Street writes: "Three years ago, 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 pedestrian walks past a robot polar bear built using animatronics, which
is parked outside the Shell Building by Greenpeace campaigners in London.
(photo: Reuters)
Wellhead and Tailpipe: Reflections on Eco-Orwellianism
By Paul Street, teleSUR
03 October 15
his 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.
The New York Times described Obama's decision as "a devastating blow to
environmentalists." It might have added "and to prospects for a decent
future." According to Times environmental reporter Coral Davenport, speaking
on the PBS Newshour last May, the Chukchi Sea announcement had environmental
groups "surprised."
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.
How is it then that Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, and the petro-statist
Democratic Party more broadly are lauded by their "liberal" supporters and
denounced by their Republican critics as environmentalist enemies of AGW?
Beneath the undeniable contribution of Republican-leaning propaganda from
the U.S. Big Carbon lobby and wishful partisan thinking on the part of
Democrats, one key to the absurdity lay in a great cognitive failure that
even many smart climate scientists have exhibited: a framing of the excess
atmospheric carbon that is heating Mother Earth almost entirely around the
sale and combustion of carbon at the expense of serious attention to the
exploration, development, and production of fossil fuels.The political
culture and even much of the scientific and environmentalist discourse has
been obsessed with what British climate change communications strategist
George Marshall calls "the tailpipe" of carbon sale and emissions, ignoring
the basic point-of-extraction "wellheads" and "mineheads" of AGW.
This over-focus on the back end of humanity's extreme carbon pollution is no
small part of "why," in Marshall's words, "we keep fueling the fire we want
to put out." It is also part of why so many can be fooled into thinking that
a militantly petro-capitalist president like Obama is a planet-loving
climate change-fighter. Beyond his seemingly heartfelt statements of concern
for livable ecology, his calls for people to acknowledge and heed the
warnings of climate science, and his support for limited renewable energy
production, Obama does, after all, advocate and enforce various and
increased "tailpipe" regulations and restrictions on final emissions (Never
mind for now that he almost singlehandedly undermined desperate
international efforts for binding global carbon emission limits in
Copenhagen in December of 2009.) U.S. truckers bitch about "Obama's"
Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on engine emissions as Obama
presides over the phenomenal growth of U.S. gas and oil production, leading
among other things to a bright light of burning gas that can be seen across
the fracking fields of North Dakota from outer space.
The tailpipe/wellhead dissonance is hardly limited to the U.S., of course.
As Marshall notes in his chilling book "Don't Even Think About It" (2014),
"In England, energy and climate change are combined into one government
department leading to simultaneous action to reduce emissions and to boost
oil production. One month the minister of Energy and Climate Change brags
about the allocations of new licenses to release 20 billion barrels of oil
around British coasts. The next month the Minister of Energy and Climate
Change announces an ambitious plan for the government to reduce its
emissions by 10 percent." The great British novelist and social critic
George Orwell would be impressed.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces detailed data
on nationally aggregated per capita greenhouse gas emissions. This data has
been used as the empirical basis for international climate negotiations
since the early 1990s. The IPCC compiles no comparable factual record on
national fossil fuel production. The head of the body's Science Committee
cannot recall a single instance in which it talked about limiting the
production of fossil fuels, Marshall reports. It's a seemingly obvious and
overriding concern, something that might - in a rational world - have moved
to the forefront of public and scientific climate change consciousness after
an incident like Deepwater Horizon. We cannot process, sell, and burn the
fossil fuels without first finding those fuels and digging and pumping them
out of the ground. Thanks to the obsession with tailpipe over wellhead and
minehead, it is left to officially marginalized "radical environmentalists"
to make the connection between exploration, drilling, and mining on one hand
and processing, sale, and actual burning on the other.
The term "radical" is ironic. What could be more conservative than efforts
to preserve the world's still vast stock (big enough to push Earth well past
livability) of fossil fuels to sustain prospects for decent life? The
relentless drive to push oil and gas extraction past the point of no return
to decently livable ecology in the outward name of growth and in the hidden
pursuit of profit is radical indeed: radically irresponsible and
catastrophic.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
A pedestrian walks past a robot polar bear built using animatronics, which
is parked outside the Shell Building by Greenpeace campaigners in London.
