最近飞机上读完的书。
From Amazon
"We're addicted to oil," said George W. Bush, as though that was some kind of revelation. Well, it actually might be to most Americans. If asked, the majority of the public would probably say they only use oil to fuel their car or heat their home. In fact, oil is the essential ingredient in 100% of all our possessions, and most of our activities. No food is eaten without massive oil inputs. No iPods or flat screen TV's entertain us without oil to make them, deliver them, and fuel them. Even if we all biked to work, the roads themselves are made of oil.
If we actually stop to think about it, our oil need is beyond an addiction, for if the will is there, a junkie can be weaned from his fix. Oil is more like the water a fish swims in, so familiar and so necessary, it's not even noticed. Or, as Peter Maass says in his outstanding book Crude World, oil is oxygen.
In the U.S., we consume 21 million barrels of oil a day, but we produce only about 9 million. The rest comes from other countries - many of which are not our friends, and are not democracies. It is this foreign supply of our daily fix that gets the bulk of Maass's scrutiny, and it's an eye-opener, to say the least, because oil has a paradoxical way of making the people who live in most countries that export it poorer, not richer; the oil curse, as it's called.
With their slick corporate PR campaigns (BP - "Beyond Petroleum") and unlimited lobbying budgets, the oil companies are able to project a high-tech, consumer-friendly image as benign providers of clean energy. That may be mostly true in the United States, with its advanced legal, political, and regulatory system. But what happens to these ostensibly fine corporate citizens when they can extract oil in poor third world countries? Here Peter Maass blows the lid off their carefully contrived corporate image, with intimate and devastating personal portraits of exploitation in action. Maass blithely walks into the most dangerous civil wars, jungles, and guerrilla training camps to show countries like Equatorial Guinea, where a tiny fraction of the population aligned with the brutal dictator Teodoro Obiang skim virtually the entire gross revenues of the country, while the remaining people live in filth. To ensure their continued access to the country's riches, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil, Chevron, and others treat Obiang as a valued friend and enlightened leader. U.S. officials like Condoleeza Rice treat him as a confidante, and our own banks help him launder his plundered wealth.
And that's only one story. Maass takes us around the world as the story changes and fascinates, but the conclusions are the same. Crude World is a cook's tour of the devil's kitchen, and is too riveting to put down. Every American should read it, and know where his daily fix really comes from. We can't get off of oil today, but we might just move a little bit faster if we think about how many people have to starve for us to fill our SUV's.
- posted on 08/20/2010
颇有批判(big oil corporation owners)助纣(dictators)为虐者的味道。至少有意
无意地点出了纣(dictators)之存在。若无纣(dictators)之存在而 big oil corporation
owners 为同样之虐,那些为虐者就成了纣(dictators),而不仅是纯商业意义上的
生意者了。
纯商业上的生意者怎么为虐?生产更多更便宜的石油?或全关门全不再生产了?
语言的游戏都是那么玩的,玩着玩着就把一些读者绕进去了。
若读书不留心不小心,还不如不读书呢,因为越读就越感觉“明白”但实际是被别
人绕进去了,成了在思想上想法上被别人成功操纵的。开卷有益?不然也。开卷就
如同开各种瓶子,不小心就不知不觉地把迷魂剂喝进去了。
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