The media got the story wrong.   They reported today that BP had been forced to withdraw from new oil drilling in the Arctic.   They miss the point.   The real news is that drilling is being permitted in the Arctic region at all.   It shouldn’t be.   The lesson of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster ought to have been an accelerated global shift away from fossil fuels, particularly oil, on the grounds that remaining global supplies of oil are limited, they are increasingly found in inaccessible areas that are difficult and expensive to penetrate, and the untrammelled oil binge is incompatible with stopping climate disaster.   Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil Minister, memorably said that the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stones; it ended because human beings found a better way.   We should do so again – energy saving, energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy – not glut on oil which threatens global war as scarcity grows as well as ecological and climate destruction.   Fat chance.

The world’s governments and the world’s media still don’t ‘get it’.   The whole midset of capitalism and of contemporary civilisation is relentless exploitation to the point of supply exhaustion, geological irrecoverability, or loss of market profitability.   It points up three flaws in the human condition: the the over-mighty power of the oil, gas and coal lobbies to push their interests virtually without check, the feebleness and indeed unwillingness of governments to regulate them, and the deep reluctance of people everywhere to make sacrifices in changing a lifestyle they’re addicted to.

It is disreputable that James Watt, the evangelical nutter under Bush, sanctioned opening up the US pristine wilderness in the north-western states  to oil exploration – on the grounds that the Second Coming was so close it wouldn’t matter!   It is equally disreputable that Obama opened up US waters in the Arctic to oil drilling just before the Deepwater Horizon blow-out which forced him temporarily to backtrack, but he is now going ahead again because the US Geological Survey believes there could be 90bn barrels of oil there as well as 50 trillion cubic metres of gas.

Now China, the new world super-power, is stepping into America’s shoes.   In a story the Western media didn’t even bother to report, the Papua New Guinea (PNG) government has suddenly amended its Environment Act which previously put 97% of land in PNG under communal tenure in order to provide an important social safety net against resource corruption.   Then without consultation on 27 May 2010 the PNG government introduced emergency legislation that dissolved the constitutional rights of all landowners in PNG, including the right of indigenous people to own land, challenge resource projects in court and receive any compensation for environmental damage.   The bill was passed without being seen or debated by parliamentarians.   Why?   Because of growing Chinese control over the PNG government.

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