Go to hell, Shell

While I was backpacking around Spain a few years ago reading Hugh Thomas’ excellent history of that country’s civil war, I was shocked to find out that the Observer, a paper I’ve read religiously every Sunday since I was about 15 supported the fascists.

I didn’t know at the time that it used to be a right-wing paper for about 200 years until it was taken over by a wealthy, noblesse oblige type who turned it into a liberal paper that became required reading for vegan types like myself.

But, like Bono, who once sang “When I was three I thought the world revolved around me, I was wrong”, the paper seems to be reverting back to it’s former position.

It’s partly that genuine left-wingers like Nick Cohn have gradually moved to the right on issues like Iraq where he’s in step with the ludicrous Euston group. It’s partly that they keep supporting Labour at every election. But it’s mostly the supplements they keep publishing in association with big business interests.

Recently there was a Pravda-like supplement on animal testing which may have contributed to a hardening of attitudes against opponents of vivisection. This week, they published a supplement about energy efficiency in association with Shell.

I’m sure some jokes about this have already been made, that it’s like having a supplement on human rights in association with the Taliban or a healthy eating supplement edited by Mary Harney.

Oddly enough, I actually agree with most of the stuff that’s actually contained in the supplement. There’s a piece by James Lovelock who argues that the Earth, which he regards as a living, breathing organism is on it’s last legs though as he’s 79 himself one wonders if the great anthropomorphiser is merely having intimations of his own mortality.

Things get a bit more suspect with wildly over-optimistic pieces about bio-fuels and solar. It’s not pointed out that ethanol, the bio-fuel of choice for companies like Monsanto isn’t really all that energy-efficient at all compared to the more environmentally friendly but less profitable woodchip.

Then there’s a piece called Here come the caring, sharing millionaires. And there was me thinking that Shell were doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.

It seems that it’s hip to be green again, just like it was in the late 60’s and late 80’s. In the last few months we’ve seen the ludicrous spectacle of David Cameron flying in a private jet to witness the effects of global warming at first hand. We’ve seen B.P. change it’s name to beyond petroleum. And even George w Bush has told America to use less fossil fuels.

I’m not old enough to remember the 60’s but I remember how dissiliusioned I was in the early 90’s when the economic recession wiped the environment from people’s minds as if we were all stepford wives, and I can’t help feeling that when the current economic bubble bursts we’ll all be more worried about our mortgages than about Gaia.

Except maybe that people will make the link between the cost of oil and the environmental effect this time.

Those of you who’ve seen that excellent documentary The Corporation will know that Shell are no strangers to this sort of corporate eye-washing. In it their CEO has a cup of tea with some prostestors and tells them he shares their concerns, but that he works for a corporation where money is always the bottom line.

Last weekend I went up to Rossport in mayo to find out just how cynically Shell pursue this bottom line.

For an extra €200 million Shell could put the proposed new gas pipeline offshore and leave the people of Rossport free from fear of an explosion potentially a third the size of Hiroshima. That’s a lot of money to you or me, to Shell it’s peanuts.What’s worse is what Shell regard as “acceptable risk”

To them, if 1 in a million people in the affected area die, that’s acceptable. But the affected area is considered to be the whole country which will benefit (though not a great deal, thanks to Ray Burke) and the project will be there for 30 years, so it’s OK for 120 people to die, just so Shell can save €200 million.

So that’s what our lives are worth to shell. €1.66 million. I almost wish we worth as much as the victims of 9/11 ($200million), or the people of the Falklands (£10million).

Of course I’m sure we’re worth a lot more than, for instance, the people of Nigeria which is really reassuring. After all, we are letting them have all that gas almost for free even though we’re a rich western country and not a banana republic, though we will be if Enda Kenny gets elected, according to Bertie.

Unlike many of the people who mooned at the bemused security guard up in Rossport, (that’s me, second from the left) I’m confident that if the greens have a government ministry after the election, (environment, ideally) that the shell pipeline will be forced to go offshore. I recognise that we need the gas as we’re the 7^th most fossil-fuel dependent nation, although we seem to be ignoring the a huge resource of bio-fuel in Mary Harney’s stomach which could be tapped in a single liposuction operation.

Yet if we stopped listening to people like Shell and started driving smaller cars and living in smaller cars, we could probably leave both the Corrib Gas Field and the Tanaiste’s gut alone.