The Age of Stupid Page #2

along with the dead bodies of tons and tons of ocean creatures.

Over millennia, temperature increased

and the organic matter was gradually cooked

until the sun's energy

was stored inside oil.

analyzed where the oil might be,

and then drilled 3 miles down

into the seabed to collect samples.

Hey you go Al, get yourself. Thank you

We get the samples and analyze them

for the fossil contents. The microscopic fossils.

And it's just another geo-scientific tool

in order to improve your possibility of finding oil.

In my opinion, probably arrogantly so,

but it's pretty high calling

actually to try to do that,

to try to figure out or maybe

take apart, you know, time itself.

Go back a few thousand years,

and the energy available to grow our crops or feed animals

was limited by the daily sunlight falling on the earth.

But now,

we gorge ourselves on hundreds of years

worth of sunlight every single year.

Every part of modern life is

now literally made of oil.

From CDs to plastic bags,

to medicines and computers.

From clothes and carpets to

hair gel and cell phones.

It's a fantastically useful substance.

Then there's our food,

each calorie we eat used about 80 oil calories

to produce, package, refrigerate and transport.

And fossil fuel produce fertilizers now feed

about 2 billion people who could not otherwise stay alive.

It would be wise for humanity to use the remaining oil

to build the new society which could run without it.

But we are, instead, indiscriminately

burning tens of millions of barrels every day.

It'll all be gone in about 40 years,

leaving pretty much none for future generations.

And then you see it,

and you smell it, and, you know,

it's greasy and ugly and smell so much

like money, it's just beautiful, you know.

pounds an hour, 400 pounds a second.

And a hefty chunk of those

profits came from here, Nigeria,

where most of the population lives

on less than 1 dollar a day.

This is the water we drink.

an ambition to trained as a doctor

and then work in

a home village called Cojabanee,

where Shell started

building this medical center.

Like hundreds of other community projects

across Niger delta, construction has been abandoned.

Shell maintains that's because

of the risk of kidnapping.

to be spent on community development.

But the local people share is almost

all lost to the corrupt political system.

So despite being in the most

profitable oil region in West Africa,

Layefa's village has no health service,

no secondary school, no electricity, and no drinking water.

Layefa is describing a phenomenon

known as "the resource curse".

Paradoxically, finding oil usually

increases a country's poverty.

As the oil wealth is

concentrated in hands of a few,

so the agriculture, education, and health system

of the country become neglected and often collapsed.

The local people health problems

are compounded by gas flare,

burning nights and days

throughout the Niger delta,

asthma, bronchitis, skin diseases

, and cancer have all been linked.

That gas is found alongside oil,

but, as it's dangerous to transport,

it can't easily be sold to over sea markets

. It could be use for cooking and heating within Nigeria,

but building infrastructure is expensive

so the oil company just burn it off.

Its flares emit about 70 million tons

of carbon dioxide every year

more than the annual emissions

from 10 million British homes.

they just do whatever they like.

Why are American cities designed

so it's almost impossible not to have a car?

Why were a hundred railways in cities like New York,

Philadelphia, and Los Angles bought

up and then deliberately destroyed?

Why do the electric cars get scrapped?

Why were we, along with Australia,

Why was an oil company lobbyist allowed to change

official government reports on global warming?

Why was the same PR firm employed by the tobacco industry

to persuade the public that smoking is healthy,

then employed by the oil industry to convince us

there was still doubt about climate change?

Alternative energy has been available

for 50 years, why have we barely used it?

Why were solar panels

taking off the white house?

Because right from the

early days of the industry,

the oil men and their unseen profit have had

an unhealthy influence on the people running our country.

And now, they all are

the people running our country.

And they're providing the cash, too.

Oil business isn't just

in bed with the government,

it is the government.

Here, Layefa is going to a nearby village,

Oiama, that was massacre by the government.

The village was involved in a dispute

about ownership of a piece of land,

on which Shell planed to drill for oil.

The government claimed that

the village was harboring terrorists,

and when they sent

the military in to find those terrorists,

the villagers opened fire on the soldiers.

Layefa has gone to hear the villagers' side

of the story, from Omiekma Wekid

Amnesty international investigated

the massacre and concluded that,

although the government

was responsible for the killings,

Shell Nigeria should have made sure that

their activities did not contribute to the conflict.

they burned them off.

Human history is littered, with the corpses

of people who had stuff worth stealing.

Animals,

water,

shinny things,

fertile land,

spices.

Hmm! Nutmeg slice, tea?

But when it came to stuff worth

pinching one continent had it all,

ivory, copper, cotton, rubber, wood,

tin, gold, diamonds, and people.

As cheap energy, slaves were unbeatable,

until the less troublesome

energy source was discovered,

and the new era began.

Human numbers increased 5 times over.

And with each person

wanting more and more stuff,

oil became "the resource"

worth fighting for all around the world.

Well, you want to know

the real reason why to warn Iraq?

According to the former Federal Reserve

chairman Alan Greenspan, it's a simple, 3 letter answer.

Not WMD, it's O-I-L.

You might read the ex-chairman of Shell

that said over weekend that oil can hit over 150 dollars

a barrel as world production begins to peak,

not really good news for

a country whose entire economy,

not to mention its entire way of life,

is based on cheap oil.

we left the world in a better place,

then we found it, that was progress,

the wheel, rule of law, penicillin.

It was our covenant

to our children, grandchildren;

my children went angry with me

for breaking the covenant,

they were too busy trying to stay alive

to waste energy on blame,

trying to negotiate their way through food riots,

refugee camps, and the collapse of society.

But I think my grandchildren

would have been angry,

had they survived into adulthood.

Skiing in desserts,

heating the air,

lighting empty offices,

energy is so ridiculously cheap it makes

perfect economic sense to just pick it away.

China is new bad guy, because they're building

a new power station every 4 days.

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