Bigger Mess Than the Gulf is the Oil Industry Itself

At Jesus' General, Austin Cline makes the case for cleaning up not just the oil industry's mess in the Gulf, but the industry itself:

The understandable focus on cleaning up the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico must not distract us from the need to also clean up the oil industry itself. Indeed, we should get used to thinking that no matter how successful the efforts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico ultimately are, it won't matter much in the long term if we ignore the terrible mess of the oil industry.

It will be difficult for this to really sink in for most of us, though, because practically everything we see about the BP oil disaster tends to reinforce the perception that it's an isolated accident. When was the last time anyone in the mainstream news media did a report trying to connect aspects of this disaster to larger problems in the oil industry? How often do we instead just see a focus on the accident and BP alone? We must actively resist this narrow focus and push back against what is essentially pro-oil propaganda.

Instead, we must learn how to see the deeper connections which link individual disasters with broader problems. We must learn to see the patterns of abuse and negligence across the industry — and we must communicate this to others so that they can see the same. This is critical because no fundamental changes will occur unless there is popular demand for it. That's why industry and even government are actively depicting the problems as existing merely with one oil platform or, at most, with BP alone.

The less of the spilled oil that sticks to the industry as a whole, the more likely the oil industry will be able to preserve the status quo — and it is precisely the status quo which we need to overturn.

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But we also need to change the background culture. We currently live in a society where no one seems to find it strange that shareholders' capital investment might receive stronger legal protections than employees' health and safety, nearby residents' lives and livelihoods, or the environment upon which we all depend. We need a culture where it's inconceivable that the law would require corporations to maximize profits, but not maximize employees' well-being or minimize the costs paid by others for a corporation's activities.

Read the whole thing.