There is a
culture in the US of not taking responsibility for mistakes. It's not just in
the United States and it's nothing new. Man has been trying to pass the blame
ever since we formed societies. We're a bunch of right greedy bastards combined
with an amazing potential to be huge dicks to one another. Passing the blame
really only works when there's something or someone else to put it on, after
all.
Take the BP
oil spill in the gulf for example. Perhaps the worst oil disaster the world has
ever seen all due to gross negligence and a fair bit of incompetence. Now,
there was no way that BP could have shifted all the blame away from itself.
They owned the oil rig after all and no amount of finger pointing was going to
cause that to change. That didn't stop them from trying to shift the most egregious
of their offences onto their subcontractors. The subcontractors deserve their
own share of the blame, but it always sounded like a six year old who has been
caught with their hand in the cookie jar tattling on Billy and Timmy for taking
cookies too. It's a means of shifting the spotlight.
There is no
corporation on the planet whose main goal is to pollute the world like some
captain planet villain. The goal of a corporation is to stay in the black and
survive. Unfortunately this incentivizes risk taking and gambling and in turn
it also constitutes a need for damage mitigation when those gambles fail. It's
also unfortunate that the heaviest burden caused by these failures is often
shouldered by people who just happened to live in the area, often with no real
recourse. The corporations can throw money at the problem, they can pay for damages
but they can't ever put that oil back in the ground or decontaminate
everything. They make a momentary payment for disasters that will stretch
decades or even centuries.
Hydraulic fracking is a prime example. There is always the risk that fracking will
contaminate the groundwater in an area, even if the corporations claim they
have safety protocols or methods that will not allow it. Those can be ignored
in the interest of greater profits. It's been done before, it's happening now,
and you can bet it will happen in the future. Then there's the relatively new
development that fracking is causing earthquakes in the surrounding areas. I
don't know how they expected breaking the bedrock of an area to not have any
adverse effects, but that didn't stop corporations from acting surprised.
Corporations
have the best chance at affecting lasting change for the better when it comes
to the environment. I'm not saying they shouldn't be turning a profit, but when
it comes to the planet's health having a large margin should come second.
There's a pickle jar that I loathe to open, because who can say how much money
is enough? But come on guys, do you really need that much? Really? A person
could live comfortably off a fraction of a percent of what you make. A better
world should beat out large sums of money every time, because even with all the
money in world, you still have to live here. Why not make it better?
No comments:
Post a Comment