Apology OK | Brussels Blog

Apology OK

posted by on 17th Aug 2010
17th,Aug

OK, I apologise. The leaking Deepwater Horizon well did not discharge twenty five thousand barrels of oil a day. I was wrong. In fact, it discharged on average sixty thousand barrels of oil a day and released in total, give or take a few thousand barrels, five million barrels of crude oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I am truly sorry for underestimating the magnitude of the disaster. The problem was that I allowed myself to be swayed by the experts at BP. They, you will recall, initially put the leak at one thousand barrels and later upwardly revised it to five thousand. You would think that with all their expertise they might have got a bit nearer the mark. It just goes to show what happens when you leave the technical stuff to the PR department.

So it was five million barrels, equivalent to a quarter of the US’s daily consumption of crude oil. Had it carried on like that, it would have taken just a year to fill the Gulf with the equivalent a full day’s worth of oil.

Anyway, enough of that, it’s yesterday’s news. Instead, lets focus on the reassuring picture of Mr Obama cavorting with his daughter in the waters near the Gulf so as to encourage everyone to think that its back to business as usual; save that this charming family photo snapshot is about as reassuring as the sight of the former government minister, the hapless Mr Selwyn Gummer, publicly force-feeding his children hamburgers at the time of the CJD crisis in order to inform the world that British beef was harmless. The French took one look at Mr Gummer and his progeny and did the sensible thing-they banned British beef. No one however, is going to ban drilling in the Gulf or anywhere else for that matter. We all need oil.

The big news of course, is that around twenty million people in Pakistan are suffering unimaginable hardship as a result of a monsoon of unprecedented ferocity. In Russia an extraordinary drought has reduced the wheat harvest by one third. China is mourning the dead after the worst floods in living memory. In the past year there have been floods, mudslides caused by heavy rain, and extreme drought in every part of the globe. In fact, all the extreme weather events that we have been warned about for so long by all the scientists who have told us that human beings are dangerously warming the planet are there for all to see. Except that we don’t. The cause of these weather events is not a mystery. As with every decade in the last century this one is warmer than the last. The International Panel for Climate Change last week observed that the recent spate of extreme weather events has been caused by man made global warming. To say that the weather is going awry is to state the bleeding obvious. Ask a Pakistani, ask a Chinese farmer or someone from the South of France or Madeira if there is not something very odd happening. Ask me if you like; the answer is that the weather has changed in my lifetime to a dramatic degree. This isn’t science its real world observation.

Two things strike me as odd about all this. First, no one on the news seems to be mentioning the dreaded words “climate change” or perhaps “man made global warming” when reporting the horrors going on in Pakistan, China or Russia. I guess that the constraints of objective reporting dictate that unless the heavens open and the Big Man up there sends down some tablets of stone with a bit of elementary science scrawled on them, the media folk will continue to skirt round the topic. Never mind that the latest theory on the origin of the Universe, generally involving quantum strings, multiple dimensions, looney astrophysicists and the sort of mathematics that look like what happens when you spill a tin of alphabet spaghetti on the floor, is reported as though the Big Man had in fact spoken. The difference is that the science of man made global warming affects the way in which we structure our society and it is only a theory. Except that it isn’t just a theory, it is a fact attested to by the work of 99.9999% of scientists producing peer-reviewed research. Not every part of the science is proven and there has been some bullshit but it isn’t alphabet spaghetti; it is real.

I read the Daily Telegraph today in the expectation that I might be agreeably surprised by its editorial entitled “Floods in Pakistan, Drought In Russia and a Global Wake Up Call”. To be fair, global warming was mentioned, but the thrust of the leader was that we had better improve food production in order to meet all the problems caused by a looming imbalance of demand against supply. No mention here of addressing the root causes of these death dealing weather events because of course to speak simply of “global warming” brushes over the real truth, that is, that the current spate of warming is man made. I suppose however, that we should award The Telegraph five out of ten for at least mentioning the seemingly unmentionable.

The second thing that strikes me as odd is this. For the most part the people affected by the recent climate events are not the kind of people who produce much in the way of greenhouse gas. In fact I would guess that they come very much at the bottom of the scale when it comes to their carbon footprint, unlike the average American who is pretty much at the top of the scale. So as they watch their homes being swept away do the people of Pakistan not reflect on a few truths. E.g. here they are, dependent on aid from amongst others, the U.S.A. It is this country that In the name of the “war on terror”, bombs Pakistani villages in a cowardly fashion from unmanned drones piloted from a Portakabin in Nevada. This so-called war is not being waged to protect the rights of women nor to protect the streets of London or New York from terrorist attack. If that were the intention the U.S. would be bombing Saudi Arabia. This campaign is being waged to secure access to oil and gas, the very same oil that is burned by the citizens of the U.S.A. at profligate rates thus creating the problem in the first place. It is a crude analysis, but if I were a Pakistani famer fighting for a food parcel it is the sort of dot-joining exercise that I might indulge in when the odd spare moment presented itself.

Meanwhile back in the Gulf it is back to business as usual.

Robert Urquhart Collins

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