Question: When an alcoholic leaves a bar, gets behind the wheel and drunkenly drives into his third or fourth wreck, do you blame the bartender who served the drinks or the alcoholic who drank them? Now answer this: When a society addicted to greater and greater fossil fuel use experiences what may amount to the largest oil spill in world history -- after a growing number of other fossil fuel catastrophes -- do you blame the oil company that drilled for the oil or the society that uses it?
I mean, I get it. If you're anything like me, you're pissed as hell at BP, the company whose deep-water oil well continues to gush some 60,000 barrels of oil a day, nobody knows exactly how much, into the Gulf of Mexico -- and the infuriatingly feeble attempts to clean it up, much less plug the hole. You're probably pissed, too, at the United States Department of the Interior who gave BP (and many other oil companies, by the way) permission to drill in hazardous conditions without a reliable safety plan.
But after you dial your Senator -- as you should -- and rant about our country getting off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy, it's worth taking a good, hard look at whether the bartender, as it were, deserves all of the blame.
Because again, if you're anything like me, even though it's 90 degrees outside, you're currently sitting in a home or office where the air conditioning is cranked so high that your toes are too cold for your flip-flops. Most of that energy comes from, you guessed it, a fossil fuel called coal. Or, perhaps, as I used to, you run your car engine for four hours every week and go nowhere while you protect your curbside parking space in a city that has one of the world's most accessible and efficient transit systems. The fuel for that, of course, starts as crude oil. Or maybe your purchases, manufactured with the oomph of fossil fuels, burst out of your closets to the point that you rent a storage unit so full of crap that you're no longer sure what's in it.
We are, in other words, more than a little bit like that alcoholic who's mad at the bartender for serving him the drinks that he himself ordered. We Americans are slugging down the energy cocktails. Unless we want more and more calamities like in the Gulf, we have to own up to our energy addiction. It's step one in the 12-step road to recovery.
We in the United States drive 20 times more miles a year than the Mexicans and twice as many as the Japanese. We use 10 times more electricity per person than the Egyptians and twice as much as the Saudis. To power this energy thirst, we each, on average, consume 10 times more oil per person than the Chinese and twice as much as the Germans. We burn seven times more coal per person than the Indians and three times more than the Brits. For all the talk of China's climate emissions, each American still emits four times more greenhouse gas than each Chinese.
Meanwhile, we have to face up to the fact that the oil we so badly crave isn't exactly bubbling up out of the ground the way it used to in states like Oklahoma and Texas. There was a day when we could scoop the stuff up with a saucepan, and oil rigs were rickety old wooden affairs. Now, the goop is so scarce that oil companies must spend billions to build potentially dangerous, deep-water wells that drill a mile under our oceans. It used to take one barrel of oil to power the harvesting of 100 barrels. Now, you have to burn an entire barrel of oil just to get 11. Simply put, worldwide, the growth in demand for oil is far outstripping growth in its dwindling supply.
This is to say nothing of coal, where we get so much of our electricity. The extraction of the black stuff from the earth is an arcane and dangerous process, and burning it pumps thousands of tons of toxins and greenhouse gases into our air.
All of which means it's getting harder and harder to safely satisfy our energy addiction. We will have to drill in deeper and deeper water and face up to worse and worse catastrophes. The BP oil spill is just the beginning, or at least just the middle. Because let's not forget that we have thousands of troops in the Middle East who probably wouldn't be there if not for oil. High gas prices in 2008, many believe, helped push the American economy into recession. And of course, our dependence on fossil fuels is causing an irreversible change in planetary climate that will bring immense human suffering.
Typically, our knee-jerk is to blame the greedy corporations and do-nothing politicians. But how much more could be accomplished if each American accepted that he or she plays a part in the problem and therefore could contribute to the solution?
