unless carbon dioxide emissions are dealt with he sees "very little hope for the world"
"No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are at present," said the Shell boss.
"Sequestration [of carbon released by burning coal and petroleum] is difficult but... I don't see any other approach...""People are going to go on allowing this atmospheric carbon dioxide to build up, with consequences that we really can't predict, but are probably not good."
Ron Oxburgh
Shell chairman
BBC News Jun.17.04
Why are people "going to go on allowing this..."?
Does it have anything to do with being made to feel helpless without their cars?
Does it have anything to do with the constant bombarding message of television, to buy cars cars cars? Big ones! And trucks! And cars as big as trucks!
And the difference between that and drugs is...
Well drugs aren't as damaging. More kids die in traffic than in any other single context.
People aren't being scared with that because the thing that would scare them, the media, is owned/controlled by the people who are making money off cars and gasoline.
Getting the perspective to see how bizarre this is is no mean feat. How bizarre it is to see grossly overweight people with nothing more vital on their minds than getting something to entertain themselves for the evening hurtling down a straight and massively wide path (go stand by a freeway sometime, or better yet walk across one, you lose the sense of how wide they are when you're inside a car), hurtling down this essentially dead path, which no other creature can use, which kills any other creature that tries to use it or cross it, hurtling down this path at, at least in California, 80 and 90 miles an hour, and at the same time releasing clouds of poisonous gas and other, less poisonous, gases that have turned out to be, while not deadly in the immediate, capable of causing the extinction of the entire human race.
Perspective requires another context. Inhuman, non-human, other. But the non-human and the other are taboo, and inappropriate. Or were. Back when it wasn't as late as it is now. No one wanted to listen to aliens about such important topics.
Or they just switch right over to total alien radio. It's all part of the wonderful war between good and evil.
The part of that that fascinates me is how cars got exempted from the judgment that's laid on everything else. Whereas drugs are bad bad bad bad, because of the harm they cause to young innocent children, cars are good good good good, even though they cause way more harm to way more children than drugs do.
But my favorite part is where the guys who were in control of things while all this was happening start insisting that they be even more in control of things now that things are so bad because of them being in control of things in the first place.