(photo: Reuters)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Wellhead-and-Tailpipe-20151002-0016
.htmlhttp://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Wellhead-and-Tailpipe-20151002
-0016.html
Wellhead and Tailpipe: Reflections on Eco-Orwellianism
By Paul Street, teleSUR
03 October 15
his 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.
The New York Times described Obama's decision as "a devastating blow to
environmentalists." It might have added "and to prospects for a decent
future." According to Times environmental reporter Coral Davenport, speaking
on the PBS Newshour last May, the Chukchi Sea announcement had environmental
groups "surprised."
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.
How is it then that Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, and the petro-statist
Democratic Party more broadly are lauded by their "liberal" supporters and
denounced by their Republican critics as environmentalist enemies of AGW?
Beneath the undeniable contribution of Republican-leaning propaganda from
the U.S. Big Carbon lobby and wishful partisan thinking on the part of
Democrats, one key to the absurdity lay in a great cognitive failure that
even many smart climate scientists have exhibited: a framing of the excess
atmospheric carbon that is heating Mother Earth almost entirely around the
sale and combustion of carbon at the expense of serious attention to the
exploration, development, and production of fossil fuels.The political
culture and even much of the scientific and environmentalist discourse has
been obsessed with what British climate change communications strategist
George Marshall calls "the tailpipe" of carbon sale and emissions, ignoring
the basic point-of-extraction "wellheads" and "mineheads" of AGW.
This over-focus on the back end of humanity's extreme carbon pollution is no
small part of "why," in Marshall's words, "we keep fueling the fire we want
to put out." It is also part of why so many can be fooled into thinking that
a militantly petro-capitalist president like Obama is a planet-loving
climate change-fighter. Beyond his seemingly heartfelt statements of concern
for livable ecology, his calls for people to acknowledge and heed the
warnings of climate science, and his support for limited renewable energy
production, Obama does, after all, advocate and enforce various and
increased "tailpipe" regulations and restrictions on final emissions (Never
mind for now that he almost singlehandedly undermined desperate
international efforts for binding global carbon emission limits in
Copenhagen in December of 2009.) U.S. truckers bitch about "Obama's"
Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on engine emissions as Obama
presides over the phenomenal growth of U.S. gas and oil production, leading
among other things to a bright light of burning gas that can be seen across
the fracking fields of North Dakota from outer space.
The tailpipe/wellhead dissonance is hardly limited to the U.S., of course.
As Marshall notes in his chilling book "Don't Even Think About It" (2014),
"In England, energy and climate change are combined into one government
department leading to simultaneous action to reduce emissions and to boost
oil production. One month the minister of Energy and Climate Change brags
about the allocations of new licenses to release 20 billion barrels of oil
around British coasts. The next month the Minister of Energy and Climate
Change announces an ambitious plan for the government to reduce its
emissions by 10 percent." The great British novelist and social critic
George Orwell would be impressed.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces detailed data
on nationally aggregated per capita greenhouse gas emissions. This data has
been used as the empirical basis for international climate negotiations
since the early 1990s. The IPCC compiles no comparable factual record on
national fossil fuel production. The head of the body's Science Committee
cannot recall a single instance in which it talked about limiting the
production of fossil fuels, Marshall reports. It's a seemingly obvious and
overriding concern, something that might - in a rational world - have moved
to the forefront of public and scientific climate change consciousness after
an incident like Deepwater Horizon. We cannot process, sell, and burn the
fossil fuels without first finding those fuels and digging and pumping them
out of the ground. Thanks to the obsession with tailpipe over wellhead and
minehead, it is left to officially marginalized "radical environmentalists"
to make the connection between exploration, drilling, and mining on one hand
and processing, sale, and actual burning on the other.
The term "radical" is ironic. What could be more conservative than efforts
to preserve the world's still vast stock (big enough to push Earth well past
livability) of fossil fuels to sustain prospects for decent life? The
relentless drive to push oil and gas extraction past the point of no return
to decently livable ecology in the outward name of growth and in the hidden
pursuit of profit is radical indeed: radically irresponsible and
catastrophic.
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http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize