COEXISTing with the oil industry

“The only thing we have to fear on the planet is man” - Carl Gustav Jung

Who Compensates the Planet?

When Shell fouls the Niger Delta with indiscriminate toxic oil waste dumping, do the people of America and other oil producing countries come to the rescue of impoverished Nigerian farmers? Are the people whose lives and health are affected adequately compensated? Do they even get to live?

The people of the Niger Delta are poor and are left to struggle alone. There is no global solidarity and thus no lessons are learned. Large multinational corporations get away with diabolical behavior in developing countries, but it is only a matter of time before the results of their belligerence wash up on shores nearer home.

Shell has targeted the Niger Delta for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and the surrounding area has continually suffered extreme and unremediated environmental damage from decades of criminal and indiscriminate oil waste dumping.

The people of the Niger Delta witnessed the slow poisoning of the waters, and the destruction of their vegetation and agricultural land. The majority of people in this region depend on the natural environment for their food and livelihood, particularly through agriculture and fisheries. Amnesty International quotes sources suggesting that in the last 50 years at least 9 million barrels of oil have leaked into land and rivers in the region. The true figure could be much higher.

A non-violent campaign for justice - the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People was started and attempted to claim compensation for those whose health and livelihood had been destroyed. There was no outside help, no media coverage and no-one but a corrupt government to appeal to. Members of the Movement were arrested, hastily tried by a special military tribunal, and hanged.

When Trafigura baulked at the cost of having its oil derived toxic waste properly disposed of, it dumped the sludge onto the Ivory Coast where it hoped no-one would find it. Thousands of people became ill and the Dutch authorities eventually brought Trafigura to trial where they reached an out of court settlement and agreed to pay 30,000 people the princely sum of £334,000– about 11 quid each.

By contrast, BP have put $20 billion into a compensation fund for those affected by the Gulf of Mexico spillage, and that is just for starters. Americans living many miles away from the disaster, and who are barely affected by it, are putting in claims for compensation – which they are likely to get.

Meanwhile, Cairn Energy starts drilling off Greenland next month in a stretch of sea known as Iceberg Alley. Unusually, it will use two drilling rigs, so if there is a blowout from the first the second can immediately start on a relief well to stem the flow of oil. This is good insurance for the company, but bad, bad news for the planet. Environmental disasters in difficult terrain are now an expectation. For as long as we demand oil, someone will drill for it.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi Army destroyed tankers, oil terminals, and oil wells in Kuwait, causing the release of about 900,000,000 barrels of oil. This was the largest oil spill in history. There was no shoreline cleanup and the oil lakes which formed were left untreated. The long term effects were significant and heavy pollution remains in the desert and on the seabed. Nonetheless, large compensation claims were awarded to Kuwaiti companies and individuals to the tune of over $52 billion.

The amount of compensation awarded seems to be decided only by your relative wealth. The poorest get nothing. Indeed they are fortunate to escape with their lives. The human rights situation in many oil polluted regions is dire.

The international standard for environmental safety and compensation seems to be ‘whatever you can get away with'.

But it is not just people who are affected by these irresponsible disasters, it is the planet. The one living planet we must all learn to share and take care of if it is to serve the human race. A healthy planet –complete with its wondrous and diverse life forms – is required to fill bellies and provide energy sources for an ever expanding population. If we continually pump toxins into the atmosphere, continually poison the land and sea with chemicals, we cannot expect it to support more than a few of us. Only we who live on this planet can be the caretakers, and only by linking up with, and furthering the rights of people suffering on shores other than our own can we possibly hope to foment a more healthy and more sustainable future. In a shrinking world our neighbours are everyone. Their environmental disaster is our warning. The more we support our global neighbour, the less likely it will be for the profiteering corporations to foul on our own doorsteps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Oil_Company
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18292
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Compensation_Commission

Contributions are always welcome. Catch up with past mailings at www.coexister.blogspot.com

COEXISTing with GDP

Among other things, prisons are included in GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Of course prison itself doesn’t work, which is why we keep on building them and why the re-offending rate is so high, but prisons, among other things, are measured as an economic output and are therefore perversely considered to be an indicator of how well we are doing. Also, positive values to events that actually detract from a country’s well-being, like hurricanes and floods actually boost GDP through reconstruction costs. The logic is terrifying.

