Tony DeyalIT IS said that those who pay the piper, call the tune. This is not true when it comes to big oil and big tobacco, particularly in the Caribbean. They are the Pied Pipers and our little Hamelins and hamlets are powerless against them.
Take the people of Point Fortin in Southern Trinidad, a community known simply as "Point". The oil giant BPTT (the national operations of British Petroleum after its takeover of Amoco) decided to tell them that the company was building a 400-metre seawall, three or four metres above sea-level, to protect one of its pipelines. The poor Point Fortin people are almost literally "cracking up". They are under stress, suffering from inexplicable increases in respiratory illnesses, and structural damage to their homes. They believe these result from the operations of a Point Fortin-based company, Atlantic LNG, in which BP has a major interest. Two beaches, including the one for which the seawall is proposed, have been lost to the community since Atlantic LNG and BPTT came to Point.
The point is that this is more than a case in Point. It is global. In July 2002, BP had to pay out nearly US$46 million for breaking strict anti-pollution laws in California. On September 3, 2000, a British newspaper asked, "Does BP mean 'Burning the Planet?'" The article continued, "BP the oil giant that is expensively rebranding itself as a green company is financing the election campaigns of most of the US congressmen with the worst environmental records, an investigation by the Independent on Sunday reveals." BP has been accused of human rights abuses in many parts of the world including Colombia where a BP-trained army unit viciously attacked trade union and environmental activists. The company long supported apartheid and is now seeking to build two pipelines from the Caspian Oil Fields to Europe that would have catastrophic environmental and human rights impacts.
A US Public Interest Group has released a paper entitled, "Green Words, Dirty Deeds: An Expose of BP Amoco's Greenwashing". Evidence includes that on September 23, 1999, BP Amoco pleaded guilty to a federal felony connected to illegal dumping of hazardous waste at their Endicott Oil Field near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The company had to pay $22 million in criminal and civil penalties. The report concludes, "Despite its green claims BP Amoco's track record suggests another colour oily black. The company with the green logo and slogan is responsible for a long list of environmental problems, ranging from toxic discharges in Alaska to oil spills in California to tons of carbon emissions that contribute to climate change."
The problem is that hydrocarbons pollute. They inevitably damage the environment. "Green" is nothing more than a convenient public relations platform, a universal bandwagon that serves to smokescreen the activities of big oil. Sports are the smokescreen, literally, of big tobacco whose major target is our youth, and the colour, oily black, very appropriate since it is the colour of lungs damaged by cigarette smoke whether actively or passively inhaled.
Last week on national television, I watched a brilliantly conceived public relations ploy unfold. A national Sports Award sponsored by a regional tobacco company. It is good positioning. It is like the mosquitoes that live in our homes. They have to be close to us because we are what they feed on. Similarly, tobacco companies associate themselves with sports because of the access they gain to young people who have been the deliberate target of the tobacco industry since the early seventies.
Tobacco Road is a dead end. When the tobacco industry reports that it provides jobs for millions of people worldwide, it does not include doctors, X-ray technicians, nurses, hospital employees, fire-fighters, dry cleaners, respiratory specialists, pharmacists, morticians, and gravediggers. Smokers who begin smoking in adolescence and continue to smoke regularly have a 50 per cent chance of dying from tobacco use. Half of these will die in middle age, losing around 20-25 years of normal life expectancy. Tobacco is a known or probable cause of about 25 diseases, the most important being lung cancer, but this number also includes heart disease, stroke, emphysema and cancer of other parts of the body. While the mortality rate for smokers and non-smokers is the same, a hundred per cent in both cases, the difference is in the timing. The result of smoking too much is coffin.
Maybe the organisers of the sports awards should also have included slogans crawling across our television screen, like, "Medical studies have proven you can still live with only one lung," or "Most forms of cancer are treatable at least for a while," or even "Smoking does not affect the foetuses of women who aren't pregnant. Given the fawning sports administrators heaping praise on them, the dealers in death might also be able to say, "Second-hand smoke only affects those who might breathe it" and "Cigarettes don't kill, matches do." Whatever the hype, the one indisputable fact is that you pay twice for your cigarettes, first when you get them and second when they get you. Just like the people of Point Fortin who will discover the truth of the Manchester Guardian's warning on Friday, May 3, 2002, that because of its effects on the environment, particularly as a cause of global warming, oil is the new tobacco.
Tony Deyal was last seen saying it is ironic that many of us who started smoking as children because it was "smart", cannot stop smoking as adults for the same reason.
