Limited Liability and Slow Violence
Ever seen a company name like “Acme Industrial LLC”? The LLC means “Limited Liability Company.” Per the arbiter of all definitions online, Wikipedia: “The primary characteristic an LLC shares with a corporation is limited liability…” and if you follow up on the definition of “limited liability” you find that this is “a concept whereby a person’s financial liability is limited to a fixed sum” regardless of the obligations incurred by the corporation of which they are an officer or shareholder.
When you see “Ltd” after the name of a corporation it means much the same thing: it’s a “Limited Liability Business Organisation.” “In a corporation [...] stockholders, directors and officers typically are not liable for their company’s debts and obligations. They are limited in liability to the amount they have invested in the corporation (eg: If $100 in stock was purchased, no more than $100 can be lost).” (footnote). And lately we’ve seen another expression of the limitation of liability (text at R of photo is a quote):
 |
Under federal law, compensation must be provided to local and state governments, businesses and residents who have been affected by this [the Deepwater Horizon] disaster, *but these damages are capped at only $75 million*.[emphasis mine]
Additionally, Transocean, which actually owned the Deepwater Horizon rig, has claimed that its liability is limited to just $27 million under the Limitation of Liability Act, passed 160 years ago. Under the law, a vessel owner can limit its liability to the value of the vessel and its freight. But this law was passed well before insurance companies began offering coverage to ocean vessels, and the drilling giant has already received a payout of $400 million from its insurance provider. By allowing this claim, Transocean could actually end up profiting from the spill. (footnote) [photo credit w/many thanks to Russ Nicholson who snapped this wonderfully appropriate sign at a BP gas station] |
OK, this is all fairly sleazy. But what has been coming into focus for me is a more general problem: this whole concept of limited liability. It is troubling me deeply. I hope it will start troubling a lot more people deeply. This is a crosspost from a thread on the BP catastrophe over at European Tribune. The thread discusses the various contributions of incompetence, greed, and corruption to the Deepwater Horizon disaster: the utter co-optation of the MMS (allegedly the watchdog and enforcer or rules), the company’s apparent contempt for industry-standard practises and (even weak) regulations, etc.
——————————————–
I’m thinking that a fundamental principle emerges here. Dangerous technologies — very dangerous technologies, in fact, WMD by any other name — should not be deployed in regions with corrupt and unstable governance. Unfortunately, there is no country on earth where we can really guarantee that government will remain incorruptible and stable.
F’rexample, the US is just one big company town at present: politicians bought and paid for, two-party oligopoly fully in place, regulatory agencies staffed by apparatchiks and ready to crucify or at least marginalise any whistleblower who dares to mention feral facts. Deploying WMD-scale technologies in such an environment is like handing an Uzi to a severely disturbed adolescent with a history of poor impulse control, bullying, and tantrums — and a sweet tooth such that he can be bribed to do anything with just a couple of chocolate chip cookies. (After all, the cost of the “safety cap” that BP didn’t install was what, half a million bucks? chump change to BP, but could they resist that little extra sugary money-hit?)
Much like Captain Renault in Casablanca, the White House is suddenly shocked, shocked to find that oil rigs can explode, destroying ecosystems and livelihoods. The Obama administration has backed away from its offshore oil expansion policy in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as the long-term environmental and economical consequences unfold in the Gulf States. Headlines are clamoring for the criminal investigations of BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and ultimately, the federal regulator, Mineral Management Services (MMS). Rather paradoxically, President Obama is using the oil spill to call for more nuclear power.
Yet, with the exception of a handful of insightful political cartoonists, the obvious parallel between the regulatory delinquency of MMS and that of its nuclear equivalent – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – and the potential for an equally catastrophic accident in the nuclear sector, has not been drawn. As with the MMS debacle, the NRC is gambling with inevitable disaster with the same spin of the wheel of misfortune and with potentially even higher stakes.
