A congressional hearing seems to be a bit of a ramp. I'm not American so I'm coming to this as an outsider with my own impressions and prejudices and I'm not imagining BP is in an way guilt free. Most oil companies are certainly not guilt free.
But a whole hour and a half as people vent their spleens saying the same thing over and over again is perhaps a way of cooling off before the flack starts flying. And everyone has to have someone to blame as if it is one persons fault or only one person has responsibility for the way we live. Take a look at our own lives that need all that oil. There is a whole lot of responsibility there, far more than the companies that we are paying to extract all that fossil fuel so we can carry on living the way we want. The one finger pointing at BP has quite a few pointing back at ourselves. The average US CO2 footprint is twice the size of any other country.
That's quite a big elephant in the room.
The other thing that's been going round my head is that we look at all these oil companies who are producing phenomenal profits and we tie up our pensions in it, but these are not profits. This money is a debts. Any profit we make from harvesting the resources of the earth is a debt in the long term. We've got the wrong short term attitude and I'm just as guilty of this. What is seen as a profit now is really a debt to the Earth.
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