One could be forgiven for glazing over at the very mention of GDP but it would be a mistake, for GDP governs our attitude to ourselves in many ways. Government announces that GDP is up and we are all supposed to rejoice because this purported measure of prosperity announces our wealth. Conversely when it is down we are all supposed to be gloomy and work harder. Most of us simply don’t get it because the way we feel is entirely linked to how happy we are. If a factory closes down with hundreds of job losses, it is no comfort to the workforce to be told that GDP is up that month. Government often mistakes the nation’s economic activity for its citizens’ well-being.

We have plenty of numbers about economic consequences but none of the numbers about social consequences. The time has surely come for a better balanced, more relevant measure given that economic growth is not possible in a world of finite resources.

GDP has not only failed to capture the well-being of a 21st-century society but has also skewed global political objectives toward the single-minded pursuit of economic growth. The main barrier to progress are that statistical agencies around the world are run by economists and statisticians. Achieving a sustainable economy, and a sustainable society, may prove impossible without new ways to evaluate national progress.

There are good reasons for reviewing the way we measure our relative prosperity. For example, the health effects of social isolation are of the same magnitude as smoking. If we can care about people smoking, because that reduces their well-being and life expectancy, then why not think about social isolation too?

A new measure should account for carbon emissions and build in a depletion charge for the natural resources such as oil, gas, timber and fisheries. Happiness should be measured too. It is also logical to subtract from GDP the cost of health problems - asthma and early deaths for instance, caused by air pollutants like sulfur dioxide we breathe in every day. It may be hard to put a monetary value on alteration of the climate system, loss of species and the consequences that might come from those, but surely not impossible.

We have to decide to measure something difficult before we can come up with a technique for measuring it.

Even if GDP was revised and updated, the tendency may still be to equate economic growth with progress on a planet that is already overburdened by human consumption and pollution. A different approach is needed. One single measure is not the best way to identify human progress and repair imbalances in the economic and environmental systems we devise, and it has been suggested that a ‘dashboard’ of indicators would better do the job.

A national dashboard of indicators could lead to very different policies from those we have now. The dashboard in your car gives you several pieces of information at a glance. It is no good knowing that your oil pressure is OK if you have run out of petrol. Similarly it is not enough to know that manufacturing output is up if the health costs of maintaining your workforce have gone through the roof. Happiness and well-being are important to measure as it has been estimated that the 10 percent of people who spend the most time suffering account for almost half of the total amount of suffering. Huge social and economic gains could therefore be made by dealing with mental-health problems, such as depression. We would also like to see new measures of emotional well-being to enable a more enlightened perspective on the complex relationship between money and happiness.

So far only one measure has succeeded in challenging the hegemony of growth-centric thinking. This is known as the Human Development Index. The HDI is a ranking that incorporates a nation’s GDP and two other modifying factors: its citizens’ education, based on adult literacy and school-enrollment data, and its citizens’ health, based on life-expectancy statistics. The HDI, which happens to be used by the United Nations, has plenty of critics, but it is at least a start.

A dire omission to the information gathered today is the amount of “natural capital” (stocks of clean air and water, biodiversity etc.) we need to conserve to maintain our economies and our quality of life. If we push the world’s natural capital below a certain level we may so radically alter the system that it has a long-term impact on human welfare and even survival. If we were to pass that point - and at present we have no measurement to indicate whether we already have -then we couldn’t compensate for our error through technological innovation or energy breakthroughs because by then it would be too late.

For more information of details being worked through by Joe Stiglitz and others please go to http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16GDP-t.html?pagewanted=all

Human Development Index stats at http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
Contributions are always welcome.
Catch up with past mailings at www.coexister.blogspot.com

Why is so much wealth in the hands of the few?

When the English aristocracy enclosed the common land the immediate effect was to disenfranchise the remainder of the populace. Subsequent land grabbing in the name of colonialism underlined the distinction of land as the mainstay of wealth and power, poor government did the rest.

