Monday, June 14, 2010
World pollution problems
With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution
Imagine BP's Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil disaster happening every single year, with little or no public outcry, no media coverage, and all but silence from government and the companies involved. Welcome to Nigeria.
Over the last 50 years, foreign oil companies have spilled over 1.5 million tons of oil in Nigeria, but there have been no legal convictions against them, and no compensation for spill victims.
IMO: Overall the US wants to get cheap oil and could care less about the polluting results - as long as people other than Americans suffer. Now we have to consider what result the new Chinese-processed lithium and rare earth mining will produce in Afghanistan - mostly for export to USA. If one were an Afghan, one could well decide one preferred the Taliban to the US and Chinese capitalists. Already many Nigerians literally consider their oil a curse and not a blessing, only a small step for most of the world to consider the US as the 'Great Satan'. Obama may have to use 'gunboat diplomacy' and the use of nuclear weapons and worse to retain the status of the US, and most assuredly most US presidents would have been prepared to do that. One would have hoped that someone with Obama's provenance would have behaved better.
Imagine BP's Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil disaster happening every single year, with little or no public outcry, no media coverage, and all but silence from government and the companies involved. Welcome to Nigeria.
Over the last 50 years, foreign oil companies have spilled over 1.5 million tons of oil in Nigeria, but there have been no legal convictions against them, and no compensation for spill victims.
IMO: Overall the US wants to get cheap oil and could care less about the polluting results - as long as people other than Americans suffer. Now we have to consider what result the new Chinese-processed lithium and rare earth mining will produce in Afghanistan - mostly for export to USA. If one were an Afghan, one could well decide one preferred the Taliban to the US and Chinese capitalists. Already many Nigerians literally consider their oil a curse and not a blessing, only a small step for most of the world to consider the US as the 'Great Satan'. Obama may have to use 'gunboat diplomacy' and the use of nuclear weapons and worse to retain the status of the US, and most assuredly most US presidents would have been prepared to do that. One would have hoped that someone with Obama's provenance would have behaved better.
# posted by uv : 6:03 PM
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