Violence can be prevented

Wednesday, 28 July 2010

BP is just the tip of the iceberg

However for some reason they seem to be exaggerating this disaster and ignoring the vast majority of other disasters. There is no effort to explain why this leak is going on so long and they seem to be claiming that it is the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every four days which makes no sense at all. If this well requires a pump to extract the oil they should just turn it off. If not what is causing all this oil to leak at such a rapid rate? Normal hydraulics wouldn’t do that and anyone who understands the basics of this should know this.

By exaggerating it and ignoring the other disasters they run the risk of manipulating the public when and only when it suits their purposes or losing the trust of the public even when there is a sincere threat and creating apathy.

They are doing a lot of reporting and virtually no rational investigating. They claimed they found oil off the east coast of Florida but it turned out to be from a shrimp boat that crashed so they dismissed it as irrelevant; what they rarely if ever point out is the fact that there are many more disasters that receive very little attention all over the world especially in the developing world. The disasters in the developing world get little or no attention here but they destroy millions of lives and leave them desperate and receptive to those with a grudge against the USA including terrorist organizations. The cumulative damage being done by the disasters being ignored is actually much worse than the exaggerations being reported by BP. This isn’t limited to BP it also includes other oil companies and other polluters of other sorts including the timber industry which is destroying the forests all over the world at a pace that is close to the destruction being done by the oil companies if not match it and it is also being ignored.

Another problem is the fact that they try to address the problem more like a public relations disaster than an environmental disaster. the Money they spend on ads telling the public they are addressing the problem hardly seems credible since it could be spent much more effectively if it went to the clean up process. They seem more concerned with convincing the public they’re solving the problem than actually doing it.

We need to rethink the way we do things or the planet will be destroyed. We need rapid development of conservation methods as well as much more reliability on wind solar and other safe forms of energy. This is a direct challenge to the capitalist ideology. The current power structure is putting society on a suicide track. There are people who know what the problem is and how to solve it but they don’t have the political power; there are people with the political power to solve the problems but the motivational structure set up for them in the short term is designed to prevent solutions. If this system isn’t changed there will be much worse environmental damage.

After typing in just a few words like oil spill, tanker explosion many more disasters turned up from the Google search engine and it is certainly still only a fraction of the damage being done. see the following:

In Democratic republic of Congo July 2010:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/democraticrepublicofcongo/7869749/Oil-tanker-explosion-kills-200-in-Congo.html

http://article.wn.com/view/2010/07/03/220_dead_in_oil_tanker_explosion/

In Nigeria July 2010:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/07/03/1251079/nigeria-overturned-gas-tanker.html

In Singapore May 2010:

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/oil-tanker-spill-reaches-singapore-coast

In Perth Australia 1991:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/22/world/burning-tanker-spills-oil-in-waters-off-perth.html

On Great Barrier Reef off coast of China April 2010;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/06/great-barrier-reef-disast_n_527359.html#s79068

In Corona California May 2010: