Know what makes big, evil corporations happy? Watching environmentalists scratch each other’s eyes out. Exhibit A: The coastal-drilling flap in Santa Barbara.
The basic story is this: California’s State Lands Commission has just nixed a deal that would have allowed a Texas oil company to drill off the Santa Barbara coast. It would have been the first such drilling approved in the state since the late 1960s. The twist? Anti-oil activists had convinced the oil company to agree to shut down its four offshore drilling platforms by 2022, close a couple of processing plants, and give the county $1.5 million for low-emission buses (the hell?)—all in exchange for fresh, juicy oil.
Gentlemen, start your pissing match!
Approving the plan, said Lt. Gov. John Garamendi of the lands commission, would have been dangerous—amounting to “a message heard very, very clearly by those who call for ‘drill, baby, drill.’”
But activists who worked on the deal say it was the only way to ensure closure of the platforms, which are normally leased indefinitely: “This is an endgame scenario and we’ve always been looking for one,” Abe Powell, president of Get Oil Out!, told the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve been trying to do this for four decades.”
In perhaps the most telling comment of all—a comment that seems to have been excised from the Times story, though it still appears in a Google News search—Powell called the lands commission’s decision “a PR stunt: ‘We can out-environment the environmentalists.’”
Somewhere an oilman is chuckling.
Comments
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Russ Posted 9:20 pm
31 Jan 2009
Based on the info given here, especially that Powell quote, this sounds like astroturfing.
In perhaps the most telling comment of all -- a comment that seems to have been excised from the Times story, though it still appears in a Google News search -- Powell called the lands commission's decision "a PR stunt: 'We can out-environment the environmentalists.'"
Somewhere an oilman is chuckling.
Sounds like the classic ploy of accusing your opponent of doing exactly what you're doing or intend to do.
Even if they're a good-faith group, why would anyone consider an ad hoc "cooperative conservation" deal better than a regulatory offensive? If you have the power to do something, you should do it, not keep mucking around with trying to find mutually acceptable compromises.
We already know how that turns out. Every deal environmentalists or the government were working on, or had even concluded, in the 90s ended up gutted as soon as the enemy developed high hopes for Bush's accession.
Corporations and right wing ideologues will never compromise one bit more than they feel compelled to. They recognize no common ground. They are in fact totalitarian. This was proven during the Bush admin (and of course many times before).
So the appeasement program will not work. I know lots of people, starting with the new admin, are temperamentally disinclined to believe this. But the evidence is irrefutable for those willing to face it.
"A crisis shouldn't be let go to waste." - Excellent words. And that should be the watchword now. Let's see if Shock and Awe can work in the opposite direction. Let's see if the disaster capitalism paradigm can be turned around with a ferocious assault on disastrous capitalism.
(What should be needless to say, this does not mean attacking real entrepreneurial capitalism itself. It means attacking the corporatism and neo-feudalism of this state of affairs.)
(Also, I'm not saying cooperative conservation is never any good or never worth doing. But just as the enemy always sees it as the least of evils, and wouldn't be engaging in it if he didn't feel he had to, so should enviros see it.)
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Tasermons Partner Posted 3:52 am
01 Feb 2009
And I've never know the oil and gas companies to live up to their end of the bargains voluntarily.
Any deal made would've been more worthless than the plastic hanger that held up the ink cartridge at the store, which they bought and put into the printer to print out the "cooperative" agreement.
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biodiversivist Posted 4:04 pm
01 Feb 2009
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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