A lot more. That is the line of reasoning that led me, back in late 2006, to take the moniker "No Impact Man" and to spend a year -- chronicled in a book and film -- using as little energy as possible in the middle of New York City. I found that I'd joined a movement of Americans searching for ways to live less energy-intensive lives. Since then, I've been called an environmentalist, an extremist and an activist. But actually, I'm just a former writer of history books. A typical New York media professional who couldn't take blaming the bartender anymore.
What I discovered on my journey is that there are 200,000 New Yorkers who don't even use the energy of mass transit and commute back and forth to work each day by bike -- getting their exercise in the meantime. Another half a million New Yorkers shop for food from city farmers' markets each week, saving the fossil fuels associated with the 1,500 mile journey industrially-produced food typically makes from farm to plate while getting food that's actually good for them.
Some cut their flying by video-conferencing or taking one two-week vacation instead of two one-week vacations. Others use fans instead of air-conditioners or drink tap water instead of bottled. Some have committed to buying only secondhand. Others have given up beef. The list, of course, goes on and on.
What these people who take responsibility for energy consumption have discovered is that they get less-expensive, healthier lives in return. And they believe the benefits of their own lifestyle changes are a mini-version of what could happen to our culture. A country that relies less on fossil fuels and more on domestically-produced renewable energy keeps its money and its soldiers at home. It gets a renewable technology industry that provides jobs. It gets air without chemicals burned into it. And it gets beaches and oceans that aren't filled with toxic sludge.
I know what you're thinking because I've thought it, too. I'd like to change my life and help, but so far, I haven't really been affected. I feel sorry for the Gulf Coast folks, but that's not me.
It will be. Right now, to satisfy our energy addictions, politicians and corporations are considering proposals for as many as 50,000 natural gas wells right in the middle of New York City's watershed. In a process, called "fracking," they propose to send a high-pressure mixture of water and extremely toxic chemicals into the ground to cause mini-earthquakes to release the hard-to-get natural gas.
Environmentalists have held them off thus far, but what happens when our energy yearnings makes them yield? What happens if fracking's toxic mixtures end up in the aquifer that supplies 8 million New Yorkers with drinking water?
Do we want to get what we've always got? Are we willing to accept the consequences of our energy addictions? Or do we want something better? More to the point, are you personally willing to accept some of the blame -- alongside the bartender -- and help us break our energy habit? If so, I'll see you in the bike lane.
Beavan is author of No Impact Man and director of NoImpactProject.org, which helps people choose lifestyles that are better for them and better for the planet.
Cross-posted from the New York Daily News.
Laura Penny: The Cheapness That Is Not: Thoughts on the BP Spill
Why did BP build a well it cannot fix? Because it was "cheaper" for them to do so.
If we are ever going to break this cycle we have to get mad. The fossil fuel industry has for three decades engaged in a well-orchestrated disinformation campaign aimed at quashing science and engendering inaction on global warming. They manufactured fake controversies around the solid science of global warming with phoney experts and ethically-challenged "scientists" turned ideologues. They have bought off one political party entirely (and the other one partly), and have exerted their influence over the mainstream media to ensure that honest information never reaches most of the public.
Strike a blow against the fossil fuel lobby and walk or bike. Stop saying "we're all at fault" and helplessly sitting on your hands, America. Its time to get mad and make some changes!
"Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even BEFORE taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption.
He permitted it to RUBBER-STAMP dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years.
He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to LOWBALL the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez."
Okay, OBAMA didn't exactly go "missing", he WENT GOLFING.
Several times in the first weeks of the OIL explosion.
Don Lemon on CNN appropriately made the comment that "it just was not the right thing to do".
We vote about issues where we have a vested interest. It's hard to get worked up over something one hasn't adopted as part of one's worldview. It's easy to look at one's circumstances and believe that nothing can be done. The more one reads up or watches environmental programming, the more one realizes that EVERYONE can do "something." For example, did you know that those re-useable shopping bags available at most grocery stores now are made from fabric created from 100% recycled soda bottles?
