{"id":965,"date":"2013-01-21T20:08:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T08:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/new-zealand\/press-release\/when-big-oil-comes-to-town\/"},"modified":"2024-07-12T15:52:51","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T03:52:51","slug":"when-big-oil-comes-to-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/aotearoa\/story\/when-big-oil-comes-to-town\/","title":{"rendered":"When Big Oil comes to town"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

Today was the first time in about a week I woke up feeling anything like human.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been laid low for the past few days with some gruesome combo of motion sickness and a wicked head cold.\u00a0 When I feel a filthy lurgey coming on, I like to wrap up, get horizontal and read a good book; a luxury I rarely allow myself enough time to enjoy when I\u2019m feeling fighting fit.\u00a0 Some people like to match wines with food, I like to match sicknesses with books.\u00a0 Call me weird, I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

I partnered this particular lurgey with\u00a0Vultures\u2019 Picnic: In pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-finance Carnivores<\/em><\/a> by Greg Palast; an \u201call the president\u2019s men\u201d for Big Oil.\u00a0 I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys a fairly thick tome of investigative journalism with a hint of the Gonzo thrown in to make the bitter facts more palpable. \u00a0It is one of Joel (our Captain\u2019s) favourites.<\/p>\n

Thumbing through the book in my sickly stupor I thought of something I hadn\u2019t thought about in years. \u00a0It happened about the time that Big Oil came to my home in Scotland.\u00a0 We were an average family on an average wage in an average little town on the East coast of Scotland.\u00a0 I had seen two movies in my whole life; \u201cLive and Let Die\u201d and \u201cJaws\u201d, that was two more than my best friend and neighbour Kenny Welsh.\u00a0 Kenny had been born with no neck because of that thalidomide drug. \u00a0We were firm friends and went everywhere together.\u00a0 On Sunday\u2019s we\u2019d be taken on a drive in the country in my dad\u2019s pride and joy; his aged Ford Cortina.\u00a0 We\u2019d always finish off the trip with a stop at a road side fish smoking hut and buy some \u201cArbroath smokies\u201d a deliciously salty snack of Haddock that has been preserved in buckets of salt and then smoked. \u201cNom Nom Nom\u201d.<\/p>\n

Legend has it that the fish store in nearby Auchtermithie (yes that\u2019s a real place) caught fire one night and in the morning the locals discovered some of the salty preservation barrels had caught fire cooking the haddock inside.\u00a0 Much Nom Nom Noming ensued and the Arbroath Smokie was born.\u00a0 Me and Kenny sitting in the middle of the back seat of my dad\u2019s Ford Cortina, my big brothers sitting at the window seats on each side to keep us safe, reeking of salty, smokey fish, these were innocent times.<\/p>\n

Then the next year Kenny died, and my world changed.\u00a0 Big Oil came to town, and first it came with money.<\/p>\n

When Big Oil arrives it comes with an agenda; get the locals drunk on money, lots of money.\u00a0 The notion of \u201clots\u201d is relative.\u00a0 When the Oil companies came to Scotland \u201clots\u201d of money meant enough to buy a new T.V. and to go along with it, to show you were really in the money, the height of modern technology – a Betamax video recorder.\u00a0 Everyone I knew whose dad worked on the rigs had a video recorder, and no one else.\u00a0 I was about eleven at the time and I remember going round to my friend\u2019s house to watch the latest video nasty \u201cEvil Dead\u201d I thought it was Amazing!\u00a0 The next week we watched a bootleg copy of \u201cA Clockwork Orange\u201d with Arabic subtitles.\u00a0 What an education! There was a new world out there and I wanted in on it.<\/p>\n

Now the thing that happened quite quickly was, with the kids at home watching video nasties, and the Dad\u2019s away at work on the Rigs, the family unit fell apart.\u00a0 Dads would come off the Rigs, stressed from the dangers and from three weeks at sea, they\u2019d get drunk for three weeks and then head back to work.\u00a0 Listening in to the chit chat at the mum\u2019s coffee mornings (do people still do those?) I could tell that this wasn\u2019t a single family\u2019s problem, but it was rife across the town.\u00a0 Reading Palast\u2019s book I realise that this experience wasn\u2019t exclusive to Scotland, it seems to be big Oil\u2019s M.O.\u00a0 Money and alcohol, and that\u2019s before they spill any oil.<\/p>\n

These days Auchtermithie is better known for her sick seas and the whales that get stranded on her beaches. The thalidomide drug has been banned and the pharma companies forced to pay out \u201clots\u201d of money (read enough for a big T.V. and whatever the equivalent of a video recorder is these days) all due to the force of people power, but that doesn\u2019t relieve Kenny\u2019s mum\u2019s pain any.\u00a0 And last year in the Scottish oil fields there were more than two hundred Oil Spills, that\u2019s right, two hundred<\/em>! but they don\u2019t make the news any more, you need an apocalypse like the Exxon Valdez or a Deepwater Horizon to make the news these days.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m getting at, I guess, if I\u2019m getting at anything at all, is that we know we have it sweet in New Zealand, this place really deserves the moniker \u201cGod\u2019s Own\u201d. Let’s keep it that way.<\/p>\n

When Big Oil comes to town, it isn\u2019t just the spills and the bad times you have to worry about, it\u2019s the \u201cgood\u201d times too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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