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Dear Western Morning News,
I am amazed that Dr Doy can bring himself to describe BP as a 'great company' (WMN 18th June) when it has been responsible for the greatest man-made environmental disaster ever. Sure it is good at extracting oil from from increasingly remote and difficult places. Sadly, it is totally lacking in a contingency plans when things go badly wrong. The consequences of mistakes in this industry, like the nuclear industry, are so catastrophic that human error simply cannot be acceptable. Dr Doy's complacency about the industry's 'mistakes' is worrying, to say the least.
BP may have the cash flow to clean up the mess and for compensation claims but eleven people have already died, not to mention numerous pelicans and other sea birds and sea mammals. They will continue to perish whilst their food source has been destroyed. Also, will the communities so dependent upon the sea recover their social cohesion and sense of community, or will the fabric of their lives be for ever ton apart by this vandalism of their environment? Obscenely, in the their 'clean-up' campaign - which involves setting fire to oil on the ocean surface, endangered turtles are being burned alive - and BP will not allow boats in to save them!! Not my definition of a great company!
The oil industry has much to answer for - sure it has supplied an abundant and, until recently, cheap source of energy for over a century, but it has tended to benefit to few at the expense of the many. BP are also busy trashing the boreal forests of Alberta to extract oil from the tar sands - a process that results in the release of more greenhouse gases per year than the whole of Denmark, uses twice as much water as the city of Calgary, has left a scar on the landscape that you can see from space and destroyed natural ecosystems that will never recover.
And lest you should think I particularly have it in for BP, I don't. Those of us with long memories remember what Shell did in Nigeria to the Ogoni people - contaminating their homelands and then standing by whilst those who defended it where executed. Esso funded George Bush's election campaign, support the anti-Kyoto 'Climate Change Coalition' and were responsible for the Exxon Valdez disaster
At present our whole economies and, indeed, civilizations, depend upon oil - that is why these huge and catastrophic risks are taken and the earth is being desecrated. We have to wean ourselves from our addiction to oil and, yet, what policies are our political parties putting forward? They are paying lip service to the issues of alternative energy supplies, energy efficiency, efficient transport systems. They are certainly not looking at the structure of our society that is so dependent on oil. Oil is a finite resource - yes there are reserves below the earth but, as we can see, those are no longer the easily accessible ones. They are either hidden deep below our oceans and so, when things go wrong they cannot be quickly remedied, or they are beneath our few remaining areas of wilderness and in a complex mix that requires a huge amount of resources to separate.
Ironically, BP now stands for Beyond Petroleum and their website boasts a mix of energy sources. I suggest the best reparation they, and the other oil companies, can make is to stop their oil exploration and use their vast financial assets to develop clean supplies of energy.
Yours sincerely,
Lindsay Southcombe
Mid and East Cornwall Green Party
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