Double Flee A

This article, which ruined my illusion that it would all work itself out politically someday, made it to metafilter. Finally.
The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org)

related quotations from the discussion that ensued:
"It is in the nature of a limited company that it can have no responsibility either to the environment around it or to the people who work for it. It is no use blaming the directors - if they do anything that might reduce profits for the shareholders they will quickly be replaced. And the shareholders not only have no liability for debts incurred by the company - but they take no responsibility for the world of nature around them. If the directors can secure bigger profits by dumping poisons into the nearest river - they have to do this. If they do not, they will very quickly be replaced. If they can make more profit by halving the work force - they will have to do so or again they will be replaced. If both shareholders and directors suffer from that most uncapitalist thing - a conscience - to the extent that it interferes with profits - that company will be swallowed up by another giant that has no such inconvenient scruples."


"Modern economics, whether informed by Marx or Keynes or Hayek, is premised on the notion that the planet has an infinite capacity to supply us with wealth and absorb our pollution. The cure to all ills is endless growth. Yet endless growth, in a finite world, is impossible. Pull this rug from under the economic theories, and the whole system of thought collapses...

Our economists are exposed by climatologists as utopian fantasists, the leaders of a millenarian cult as mad as, and far more dangerous than, any religious fundamentalism. But their theories govern our lives, so those who insist that physics and biology still apply are ridiculed by a global consensus founded on wishful thinking."

"One day, in a frighteningly overpopulated, polluted and chaotic future, people who currently have their heads up their asses will pull them out and smell the devastation they've caused. Still, many heads will remain firmly lodged because of religion. These folks will only deepen their conviction in their rapture fantasies the worse things get."

"Having just finished the Harper's article, I'm left with an odd feeling about the last paragraph. The long article is packed with many statements of fact. He's an authority. But the finale is about him dropping a cow elk from a wild herd that feeds near his Montana home. An act of violence less violent than eating a tofu burger. But this last sentence talks about how his choice preserves the natural order of things, rather than damaging it, as the selfish choices of so many other people have done. This is the crux, isn't it? What's good for you is bad for the planet; what's good for me is natural. This sage wisdom of his about what effect that single act will have in a super-complex system no one can understand in total smacks of a disingenuous confidence play, or an ironic sense of self-importance."

posted by dale @ 7:42 AM