Saturday, May 19, 2012

Still raging : the age-old war over the limits - if any - to human potential

      HALIFAX - By all-party agreement in the legislature, it is the law in Nova Scotia that no one can express doubts in public that enormous amounts of oil will not be soon found off Nova Scotia's shores.
     So naturally the news that the province's last remaining oil refinery is to close or become a terminal only, hit many people here very hard.
   Because, because, because of who owns that that oil refinery.

   It is/was owned by Canada's largest oil company Imperial Oil, which itself is owned by the world's largest DENY-ME-NOT oil company Exxon-Mobil , aka Standard Oil The First, the House than John D Rockefeller built.
     If the biggest guys in the oil biz are having doubts about Nova Scotia's future oil prospects, shouldn't the natives on shore, awaiting their $24 in beads and trinkets, be getting a little worried?
   Exxon-Mobil, it is fair to say, are the most utopian corporation on a planet hardly short of utopian businessmen.
    It had funded virtually all of the usual suspects in the carbon pollution denial business and officially, at least, in public , at least, they see a bright future for oil for a long,long time and feel sure, if there is any carbon pollution of the atmosphere, human ingenuity can easily solve it.
    They are thus this planet's principal SKY GODS, Utopians who view human potential as essentially limitless.
    By contrast, those who embrace the metaphor of Global Commensality are Realists who fully accept that humans are mortal biological beings, with constant biological needs, living on a small rare human-inhabitable planet that is, none the less, materially restrained in most ways.
    Deniers versus Doomers ?
    More accurate, by far, to see this civil war as being between
Utopian sky gods, high * in the sky above Nature, versus down to earth Realistic earthlings.....

* High, only in the pharmaceutical sense, of course....
  

No comments:

Post a Comment