Investigations have already revealed that MMS had become too friendly and compliant toward the industry it was supposed to regulate. This hands-off approach proved to be a formula for inevitable disaster. Similarly, the NRC consistently puts the financial motives of the nuclear industry it is supposed to regulate ahead of public safety. In instance after instance, the NRC has chosen not to enforce its own regulations even in the face of repeated reactor safety violations, risking a serious reactor accident while leaving often high-risk safety problems to linger unresolved for decades.
The NRC acknowledges that the greatest hazard to a reactor comes from fire. Yet not one of the 104 currently operating reactors is in full compliance with critical federal fire safety regulations. The NRC has known this since 1992 when the majority of U.S. nuclear plants were found to have installed bogus fire barriers prone to fail in a significant fire. Rather than take prompt action, the NRC spent six years discussing the problem with industry, then issued corrective orders which it later discovered the industry had ignored, substituting them instead with less costly, unapproved and illegal measures [...] footnote
(read on for more depressing and familiar history typical of the corporate-friendly “regulatory” sham prevailing in N America — dysfunctioning merrily everywhere from phood to pharma to phuel and beyond)
I am starting to think of wind, solar, tidal etc as Appropriately Pessimistic Technologies, i.e. technologies that do not turn into WMD if they fall into the hands of incompetent and corrupt operators. I figure: assume the Mafia will end up running everything. Assume that the inbred, clueless aristos of the court of the Sun King get appointed to all the plummy jobs. Assume that all the directorships get handed out according to bribery and machine politics. Assume that GWB is not an isolated instance. (I mean, just listen to the BP talking heads. They can’t even come up with plausible lies.)
These people should not, repeat not, be allowed to run with scissors. They can’t do too much harm with a wind generator or a solar-Stirling tower; the worst it can do is fall over and hurt a few people, maybe destroy a building or two. But jeez, give them a coal fired plant to run, or 9 billion (yes, with a B) gallons of slurry “safely” contained on a steep hillside… and all of a sudden we have to trust them — a lot.
Webb’s concerns are not unfounded. Ten years ago, millions of gallons of toxic coal sludge broke through a similar impoundment at another Massey operation in eastern Kentucky. The worst environmental catastrophe in the US until the TVA coal ash pond disaster, the Martin County spill at the Massey site dumped over 300 million tons of toxic sludge into 100 miles of streams, contaminating the water supplies for 27,000 people, and wiping out 1.6. million fish.
Ever notice how “the worst environmental catastrophe” awards are getting closer and closer together in time? and how, like family size and longevity, the consequences of the last N “worst” disasters are still being felt even as the next N “new worst” disasters occur? The Exxon Valdez incident is now “so yesterday,” yet the bioregion we pissed all over on that occasion still hasn’t recovered.
Kinda like the increasing train wreck incidence in the life of an addict going rapidly downhill: the new low in “stupidest most self destructive thing I ever did” starts to happen yearly, then monthly, then…
So in light of all this (not to mention most of the rest of human history) I am considering this new theory of appropriate technology. Appropriate technology is by definition technology that will not have biome-destroying, life-altering, long-term-disastrous-consequences results even if/when applied and administered by slovens, chancers, moral cowards, bandits, etc. Any technology that absolutely requires people of the highest principle, discipline and intelligence to keep it from wreaking havoc and mass destruction is, well… Doomed(TM). ‘Cos humans are neither robots nor angels — even if one generation of us is relatively upright, responsible and sober, we can’t guarantee that our kids won’t be fops, wastrels, gamblers and drunkards. Giving them a collection of Uzis for their 18th birthday doesn’t sound like such a great idea to me.
Now I’m going to add another meme to the toolbox for conceptualising this kind of event: Slow Violence.
We are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico slow violence. Writer Rob Nixon coined the phrase, which he acknowledges as seemingly oxymoronic, to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”
Would anyone argue that the exploits of oil professionals in the Gulf haven’t caused deadly outcomes that continue to sprawl spatially and temporally? If the implications of the words Nixon uses to help us understand his concept were not utterly devastating, I’d relish their richness: “attritional calamities” with “deferred consequences and casualties;” “dispersed repercussions” that “pose formidable imaginative difficulties.” The explosion, fire, and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon was a small spectacle and only the initial phase of a protracted series of events with severe ramifications.
Slow Violence — distributed widely, with delayed and diffuse injuries — is a form of harm and risk that our ideas of justice have a hard time dealing with. It is not the identifiable individual fist in the identifiable individual face, with witnesses. It is in fact an eminently deniable violence, and hence very attractive to those who want to reap unreasonable profits by injuring others, yet duck the risks and consequences of banditry (accountability, loss of reputation, possibly reprisals or punishment).
Environmental crime is slow violence. The consequences can endure for generations — in some cases for centuries. The deployment of DU munitions in the Balkans and Iraq was slow violence. [Landmines are a shorter-term, half-way version of slow violence: they have delayed consequences but they are still visible and attributable to their source by the victims, even if the aggressor has "moved on" and is now thinking about more important things like the Olympics or the latest celebrity divorce.]
Anyway, we have difficulty understanding slow violence, genuine difficulty assessing it (it took almost 25 years of epidemiological and actuarial data collection and analysis to produce the most recent estimate of the true cost of the Chernobyl event in premature mortality). Not only does each act of slow violence have multigenerational impact, but the process of measuring and understanding the impact is likewise delayed, and thus (this is important) so is the attribution of responsibility.
How can a “limited liability” corporation be permitted to engage in activities which, if they go wrong, can have nearly-incalculable multigenerational costs — costs whose assessment, if even feasible, may take longer than the remaining lifetimes of those responsible? Engaging in high stakes gambling with other people’s lives (decades’ worth of their lives) should carry high stakes for the gambler as well — not “limited liability”. One strike, you’re toast. If CEOs knew that one major disaster would spell the end of their company, the end of their careers, they might be much more cautious about cutting corners to minimise chump-change expenses. With risible liability caps and the equivalent of extraterritoriality or dip immunity for all corporate pseudo-persons, what we have established is a grotesque game of “moral hazard” in which suicidally (or murderously) risky behaviour is encouraged and rewarded.
If more caution were exercised, we’d all have to pay more for certain amenities and commodities whose production involves high-stakes gambling with the lives and fortunes of thousands or millions of innocent bystanders. But, ummm… isn’t that how it should be?
Stan:
“like handing an Uzi to a severely disturbed adolescent with a history of poor impulse control, bullying, and tantrums”
!!!!
7 June 2010, 4:50 amCurt:
Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore! While I think that I could have said it better myself you did such a good job that I do not have to. Many smart people having been saying for a long time that at least some of the people at the top of any Ltd. should have unlimited liability. Sadly socialist countries did not have an environmental record that was very good either. So, I wonder was the decision not to have this safety device made by someone at the highest levels of the company or was it made by a mid level manager?
7 June 2010, 7:04 amRichard:
I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the notion of limited liability. I suppsoe it’s not a bad idea, in the limited area of financial liability for a failed venture. But when you’re getting into the ability to technologically impact the lives of others, that’s a different story.
Apparently during the colonial/revolutionary period, companies could be incorporated for only limited periods of time–say, the length of time it took to build a bridge, if that was the project.
7 June 2010, 2:21 pmm.c.:
The Exxon Valdex was a single-hulled tanker. Had it been double-hulled(if I were in charge all tankers would be), there might have only been minimal leakage of crude, even though it was a rocky shoreline.
7 June 2010, 2:45 pm(Boer) Tom:
You might want to have a look at the Suncore dam on the Athabasca river (Alberta – it leaks if memory serves about 1.6 million litres a day, hence the dead fish and destroyed Athabasca lake), so you are looking at a roughly equivalent dump every fifteen years, from one tailings pond alone. Fort Chipewyan is dying from cancer. Then you might want to look at the mines (especially gold) in Yukon and NWT – I’ve heard that the dead zones around these mines are often measured in integer multiples of kilometers..