Women and men thought that by fighting for emancipation they could share in the decision making process, but though the fight was hard won, it changed little. Putting a cross in a box every four years is not democracy, it is a sop. We are voting for one group of lies and spin over another. Democracy is functionally bankrupt.

In a world where 854M people are undernourished and 700M are obese, the inequalities are stark. Governments worldwide, swayed by the lure of past glories and reacting to the strings pulled by the rich, lack imaginative responses to changing circumstances. The link between economic models, inequality and peak oil will be the testing ground. Oil is a gift we have squandered on trips to the supermarket and joy riding. We should have used it to develop the sustainable technologies we need for the future. Our tired economic models insist on basing their trends on growth – an impossibility in a world of finite resources. Inequality languishes unaddressed at our peril. It will not be enough to ask the most vulnerable to suffer further just to maintain the system which made them vulnerable in the first place.

The need to minimise governance-induced debt will not be met by squeezing the average citizen still further, because they are not likely to tolerate it. With the advent of the internet and mobile technology people are now more in touch with each other than ever before. They are learning to sift through the endless streams of information and disinformation, and they are formulating their own plans. People know that there is a small but fantastically rich elite who hold themselves above the law, who pay little or no taxes, and who for generations have lived quite literally off the fat of the land, stolen land.

Land is the one finite resource where the value is rigged entirely towards the possessor at the expense of the community surrounding it. A tax shift away from goods and services, and towards the value of land would create greater wealth for communities without dispossessing the owners. It would also be the single most effective means of reducing inequality. To continue a bias in policy towards landowners and the rich, at the expense of people and planet, would be no less than a criminal enterprise of government.

Financially, the world is living on drafts upon the future; economically, it is living on the products of the past. The creation of credit has done much to destabilise economic practices. The abolition of credit would bring us back into the real world whereby investments would require nurturing to bring about tangible returns. This would mean the delivering of goods and services which are needed by our communities, and not the manipulative marketplace of products and information for which there is little demand but much hype.

We need to design our descent down the energy curve economically, spiritually and practically. Post peak oil brings with it the opportunity for a vastly reduced CO2 environment. With every building being transformed into a power plant, transportation free of pollution, and more refined and humane eating habits, we have the opportunity – born of necessity (as opposed to compassion)– to transform the way we live.

Power and Propaganda

“The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

- Noam Chomsky

The word ‘propaganda’ originally referred to the propagation of plants and animals. It took on new meaning in the 17th century when the Papacy established the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), to systematically spread Catholic doctrine throughout the world to win new converts and stem the rising tide of Protestantism. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12456a.htm

The modern political sense of the term ‘propaganda’ dates from World War I when propaganda techniques were discovered as a powerful weapon for shaping public opinion and behaviour. During WW1 the governments of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, the United States, Germany, and Austria-Hungary employed writers, artists, and filmmakers to craft political messages aimed at mobilizing their populations for war, weakening the enemy’s morale and will to fight, and at winning over audiences in neutral countries. In the USA, the Creel Committee, which included Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud), devised a pro-war propaganda campaign which produced an intense anti-German hysteria within six months. http://web.utk.edu/~glenn/CreelCommittee.html

Propaganda also became the subject of serious discussion and intellectual study in Germany. Adolf Hitler, leader of an obscure right-wing extremist party in Bavaria, wrote, "Propaganda is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert." The Nazis subsequently eliminated the "marketplace of ideas" through terror and media manipulation and mobilized propaganda as a weapon to unite the German people around a leader and to facilitate aggression, mass murder, and genocide.

Modern propaganda draws upon techniques and strategies used in advertising, public relations, communications, and mass psychology. It simplifies complicated issues or ideology for popular consumption, is usually biased, and is geared to achieving a particular end. Propaganda generally employs symbols, whether in written, musical, or visual forms, and plays upon complex human emotions. It is employed by governments and private organizations to promote causes and institutions and scorn their opponents. It is deployed to obtain your vote.

