Global Warming Facts and What to Do

An Oil-Based Civilization

Most people in the industrialized world are collectively guilty for global warming. The developing world is hardly blameless though. People in those countries eagerly strive for the automobile culture and heedlessly gobble as much energy as possible. Take the example of the Chinese who labor in a cloud of appalling smog and call it progress.

The very poor of the world usually have no benefit from the delights of fossil fuel power. They mostly suffer, particularly in oil-producing countries like Nigeria where oil companies and the corrupt government inflict disgraceful pollution and violence upon entire populations. For example, the Nigerian government reported that 6,817 oil spills happened between 1976 and 2001. Even this horrifying number is considered by experts to be a gross underestimate. (1)

All people when they turn the keys in their cars and start their engines passively condone the environmental ruin and global warming that are the spawn of unchecked fossil fuel consumption. Energy is not the only product of oil. Petroleum products permeate modern life with an unsettling totality. Unlike Lady Macbeth trying in vain to wash blood from her hands, people today are submerged in a vat of the guilty blood bled from a despoiled Earth. Plastics are petroleum-based, which means that grocery bags, shampoo bottles, and infant car seats, to name a few items, are derived from petroleum. The list of materials and products that make up this petroleum-based civilization is long, and it demonstrates the giant squid tentacles of big oil companies that have defined the world.

A concerted effort over many decades by oil and automobile companies has promoted the polluted and warming state of the Earth. These well-documented conspiracies to destroy public transit, promote cars, and limit fuel efficiency are described in the books “Lives Per Gallon” by Terry Tamminen and “Taken for a Ride” by Jack Doyle.

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Sources:

(1) “Curse of the Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta” Tom O’Neill, National Geographic, February 2007, p. 112.