7 June 2010, 6:01 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I am anti-violence and certainly against torture. Academically-speaking, seeing as how torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” are legal, and seeing as how no one seems to be able/willing to answer some very pertinent questions here, it is as if we actually *do* have some version of the “ticking time bomb” straw man argument that was held up for so long as the reason to retain the policy.
So, much as I would oppose such a scenario on principle, do you suppose if the US gov’t (or perhaps some kind of legitimate authority) were to waterboard Dick Cheney with oil-infused water from the Gulf until he could say how Halliburton was going to make this right, that he would at least be able to appreciate the irony?
8 June 2010, 10:43 amDeAnander:
Along with limited liability for corporations goes unlimited hubris and arrogance in Enclosure.
footnote
Monsanto is apparently claiming that if livestock is fed with feed containing GMO commodity soy/corn patented by Monsanto, the patent “transfers” into the flesh of the animal — presumably, whether or not the farmer was aware that the feed contained Monsanto’s patented GMOs: after all, they bully and prosecute farmers whose fields are contaminated with Monsanto-engineered GMO canola, soya, etc.
This bears more resemblance to a mana (or taint) kapu than it does to any reasonable jurisprudence. Monsanto has come up with the idea that (a) life can be patented, (b) life processes are transformative, (c) therefore Monsanto’s patent persists across all transformations of the patented life. The irony of this claim is kinda stunning — from the same company that (wrongly) claimed repeatedly that their GMO strains could not possibly “get loose” and invade non-GMO biomes. Apparently GMO-ness is persistent, pervasive, and transformative in the intellectual property sense, but perfectly and narrowly bounded in the physical sense. Corporate property rights are unlimited, corporate liability is limited.
Sounds like the definition of “ruling class” to me.
The implications are insane, absurd — scary. After all, 300 mio Americans have been eating Monsanto-engineered GMO feedstock in processed food for over a decade now. Are all those people now the property of Monsanto?
9 June 2010, 1:41 amStan:
That seems a perfect legal argument to me. If only Monsanto could somehow “tag” the molecules that migrate into the human body, over a period of a few years, a simple test, say, spectroanalysis of a hair, could demonstrate that each of us is the intellectual property of Monsanto.
You ought to expand this thesis for publication… a Modest Proposal, defending the molecular annexation of human beings.
9 June 2010, 6:51 amStan:
Nuculer power. The answer to our problems.
9 June 2010, 7:00 amCurt:
That nuclear power link was damned interesting. I wonder can nuclear power plants be made safer? I suspect not because I suspect that if they could have been made safer they would have been made safer. But then again maybe profits were put before safety. Someone decided that they were safe enough. Someone signed off on it and there you have it. I will now give Nuclear Power a really really big endorsement……of sorts. It seems smarter than bio diesel. Would anyone like to be my agent and try to get an electrical utility company to sign an advertising contract with me for my endorsement.
9 June 2010, 12:01 pmaskod:
Safety in nuclear power is – imho – directly related to oversight and perpetual improvements. Good oversight can catch an organisation downgrading security in time. Problem is that career paths tend to make oversight and industry co-dependent, making oversight less interested in blowing the whistle.
And in the end, nuclear power is like buildings made out of glass. Glass is a strong material, and as long as it works it is perfectly fine, but when it breaks it breaks dramatically. And it would appear that we as humans are bad at handling such risk/benefit calculations, tending to average a low risk to zero. So I do not think you should build buildings out of glass, and neither should we dabble in nuclear power.
11 June 2010, 7:42 amDeAnander:
@askod: yep — people who fumble with stones should not live in glass houses. nice analogy and far more succinct than my own ramble
11 June 2010, 10:38 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I like Askod’s way of putting it. There’s a TED talk making the rounds right now that deals with “nukuler” power. It’s like, all the theoretical stuff is awesome, but we don’t live in a theoretical world.
One day, I’ll be able to support all manner of things – nuclear, GMO’s, nanobots, RFID chips – but that day will not come before we have a consensus-based society. When we’re all ok with the risks, I’d call that oversight. Until then, sorry, hierarchy, you’ve earned scant little trust.