Chomsky’s theory (1988) postulates three main classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media: Ownership of the medium, the medium's funding, and sourcing of the news. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Chomsky stated that the new filter replacing communism would be terrorism and Islam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media

Propaganda is a powerful weapon in war. It is used in insidious ways to dehumanize and create hatred toward a supposed enemy, either internal or external, by creating a false image in the mind. This can be done by using derogatory or racist terms, avoiding certain words and by making allegations of enemy atrocities. Most propaganda wars require the home population to feel the enemy has inflicted an injustice, which may be fictitious or factual - it does usually matter which in the battle of words.

Propaganda is generally an appeal to emotion, not intellect. Disinformation about the history of certain groups or foreign countries may be either encouraged or tolerated in the educational system. Few people double-check what they learn at school, and this disinformation will be repeated by journalists as well as parents, thus reinforcing the idea that the disinformation is really a well-known fact. Paradoxically, no one repeating the myth is able to point to an authoritative source. This permeating propaganda can be used for political goals by giving citizens a false impression of the quality or life, or the policies of their country.

Media such as daily news coverage, advertisements, videos, pictures, polls, and various others are indirectly controlled by the news media. People are more and more focusing on the great soap opera known as the news, which is often seen as a credible source. The aim of the propagandist is to create the semblance of credibility.

George Orwell's novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are widely seen as textbooks on the use of propaganda. These books are about totalitarian regimes that constantly corrupt language for political purposes.

Propaganda is also used in psychological warfare, which may involve false flag operations. The term propaganda may also refer to false information meant to reinforce the mindsets of people who already believe as the propagandist wishes. If people believe something false, they will constantly be assailed by doubts. For this reason propaganda is often addressed to people who are already sympathetic to the agenda. This process of reinforcement uses an individual's predisposition to self-select "agreeable" information sources as a mechanism for maintaining control.

What sets propaganda apart from other forms of advocacy is the willingness of the propagandist to change people's understanding through deception and confusion rather than persuasion and understanding. Not to be overlooked is the link between propaganda, indoctrination, and terrorism/counterterrorism. Threats to destroy are often as socially disruptive as physical devastation itself.

Television and the Internet have increased the speed and spread of information globally. Websites and other online media now reach hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and have become major propaganda vehicles for private and governmental organizations. In the face of such a relentless and skilful media barrage, we must now, more than ever, carefully and critically evaluate the information we receive in order to become better informed citizens capable of making our own decisions for the future.

For most of the supplies made by market forces, no demand was in fact made by the people

The global economy doesn’t need your town. It will relocate your jobs where profits are greatest at the drop of a hat. It can flip into recession overnight and dump you and billions of others into unemployment and poverty. It will only deliver to you those few benefits which trickle down from the ventures which maximise corporate profits. The global economy loots the Third World to stock your supermarket shelves. It pollutes and asks you to clear up the mess through your taxes. It will think nothing of condemning much of your town to idleness in the form of unemployment and wasted time and resources that could be devoted to meeting urgent needs in your own community.

The resources of this planet are finite. We are overfishing and over-farming. Soil and water are being polluted to the point where they are yielding less and less. At a time of resource diminishment the human population continues to grow. Technology may well devise yet more intensive methods of creating food, but we would be unwise to rely on it. Our governments insist on infinite economic growth from finite resources.

In the oceans we are losing species as well as entire ecosystems. Land is being stripped of its nutrients and indigenous vegetation. As a result, the overall ecological unity of our oceans and land are under stress and in danger of collapse. We are risking the ability of this planet to sustain our food sources.

The recent history of economic growth can be described as the history of exploitation of mankind by mankind. We have witnessed the creation of demands through whatever means possible - disinformation, high-pitched advertising, reconditioning of tastes and utilisation of human weaknesses. For most of the supplies made by market forces, no demand was in fact made by the people.

As far back as the 18^th century, Adam Smith could see that “economic successes beyond the level necessary for the satisfaction of one’s physical wants do not add to a man’s real happiness, and it is only vanity, the desire to be looked upon by one’s fellowmen with admiration and envy that motivates the incessant accumulation of personal wealth”. Profit hunger conflicts with public interest, and he defined global monopolies as “infamous covetousness ..... which do not shrink from terrorization and crime”

In the coming time of scarcity the global economy will not look after you, only the foolish and shortsighted will rely on it. The choices boil down to one. You must create a safe economy in your own region, and run it to provide for the people who live there.

