Catch 22

I’ve said it a couple of times now, but I’d like to go into more detail on what I mean by the fact that finding more oil is a catch 22 situation.

Well, for one thing, this culture is not only responsible for climate change through altering the atmosphere, we also chop down vast areas of ancient forests, areas which are essential for our life, but more importantly areas which are home to vast arrays of non-human life. An area the size of Wales disappears forever from the Amazon each year for example. Policy made in the US and in Europe ensures that this destruction will continue and the economic model we operate will ensure the destruction grows each year.

Not only that but this culture is also responsible for massive dead zones in the ocean. Partly through the actions of drag net fishing and partly due to vast numbers of plastic bags and packaging circulating round and round. These dead zones are giant and they are persistent. It’s rarely reported on, for how pressing and important it is, but they’re out there.

We dig up massive piles of crap to get at the minerals we want. We leave these massive piles of crap, called tailings, sitting around so the heavy metals in them have plenty of time to wash out and pollute rivers and so on. Our economic model ensures we dig up ever increasing amounts of minerals and leave ever bigger piles of crap. The companies which own mines often promise to bury the tailings back in the mines when they are done excavating, yet this rarely happens. Never happens is probably closer to the mark, but I don’t know how I’d go about proving it and someone would almost certainly point out one mine which had in the whole of human history, and then wouldn’t my face be red!

We are directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of over 200 species a day and are racing to an extermination level of 50% by 2050. Since this is an official figure it’s probably horribly conservative and we are probably looking at a figure closer to 60% by 2025. Whichever it is, what gives us the right to kill so much bio-diversity? Who do we think we are? We didn’t know the effects of a McDonalds diet on an individual before Morgan Spurlock did his documentary Super Size Me. Most nutritionists knew that a McDonalds diet wasn’t good for you, but no one knew just how bad for you it could be. All three of the GPs Morgan goes to before he starts his experiment say that he’s going to be able to metabolise most of the crap he’ll be putting into himself. None of them predicted that he’d increase his body weight by over 10% in a week. Each of them were floored by the figures. What am I rambling about? We don’t even know the effects of what we do to ourselves. How can we be so arrogant as to think we know the effects of removing 50% of the bio-diversity of the planet?

What I’m getting at is that business as usual isn’t a good thing. So the catch 22 situation would be for business as usual to continue and that would be facilitated by the discovery that there was way more oil than we assume there is.