Speaking of oversight, is anyone aware of any citizen/community-based nuclear oversight and inspection organizing that’s been successful?
11 June 2010, 10:53 amCurt:
Askod,
11 June 2010, 1:36 pmVery well symbolically stated. Germany decided several years ago to get out of the nuclear power business in 20 or 25 years. Then when the FDP became the new CDU coalition partner I think that deadline has been pushed back.
Yet France is getting even more heavily involved in nuclear power. At least that was the last that I heard a while back. Being down wind from France much of the time Germany is forced to bear an externality of the French Decision. I think that Germany should be compensated by French power companies for bearing this risk.
Let it be said. Let it be written. Let it be done.
DeAnander:
Financial compensation for risk imposition — not just in “damages” after an incident, but all along — is one way (in the money-paradigm) to make risk-inflicters “pay the price” of the risks they inflict on others willynilly. Of course, it would be hotly contested by very wealthy and powerful people, and has approximately a snowball’s chance of becoming law. Because the imposition of risks on others (aka externalisation of costs) is what makes enormous profits possible in the first place… ah, limited liability, how sweet the sound, that saved so many wretches like BP.
11 June 2010, 2:43 pmHenry:
“In America today you can murder land [insert ocean] for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.” ~Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971
“They [BP] want to hide the body”~ Ian McDonald, FSU oceanographer
Why do Americans think BP is still quoting the ridiculous figure of 5,000 barrels a day, when conservative analysis of satellite imagery indicates that the surface oil alone (10,000+ square miles, May 18th) requires a release rate of at least 26,000 barrels or 109,000 gallons a day? To cover-up the dagger it shoved into the belly of the Earth, and then through their intentional disregard for safety protocols in the name of profit, turned in a circle to release a leviathan of toxic crude into the world’s oceans.
More:
http://oilspilltruth.wordpress.com/
12 June 2010, 2:04 pmHenry:
The Blowout, parts 1 and 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLJHTTOSkpg&feature=player_embedded#!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skDR0h2EsyU&feature=player_embedded
12 June 2010, 2:08 pmHenry:
The Blowout, Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxFtnQdKwXk&feature=related,
12 June 2010, 2:56 pmCurt:
If I were to write that BP and Trans Ocean and Haliburton should be nationalized because they are incapable of paying the for the damage that they caused would that be a comment that would need to wait for moderation? My thinking is that after a fair trial they would owe the American people and probably also the people of Cuba and Mexico more money than they could ever hope to repay. Therefore the people of those countries would be in fact the right full owners of these companies. So the best way to determine what percent of these companies to be owned by each country would be to divide them up by population of the US states that border the Gulf, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas with the Mexican provinces that border the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and the country of Cuba. I suspect that would make the US government acting in trust for the American people of the Gulf states the majority owner but it would have to share I suspect about 5% of its proceeds with Cuba and also a chunk with Mexico. Jamaica may also have to be included in this program if the oil damages their fishing and tourism industries. So let it be written. So let it be wread. So let it be won(one).org
13 June 2010, 4:16 pmMichael Anderson:
A couple of links, on Afghanistan’s “newly discovered” mineral and Iron ore deposits:
http://communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/reality/archive/2010/06/14/us-knew-about-afghan-mineral-bonanza-in-2007.aspx
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?th&emc=th
This ain’t slow violence at all…I always wondered why we were so interested in Afghanistan—-it seems like, given the speed of communications and transport, that the old “strategic position” argument was losing its luster. Now it all makes perfect sense. And the Russians found it first.
14 June 2010, 12:18 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I haven’t been real impressed with the way the US gubbermint has acted in trust for the American people over the fruits of our own labor. My expectations would be that much less for the fruits of BP’s planet-raping.
Who owns BP and who owns the US? It’s like my left hand swatting my right hand for offending some “underling”, then transferring my savings account to my checking account as “punishment.” Then my right foot can cry “it’s a communist conspiracy!” and my left foot can go “you’re racist!”
