Mother Nature Is An International Woman - 2

Some Can't Get Their Life Back

In the first post of this series we pointed out that Mother Nature, like other women, is being persecuted in the U.S.eh? as much or more than ever before.

During the greatest U.S. environmental catastrophe, so far, the Dredd Blog System followed the Deepwater Horizon dirty oil corruption in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), with many posts, such as Danger Lurks In The Deep Water and From Deepwater I To Deepwater II.

Now, a portion of MOMCOM, the mortal enemy of Mother Nature, is "returning to the homeland" to finish her off.

So, now that the journalists have left the GOM, now that the president has brought his two children to swim in those waters as if to say "all is now well", and now that Republicans, who think that global warming is a hoax, have taken the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, what does the future look like for the GOM and Mother Nature in general?

More than likely it will be more of the same, that is, the U.S.eh? will become more and more like a third world country:

"I want my life back."

A new study of dolphins living close to the site of North America's worst ever oil spill – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals ... The research follows the publication of several scientific studies ... which all suggest that the environmental impact of the five-month long spill may have been far worse than previously appreciated ...

The study of the dolphins in Barataria Bay, off the coast of Louisiana, followed two years in which the number of dead dolphins found stranded on the coast close to the spill had dramatically increased. Although all but one of the 32 dolphins were still alive when the study ended, lead researcher Lori Schwacke said survival prospects for many were grim ...

(GOM Still Dying, emphasis added). So, after assaulting Mother Nature, what does the MOMCOM gang now have in mind?

The answer is "the typical psychopathic double down", it would seem:

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

The Jingoist Bucks Reality

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

Knowledgeable observers are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry’s “Third-Worldification” of the United States. Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled. Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development. In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.

(U.S. To Become A Third World Energy Nation, emphasis added). I am reminded that Obama told Medvedev he would be able to be more flexible after the election, as well as being reminded of The Elections of Pontius Pilots post a while back.

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Quote from Hansen Video, at about 7:25 into it:

"The total energy imbalance now [not enough heat radiating into space because of green house gases] is about .6 watt per square meter. That may not sound like much, but when added up over the whole world, it's enormous. It's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy used by all of humanity. It's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year. That is how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day. This imbalance means, if we want to stabilize climate, we must reduce CO2 ..."

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