Either your town will get control of its own affairs and organise viable productive capacity to provide for its communities, or it will remain dependent on the mainstream economy and subject you to boom and bust, power shortages and growing impoverishment.

We will need coordination, priorities and planning – call it a Community Development Co-op, call it anything you like, but start setting it up.

We need to create our own economy - Economy B - a new local economy enabling the people who live in each community to guarantee the provision of basic necessities by applying their labour, land and skills to local resources. The old Economy A with all its inconsistencies and incompassionate recklessness will be sidelined as irrelevant because we will be capable of providing for ourselves.

http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/bank/idea.php?ideaId=479

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/299/

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds – Albert Einstein

Why do we send our children to school?

To be educated? - a real education would channel us into curiosity and self-discovery

To keep them out of the way for a few hours? - working mums enticed into the workplace so that they too can pay taxes, need to place their children somewhere

To be good workers? - what parent brings a child into this world to ‘be a good worker’

To be prepared for life? - survival and creativity are way down the list in the average syllabus.

Because the law demands it?

School does exactly what it was created to do: it solves, or at least mitigates, the problem of a restless, ambitious labour pool - deadly for capitalist economies; and it confronts that other thorny problem: left to their own devices, people might learn to un-divide themselves, band together in the common interest, and take control of the institutions that stunt their lives.

Busy parents are prone to buying convenience food. Family units are dispersed. Rarely does a child learn the basics of cooking at home.

Cheap and disposable clothing mitigate the need to sew, to be creative and to extend the life of a garment. In a land where a yard of fabric is more expensive than a ready made item there is neither financial nor social benefit to learn even the basics.

Children living in less rigid societies can make their own clothes, grow their own food and build their own houses. Most so-called educated kids never learn practicalities of life because they are too busy learning how to sit still in a classroom.

In her book: “Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All In The Head” biologist Dr. Carla Hannaford states that almost all children are born as “whole brain” thinkers; however, by the time the child is 7 years old, due to parental, religious, and scholastic programming in the modern world, we see a very definite trend toward the left-brain orientation. Intuition and creativity are lost.

A real education is not achieved through memorizing data and ticking the boxes in multiple choice questionnaires. We have to find out who we are by experience and by risk-taking. We must pursue our own nature intensely. School routines are set up to discourage us from self-discovery. People who understand who they are make trouble for schools.

To know yourself, you have to keep track of your random choices, figure out your patterns, and use this knowledge to dominate your own mind. It's the only way that free will can grow. If you avoid this, other minds will manipulate and control you for the rest of your life.

The ancient Greeks discovered thousands of years ago that rules and ironclad procedures burn out imagination, stifle courage, and wipe the leadership clean of resourcefulness. Greek education was much more like play, with studies undertaken for their own sake, to satisfy curiosity. It assumed that sane children want to grow up and recognized that childhood ends much earlier than modern society typically allows.

If we are considering restructuring our society, we must consider what real benefit our current institutions have for the future. Today we are faced with an energy crisis, converging peak resources and financial collapse. But, in fact it is a consumption crisis, a lifestyle that has led to the depletion of resources, toxification of the globe, and obsession with money.

Society needs people who will take care of the elderly with love and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional.

It is not financially or socially feasible to continue to build and maintain cities as we know them today. The expense of acquiring land upon which to construct facilities such as schools, shopping malls, industrial and office complexes, etc., maintaining and expanding the roads and transportation system for the irrational rush hours and the few hours a day in which they are in use. In many ways it would be far cheaper to pay people to stay home. Out of this realization came Alvin Toffler's idea for the "electronic cottage" as we face the "end of work" which is visible today, and we are forced by changing climatic and economic circumstances to design a new lifestyle more appropriate for our time. "If we build self-contained structures - ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities may well have to build electronic walls against the propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves.

We will need isolated areas of land and distance from the food deserts of our inner cities. Produce and goods will become prohibitively expensive and state repression will become harsher and harsher."

All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours."

School is neither in the business of teaching survival (playground survival is usually self-taught and a major life lesson) nor creativity. Survival and creativity, compassion and honesty are the main requirements for an uncertain future. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.