14 June 2010, 3:51 pmHenry:
Gulf Oil Spill “Could Go on Years and Years” …
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, June 11, 2010
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19660
14 June 2010, 4:21 pmMichael Anderson:
Oops…excuse me…the British and French, too (from FP–more on site):
By John Stuart Blackton
Best Defense Afghan natural resources editor
The ” discovery” of Afghanistan’s minerals will sound pretty silly to old timers. When I was living in Kabul in the early 1970′s the USG, the Russians, the World Bank, the UN and others were all highly focused on the wide range of Afghan mineral deposts. The Russian geological service was all over the North in the 60′s and 70′s.
Cheap ways of moving the ore to ocean ports has always been the limiting factor. The Russians were looking at a northern rail corridor.
Take a look at this little bibliography of Afghan mineral assessments. This one is mostly Russian, but pre-dates the DoD/USG “discovery” period by 30 years. In my day we did a joint USG/Iranian study of a potential rail line from Afghanistan to several of the Iranian rail hubs. This was predicated on mineral exploitation in a way that would thwart the Russian’s northern rail corridor plans.
In the early 70′s the USG had an old FDR New-Deal planner/economist/brains-truster – Bob Nathan – working with the Afghan Ministry of Plan to work out a fifty year mineral exploitation program. When the Russians took over they picked up Bob’s plans and extended them. So this is anything but a “new discovery”.
Low cost, long haul transport infrastructure remains the constraint. The Louis Berger “four inches of asphalt on the old Ring Road” doesn’t do it.
Bibliography
Drummond, C. (1841) On the mines and mineral resources of Northern Afghanistan. Journal of the Asiat. Society Bengal, Calcutta, 1841, 10: 74-93.
Furon, R. (1924) Les ressources minières de l’Afghanistan. Rev. Sci, Paris, 1924: 62: 313.
14 June 2010, 5:10 pmHenry:
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (1) is the worst environmental disaster in US history. But it’s a catastrophe of the creeping, cumulative kind, composed of images familiar from earlier ecocides. How to get a grip on its width and breadth? Obviously: a map. Ingeniously: a map of the area affected by the oil spill transposed on your geographic location of choice – your home, for optimum shock effect.
Coming Soon to a Map Near You: the Gulf Spill
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/467-coming-soon-to-a-map-near-you-the-gulf-spill/
15 June 2010, 11:45 amDeAnander:
Oh. My. Gawd.
Scientists Revise Estimate of Flow Rate of Oil Volcano
One writer has said this is an Exxon Valdez every 4 days.
Iatrogenesis.
In other words, there is panic and confusion — as there always is when a bunch of overexcited humans try to deal with a genuine disaster. Panic, confusion, desperate attempts at denial and obfuscation which lead to inexcusable delays in confronting the real magnitude of the problem.
A pattern emerges in recent decades: the “best estimates” of the situation are repeatedly shown, as the science advances, to be overly optimistic. Glaciers melting faster than previously thought. Tipping point possibly far closer than previously thought. “Perfectly safe” chemical compound now revealed to have serious pathogenic effects. And now, catastrophic release of pressurised deep-field oil proceeding far faster than previously thought.
How many times can they tell us “it’s all right, it’s under control” when it’s patently not… and still be believed?
16 June 2010, 12:37 amHenry:
See the oil drum for updates on the BP disaster:
http://www.theoildrum.com/
16 June 2010, 7:58 pmHenry:
See reader doug r’s lengthy and very sobering comment of June 13 at
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967
———————————-
Excerpt:
What does this mean?
It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot…the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?…the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?…it doesn’t leak so bad, you close the nozzle?…it leaks real bad,
same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off…or tried to anyway…but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks “down hole”. I’m sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed…because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.
Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed…..and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.
