grinning like marionettes as they extol the virtues of a vacation down South. Visit our many restaurants, featuring Now Practically Dispersant and Oil Free seafood! Check out our hundreds of miles of Now Virtually Clear of Softball-sized oil globules beaches- and if you take a dip on our Looks Blue Which Means It's Clean Gulf Waters, that sticky feeling is suntan lotion residue, honest!

Yes, all these industries are now partners with the company whose failure to invest in automatic shutoff valves and something more substantial than Grade D cement killed eleven men- husbands, fathers, brothers, sons- and drove any number of fishermen out of business. Now it's all smiles and hugs and "Come visit us, we're awesome again!" public service announcements financed by British Petroleum. All is forgiven, apparently.

I'm sorry, but this is kind of like the American government working in partnership with the Japanese to produce "Visit Beautiful Hiroshima!" commercials in 1947. British Petroleum can pay off the corporate voices of the Gulf (turns out that it's surprisingly easy) but that doesn't change the fact that BP's carelessness, callousness and penny-pinching attitude (thoroughly corporate and Capitalist in the truest sense of those words) wrecked havoc on the environment which may take a century to repair. All sacrificed in the sacred pursuit of the almighty buck.

Just like the dignity of the people in these ads.

10 comments:

  1. It's like a woman saying "Except for raping me, he's a great guy!"

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    1. *spits drink all over screen* That's one way of putting it. ;)

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  2. "On April 20, 2010 an explosion on an oil rig owned by British Petroleum killed eleven men and inaugurated the worst man-made environmental disaster in history."

    Actually, Chernoble and the Romans' salting of Carthage were worse, as nothing like that would happen naturally. All the BP spill was was a enlarged version of oil leaking that has more or less all ways happened. The oil will eventually be eaten by all the weird bacterial life in at most a decade. A large tract of Ukrainian countryside will never be the same.

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  3. Anti-Union.

    Pro-Episodes I, II and III.

    Willing to minimize British Petroleum's 100 percent preventable rape of the Gulf of Mexico "the oil will eventually be eaten by all the weird bacterial life in at most a decade"- hmm, no real harm done then, huh? Tell that to the people of the Alaskan coast who are still finding oil under rocks twenty years after the Exxon Valdez disaster.

    You are batting .000 in my book, Derek.

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    1. If it's possible to bat lower than .000, then Derek's just done it, pulling pseudoscience out of his butt and yammering on like he actually knows what he's talking about. It's too early to know if the Gulf will ever return to how it was, and there may be microbes that will eat the oil eventually, but that doesn't change the fact people are screwed over RIGHT NOW and it's had serious environmental impacts on species and who knows if the ecosystems will ever be able to recover from that.

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  4. Not only did he downplay the horror and not address my personal fear of drilling in the Arctic, he didn't even spell Chernobyl correctly.

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  5. I didn't minimize the disaster, I just said it could have been worse

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  6. Yes, BP could have shipped oil in from the Middle East to dump into the gulf, or built a nuclear reactor on the Florida coast and melted it down. That would have been worse.

    Seriously, "it could have been worse" is a rationalization that could be used in pretty much any situation. What's the point? It wasn't bad enough to draw attention to here?

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  7. It was bad enough to draw attention to anywhere.
    (when I wrote the second post I was pressed for time, so "could have" should be "has been")
    And I'm sorry I mis-spelled Chernobyl. It's not an everyday word.

    Now, can anyone here tell me with a sraight face that this fouling up the gulf and subsequent incompetance, while very, very tragic, is accually worse than the truly 100% preventable defolliation of the Ukrainian countryside? Anyone?

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    1. No, I won't argue that one is worse than the other. I should have written "ONE of the worst man-made disasters of all time."

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