George Monbiot says the oil barons are more dangerous than ever

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0613-23.htm

Behind the Spin, the Oil Giants are More Dangerous Than Ever

For a company that claims to have moved "beyond petroleum", BP has managed to spill an awful lot of it on to the tundra in Alaska. Last week, after the news was leaked to journalists, it admitted to investors that it is facing criminal charges for allowing 270,000 gallons of crude oil to seep across one of the world's most sensitive habitats. The incident was so serious that some of its staff could be sent to prison.

Had this been Exxon, the epitome of sneering corporate brutality, the news would have surprised no one. But BP's rebranding, like Shell's, has been so effective that you could be forgiven for believing that it had become an environmental pressure group. These companies have used the vast profits from their petroleum business to create the impression that they are abandoning it.

-snip- (this snip tells of the other companies and how they all are pretending to be for the ecology in their advertising, etc.)

Whatever happens, they can't lose. If they invest in new exploration and production, they secure lucrative control over a diminishing asset. If they fail to invest, as they have done over the past 10 years, the price rises and they do even better. In either case, they make so much money that they can throw a few billion into developing alternative technologies without gulping, thus cornering the future energy markets as well.

-snip-

Three weeks ago, a demonstration outside BP's headquarters in London reminded us that some of the land seizures, environmental damage and human rights violations associated with its pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey (which came onstream on May 27) have been neither acknowledged nor addressed. BP admits that the oil and gas it extracts produce around 570m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, roughly the same as the amount the UK emits. This is after it changed its methodology to exclude some of its operations: otherwise it would have been responsible for over twice that amount.

Shell's practices look even worse. Though the flaring of gas from oil wells in Nigeria was banned in 1969, it is still burning hundreds of millions of cubic feet a day, wasting a precious resource and producing more carbon emissions than everyone else in sub-Saharan Africa put together. The surrounding communities are plastered with sticky soot. In April, Shell was ordered by a court in Lagos to stop the flaring, but does not intend to do so until 2009. It has also been fined $1.5bn for polluting the Niger delta, but won't pay pending its appeal.

More at link....

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conclusion: the neo con oil barons will continue to kill the earth and us until the last dollar has been stuffed into their pockets.
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to survive in the polluted planet that they're leaving them? When you're willing to destroy your entire family line (let alone everybody else) for money, then you've become a creature that is not worthy to be considered a human being.