Eco-Orwellianism

[HomerRamone]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/32740-wellhead-and-tailpipe-reflections-on-eco-orwellianism

This is an age of eco-Orwellian cognitive dissonance. Three years and three months ago, then United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Norway to negotiate increased U.S. access to the Arctic’s vast oil reserves. She sailed on a research vessel to see in person the melting of the Arctic under the pressure of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – an experience she called “sobering.” Back on land, she went straight into a meeting to strategize for increased Arctic oil production with an Exxon Mobil executive and the CEO of Norway Statoil.

A different version of the same absurd, eco-Orwellian drama was acted out in a different Arctic setting by U.S. President Barack Obama this August. Obama went to Alaska to see firsthand the toll that carbon-driven planet-cooking is taking on Arctic frost. Obama’s junket north included a speech on climate change that “bordered on the apocalyptic” (New York Times) and argued with seeming passion that “we’re not acting fast enough” to heal the earth.

Never mind that just last May Obama cleared the way for the giant climate-changing multinational oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell to begin drilling for fossil fuels in the Arctic Ocean this summer. Shell got approval to drill in the U.S. portion of the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska. Shell’s leases are 70 miles out, in a remote, untouched, and pristine area that provides critical habitats for several rare species and large marine mammals. It’s a treacherous area characterized by extreme storms, likely to cause massive oil spills. Environmental groups had long warned against the madness of drilling in the area, which holds 22 billion barrels of oil and 93 trillion cubic feet of natural gas...

Nobody should have been surprised. The decision came just four months after Obama had opened up a large portion of the southern U.S. Atlantic coast to new deep-water offshore drilling. In late March of 2010, three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Obama freed up 167 million acres along the eastern U.S. seaboard for Big Oil extraction.

The president’s “drill, baby drill” record ever since has been calamitous. It has greased the skids for the United States’ largely fracking-based emergence as the world’s leading oil and gas producer in the name of an “all-of-the-above” (nuclear included) energy policy and so-called national energy independence. “Beneath his climate change policies,” Slate’s Eric Holthaus recently noted, “Obama is basically running a petrostate.” Consistent with that observation, Obama’s faux-green Alaska trip included a call by the president for an increase in U.S. Coast Guard vessels equipped with ice-cutting tools to further America’s competitiveness in the international race for the exploration, drilling, and extraction of Arctic oil.

[djean111]

1. Bears repeating -

Three years and three months ago, then United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Norway to negotiate increased U.S. access to the Arctic’s vast oil reserves. She sailed on a research vessel to see in person the melting of the Arctic under the pressure of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – an experience she called “sobering.” Back on land, she went straight into a meeting to strategize for increased Arctic oil production with an Exxon Mobil executive and the CEO of Norway Statoil.

A different version of the same absurd, eco-Orwellian drama was acted out in a different Arctic setting by U.S. President Barack Obama this August. Obama went to Alaska to see firsthand the toll that carbon-driven planet-cooking is taking on Arctic frost. Obama’s junket north included a speech on climate change that “bordered on the apocalyptic” (New York Times) and argued with seeming passion that “we’re not acting fast enough” to heal the earth.

Never mind that just last May Obama cleared the way for the giant climate-changing multinational oil corporation Royal Dutch Shell to begin drilling for fossil fuels in the Arctic Ocean this summer. Shell got approval to drill in the U.S. portion of the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska. Shell’s leases are 70 miles out, in a remote, untouched, and pristine area that provides critical habitats for several rare species and large marine mammals. It’s a treacherous area characterized by extreme storms, likely to cause massive oil spills. Environmental groups had long warned against the madness of drilling in the area, which holds 22 billion barrels of oil and 93 trillion cubic feet of natural gas...

Nobody should have been surprised. The decision came just four months after Obama had opened up a large portion of the southern U.S. Atlantic coast to new deep-water offshore drilling. In late March of 2010, three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Obama freed up 167 million acres along the eastern U.S. seaboard for Big Oil extraction.

The world can no longer afford to have politicians like that pretending to be concerned about global warming and then doing their best to make it worse.

[Hydra]

2. This suggests the ideas the "Elite" used to float about underground cities

Is their probable escape route. They *know* how bad things are, but they push at it full steam for profits that are rapidly becoming irrelevant. Who needs money when there's no civilization left?

[hedda_foil]

3. Underground, on floating domed cities, or orbiting the Earth. The elites are really good planners.

[hunter]

4. We're all part of it.

Even myself.

Willing participants in the machinery of destruction

This thing we call "economic productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to earth's natural environment and the human spirit.

Who here is willing to say their own "work ethic" is destroying the planet? Who considers that some kid living in a tin shack in Mexico City or Cairo has a much smaller environmental footprint than almost any U.S. American?

Who here will confess that their own work is harmful bullshit? 95% of all work is bullshit. Our "work ethics" are destroying the planet. Who here is willing to abandon automobiles and airlines? Who here refuses factory farmed meat?

A sustainable humanist society looks nothing like the society we have now. I think high energy technological society needs to go away. I don't think technology needs to go away but we always have to think about what we want to be, eaters of the earth or gentle gardeners.

I think the modern economy is extremely fragile and the cracks in its foundation are already showing. We can retreat from this catastrophe on our own terms, or we can do nothing and let nature deal with the problem in her own very messy way, usually involving a lot of human pain and suffering.

If the wealthy think they will be shielded from nature's wrath, they are mistaken. It will be the poor who survive, but only because there are so many of them.