So, just changing to using them causes a ripple affect of benefits from having stronger nearly non-tearable bags that don't leave your groceries on the sidewalk to helping the recycling industry to keeping one more bag out of the landfill.
http://www.politicalwild.com/2010/07/84-days-of-disgrace-in-gulf-and-2020.html
Our government is dysfunctional and bought off and thanks to their criminality we are left with guilty gestures of self denial over our "addiction". I have literally, over the past 40 years, read a 100 articles like this one blaming the victims and pretending that we can, through individual action, change our collective economy.
Obviously the corporations love this kind of individualistic thinking - divide/conquer - since the only possible way out of our enslavement to them is ORGANIZED resistance - forget the personal guilt and join up with the political resistance - Greenpeace, Move On, whatever - and press for systemic change.
If it is everyone's fault it is no one's fault. The problem needs to be brought to human scale and needs a target of direct outrage for people to feel that they can act to address it.
1) You say "forget personal guilt" and "individual action" and instead recommend "political resistance". Why not do both? Individual conservation action won't do any harm, and will likely do a lot of good.
2) I can't help noticing that your recommended course of action conveniently avoids the need for personal sacrifice. Read the article: Our per-capita energy consumption dwarfs that of any other country. It would be extremely meaningful if a lot of people traded in their car for a bike, or scaled back their meat consumption, or turned down the AC.
Finally - when you say "systemic change" what do you mean? What kind of change would you have me press for?
As for individual action/sacrifice I agree that it might not do any harm (I personally have a pretty small carbon footprint and have sacrificed plenty) except that individual action often sets people apart and just leaves the "righteous" ones feeling superior. What we really desperately need to see is that we are in a life and death struggle between the "little" people (all those who gross under say 250,000 all the way to the homeless) and our corporate "masters" (R's and D's).
They are more than willing to throw us off the sinking ship and retreat to their personal getaways with their private security forces. Austerity and homelessness what do they care?
As for systemic change I would first find local folks who are into cooperative worker owned businesses. I'd divest any investment in large corporations/banks and look to invest locally. Check out Habitat for Humanity and forget about taking money in interest. Get involved in the movement to strip corporations of their personhood. Just for starters.
There are no victims - only volunteers!
The Nissan Leaf electric car will be out this fall, as well as the Chevy Volt. Lots and lots more are coming in the next few years.
A recent study found that the amount of wind power that is feasible, not theoretically possible, but actually feasible, is enough to generate all the worlds power 30 times over. Add in solar, hydro, and other forms of renewable, and there is no reason we have to keep burning coal.
Let's do away with oil and coal. Kick the fossil fuel habit. It can be done.
Holding the perpetrators of the crime accountable is VITAL.
Is BP the only perpetrator of this ATROCITY? No.
Was this President responsible for rubber-stamping the Deepwater rig? Yes.
Do we all contribute to oil consumption? Yes.
Collectively, will the people ever be able to accomplish what OUR government with OUR taxpayer money, can accomplish to provide oversight? No.
Saying no to plastic bags and driving less will NEVER equal what OUR government can and is obligated to do.
This President rubber-stamped the rig, he failed to END offshore drilling as he promised in his campaign and then he went MISSING when the OIL rig exploded.
WE must hold our elected officials responsible for representing US, not the OIL companies.
Have we asked for petroleum in our shampoos, medicines, food??? I don't think so.
Petroleum is used and hidden in countless items. It is used by BIG AG in pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Where are the subsidies for ORGANIC farms?
Let's not put ALL the blame on ourselves when we MUST DEMAND that our taxpayer money is used to utilize the many alternatives to OIL.
If the DEMS refuse, then I REFUSE TO VOTE DEMOCRAT starting with November 2010 elections.
But I think it was the Bush admin that rubber stamped letting the oil companies do whatever they wanted. It wasn't until Deep Water that most of us realized how much the Bush Admin had let them get away with.
Do you not think Obama's first year is a learning experience? What Pres comes into office and automatically knows everything about everything?
