Let's be honest: Oil really is disgusting
Oil is a very useful but truly disgusting substance. Fossil fuels have been foundational to modernity and globalization, but the addiction to oil has had hideous consequences, in the form of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, immense environmental degradation, dreadful impacts on human health and the perversion of built environment. Oil dependence has skewed foreign policy, entrenched resource curses, given reason for wars and dominated the political economy of entire nations, empires and continents.
Across the world, the BP disaster focused minds on the true cost of oil. Only after 85 days and an estimated 184 million gallons poured in to the Gulf of Mexico was the spill finally staunched. The scale of the catastrophe, the galling corporate response of BP and the fact that it was the USA suffering from the disaster all contributed to drawing the attention of the world’s media. But the BP Deepwater debacle is hardly an isolated event. For example, on 16 July two pipelines exploded in Dalian, Liaoning province, China spilling large amounts of crude oil into the Bohai Gulf. And all the while there is the ongoing tragedy of the Niger Delta, where decades of oil spillage have wrought appalling social and environmental consequences.
All of these calamitous spills are rooted in the global economy’s reliance on oil. And the longer our global oil dependence lasts, the harder the stuff is to find, to the point where resource companies are looking miles deep in the sea and underground, pursuing the environmentally filthy business of tar sands, or seek to penetrate the last wildernesses in the hopes of a strike. If ever there was a path dependency that needs to be broken it is our craving for oil. So as the disasters mount up, peak oil looms and the threat of climate change becomes ever more immediate and ominous, can we break the addiction?
There is hope to be found from an unexpected source, because it turns out that humanity has a track record of managing to break an oil addiction. As Charlotte Epstein describes in the opening passages of her absorbing work The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse, whales once ‘comprised a strategic resource, a key raw material, a fuel, and a food’. Whale oil was an everyday product used, for example, to light street lamps. But in the space of a few decades, the global community completely abandoned whale oil as a form of energy. Today most of the developed world regards whaling as a disgusting practice and it would be unthinkable to kill cetaceans to use as fuel. As Epstein herself notes with restraint, ‘when the reliance on oil raises increasing questions, this in itself is food for thought’.
Epstein persuasively argues that a key element in the monumental shift away from whaling, was a complete transformation in how whales are socially constructed. From being considered a fearsome resource to be exploited, whales became a wonder to be treasured.
The whaling story suggests that if as a global community we are going to break the oil habit, then we need to start talking about the stuff differently. We need to start regarding oil with a new honesty as disgusting: as poisonous, deadly, smelly and wasteful. We need a discursive shift that sees art galleries and sports teams alike refuse sponsorship from fuel companies, because they don’t want to be associated with something so truly foul and that sees shareholders unwilling to invest in a product that has become so embarrassing.
We need to make oil socially unacceptable, so it becomes axiomatic among the global community that our addiction must be broken as swiftly as possible. We need to reach the stage that every time 'oil' is mentioned, our brains should prompt the reality of the substance: death, destruction, pollution, mayhem: dead animals, dead people, choked air and toxic tides. Shocking images like these, of workers drowning in the Bohai Gulf spill, must become the immediate mental association.
We can’t make the transition to a post-oil global economy overnight, but if we want to make the change happen we need to make sure the power of words is on our side. And that means we must start talking plainly about oil as the disgusting polluting poison that it truly is.