16 June 2010, 11:03 pmHenry:
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (Global Century Series) [Paperback]
J. R. McNeill (Author), John Robert McNeill (Author), Paul Kennedy (Author)
Amazon.com Review
J.R. McNeill, a professor of history at Georgetown University, visits the annals of the past century only to return to the present with bad news: in that 100-year span, he writes, the industrialized and developing nations of the world have wrought damage to nearly every part of the globe. That much seems obvious to even the most casual reader, but what emerges, and forcefully, from McNeill’s pages is just how extensive that damage has been. For example, he writes, “soil degradation in one form or another now affects one-third of the world’s land surface,” larger by far than the world’s cultivated areas. Things are worse in some places than in others; McNeill observes that Africa is “the only continent where food production per capita declined after 1960,” due to the loss of productive soil. McNeill’s litany continues: the air in most of the world’s cities is perilously unhealthy; the drinking water across much of the planet is growing ever more polluted; the human species is increasingly locked “in a rigid and uneasy bond with modern agriculture,” which trades the promise of abundant food for the use of carcinogenic pesticides and fossil fuels.
The environmental changes of the last century, McNeill closes by saying, are on an unprecedented scale, so much so that we can scarcely begin to fathom their implications. We can, however, start to think about them, and McNeill’s book is a helpful primer. –Gregory McNamee –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
17 June 2010, 5:56 pmFrom Publishers Weekly
Our profligate, fossil fuel-based civilization is ecologically unsustainable and creates perpetual environmental disturbance, says Georgetown University history professor McNeill, but he remains undecided as to whether humanity has entered a genuine, full-blown ecological crisis. Nevertheless, the evidence he presents in this comprehensive, balanced survey is alarming. Soil degradation now affects one-third of earth’s land surface, though intensive fertilizer use and genetic engineering of crops have masked the ill effects. From Mexico City to Calcutta, from China to Africa, megacities choke on air pollution as economic development takes priority over other concerns. Acid rain has decimated lake and river life, crops and forests across Europe and North America. International in scope, McNeill’s kaleidoscopic, textbookish history hops from Soviet phosphate mining in the Arctic to deforestation by white settlers in southern Africa, documenting the pollution of oceans and seas; the unchecked “harvesting” of fish and whales; environmentally influenced, disease-producing shifts in human-microbe relations; disruptive invasions by new species (sea lampreys in the Great Lakes, rabbits in Australia); and the massive impact on ecosystems resulting from urbanization, population growth, wars, oil spills, nuclear power accidents. McNeill’s study underscores the mixed consequences of environmental and political decision making. For example, the Green Revolution fed additional millions, but it also promoted monoculture and strengthened landed elites in Asia and Latin America. The book closes with a capsule history of the environmental movement, gauging its successes and influence. This scientifically informed survey makes a useful resource for environmentalists, scholars, globalists, biologists, policy makers and concerned readers. 40 photos and 15 maps not seen by PW. (Apr.)
Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Some folks are saying that the “slow violence” could suddenly accelerate:
… the state most exposed to the fury of a supersonic wave towering 150 to 200 feet or more is Florida. The Sunshine State only averages about 100 feet above sea level with much of the coastline and lowlands and swamps near zero elevation. A supersonic tsunami would literally sweep away everything from Miami to the panhandle in a matter of minutes. Loss of human life would be virtually instantaneous and measured in the millions.
More at: http://www.helium.com/items/1864136-how-the-ultimate-bp-gulf-disaster-could-kill-millions
And a more sinister implication:
Halliburton, the party most implicated in causing and maintaining the BP false flag oil spill operation, is also the contracting party for FEMA camps where evacuees from the benzene fumes and other toxic rains and poisons along the Gulf and eastern coasts of the U.S. may be sent. If this does not seem realistic, evacuees from hurricane Katrina, a prior false flag environmental war attack on New Orleans are still living in FEMA camps at this time.
More at: http://www.examiner.com/x-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner~y2010m6d13-Evidence-BP-oil-spill-is-disaster-capitalism-by-criminal-elite-to-depopulate-and-stop-ET-disclosure
I’m not saying this stuff is true, I’m just saying it’s less disproven than the lies that constantly stream from the MSM.
25 June 2010, 10:22 am