But it wasn't Obama who went MISSING when the rig exploded. It was the former vice pres who was all over the media daily criticizing EVRYTHING Obama did. That was until the rig exploded (A mess he is very interwoven in) and then he DID GO MISSING. Nobody's heard a peep from him since that day (thank God).
Since he thought it was a good idea for the Oil Comps to self-regulate don't you think he should come out of the shadows and tell us why, or how this mess will be cleaned up, or what a better energy source is, or how we get the Govt to FORCE better energy sources upon us?
READ: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/111965
"Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even BEFORE taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption.
He permitted it to RUBBER-STAMP dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years.
He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to LOWBALL the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez."
Okay, OBAMA didn't exactly go "missing", he WENT GOLFING.
Several times in the first weeks of the OIL explosion.
Don Lemon on CNN appropriately made the comment that "it just was not the right thing to do".
No you haven't asked for them, but you continue to use them because you want the cheap and easy stuff. When you eat maccas you are saying I want factory farmed, GM grain with piles of herbicides and pesticides and rainforest destructition on the side. Do you refuse to buy shampoos with petrochemicals? Do you reach for the pain killer first or look to the cause of your problem? It's all supply and demand. If you, like Colin, say no to petroleum derived products and then thousands followed by millions do to then there will be no need/profit to drill for oil.
The total domination of our product availability by the oil industry is traceable throughout the culture in EVERYTHING we use in daily life. Since I am into textiles, I noticed it earliest in the fact that it takes concerted effort nowadays to find any textiles or textile products that are made of natural fibers. And the clothes on your back or the bedding you sleep on is just one area of daily living now dominated by oil.
I compliment the author -- healthy blogger that he is -- for his enthusiasm about biking. The only way I can see a majority of Americans getting on bikes is this: If they first choose living within biking distance of their destinations (a choice that relies on mixed housing amongst social classes and adherence to in-filling as opposed to urban sprawl) and if they can find thoroughfares suitable to bike on safely (this like housing development, is also in the control of larger entities and forces beyond the individual).
Switching to bikes is given significance in this piece, but please note that the roads are STILL made of ASPHALT, costing communities in excess of $1 million per mile to resurface.
Unplugging from oil is harder than acknowledged in this blog. One needs to get involved in local government processes too.
We must really quit blaming ourselves for the disasters we face now and the greater ones we will face in the future when the oil escapes in really deep water and really cold places like the Arctic Sea. Good luck to your grand kids. "Say Good night, Dick."
We have, in my considered and well informed opinion, already booted the pooch.
Rant to your Congressman about "renewable" energy? How about ranting to them about providing birth control options and education for all the world's inhabitants.
Not one problem facing humanity wouldn't be eased with lowered population, but this gets almost NO consideration by most commentators...
The chaos we have inserted into the systems that regulate our planet's climate, and other systems, means they are already beyond "repair" regardless of what cockamamie "geo-engineering" so called solution one can muster.
What do I mean?
The processes we've already disrupted will conspire to preclude viability for human life, no matter what we do to moderate those effects. And, the timeline for our demise, as a specie, is in decades, not many 100's or thousands of years...
Humanity is already Dead Folk Walking.
The truly ironic part is we'll be able to document and argue about it all the way to Armageddon.
My Solution: Not having Children is the biggest environmental good one can provide the planet, and which can protect the portion of life that is not human from going extinct...as we kill off hundreds of species every day...
www.vhemt.org = Voluntary Human Extinction - it is the ONLY MORAL CHOICE.
Some of us are not that addicted to oil at all, but we live in dysfunctional families dominated by addicts.
I known many people who drive places that they could easily bike, take public transport or even walk. That's discretionary energy spending.
You're right that practically no-one in modern America can live an oil-free existence. But that doesn't need to be the goal. Let's start by bringing our per-capita consumption in line with Europe.
In a word, "yes."
'Nuff said?