Capitalism Killing the
Earth and its People
By Finian Cunningham
‘I see a
bad moon rising
I see
trouble on the way
I see
earthquakes and lightning
I see hard
times today’
John Fogerty, Bad
Moon Rising (1969)
January 31, 2015 "ICH"
- "Press
TV" -
John Fogerty’s classic rock
song ‘Bad Moon Rising’, from the 1960s,
could be the foreboding soundtrack for what
is rumbling in America’s Midwest today.
Earthquakes have now
become a daily occurrence in Oklahoma and
other Midwest states. In the past, a
baseline incidence of quakes was two or so a
year. Now, the region is experiencing over
500 a year, according to official
seismological records. So far, there hasn’t
been “a big one”. Most of the quakes have
registered around 3 to 5 on the Richter
Scale. But it seems only a matter of time
before the Earth lashes back with deadly
force.
A report this week in the
Washington Post tells of widespread
structural damage and personal injuries from
the “swarm of earthquakes” that residents in
Oklahoma are having to endure. With
trepidation, ordinary people are fearing
that a final calamity is crescendoing.
“The earthquakes come
nearly every day now, cracking drywall,
popping floor tiles and rattling kitchen
cabinets. On Monday, three quakes hit this
historic land-rush town [Guthrie] in 24
hours, booming and rumbling like the end of
the world,” reports Lori Montgomery for the
Post.
“After a while, you can’t
even tell what’s a pre-shock or an
after-shock. The ground just keeps moving,”
says one resident. “People are so frustrated
and scared.”
The oil and gas industry
will, of course, deny any link between the
new geological phenomenon and its increased
drilling activity. But self-serving
capitalists are hardly a reliable source.
They claim that the surge in seismological
tremors across America’s Midwest is just
part of a “natural cycle” of more frequent
quakes. That’s not much comfort to millions
of people living in dense cities and towns,
with their homes mortgaged to the hilt, or
their workplaces nestled in high-rise
buildings.
No matter what the
industry capitalists and their bribed
politicians may say, there seems little
doubt that the Earth is quaking from the
so-called enhanced recovery techniques of
hydraulic fracturing. This is where chemical
fluids are injected under extremely high
pressure into subterranean wells to break up
shale rock layers and release untapped
reserves of natural gas or oil.
The injection-wells can
penetrate the earth to a depth of 10,000 ft
(3 kilometers) and the high-pressure
fracking fluid contains hundreds of organic
chemicals to punch out the raw fuel from the
rock fissures. Hydrocarbons and profits may
be gushing anew for the American industry,
but it is humans and the environment that
are subsidizing the system by bearing the
huge costs of collateral damage.
Fracking has become
the new El Dorado for the oil and gas
industry, promising lucrative profits
and a revival of flagging economies. The
US is a world leader in the practice,
where rejuvenation of the oil and gas
industry is touted as the savior of a
stagnant capitalist economy and as a
strategic lever for American global
power.
The crisis in Ukraine, for
example, is very much predicated on American
ambitions to displace Russia as the main
energy supplier to Europe. Fracking is thus
the holy grail for Washington’s global
ambitions.
But as with many best-laid
plans, there is a snag. Actually, several
potentially fatal snags. Not only is the
proliferation of hydraulic fracturing in the
US unleashing seismological spasms; the
industrial activity is creating massive
contamination of groundwater. Fracking fluid
can contain up to 600 chemicals, such as
mercury and ethylene glycol, some of which
are known carcinogens.
Millions of barrels of
chemical fluid have to be pumped into the
Earth in order to retrieve the same number
of barrels of gas or oil equivalent. These
chemicals are seeping into freshwater
aquifers and thence into drinking-water
infrastructure. Also, the natural methane
gas released from the fracking process is
not always recovered by the industry.
Instead, it finds its way into unintended
fissures and eventually home water supplies,
to the point where some households in
America’s Midwest can now ignite water
coming out of their kitchen taps.
There are now reckoned to
be 500,000 of these injection-wells
operating across the US, mainly in the
Midwest states of Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio and
Arkansas. So far, the oil and gas industry
has enjoyed a boom in profits and stock
market exuberance; and certainly several
states have gained revenues and jobs as a
result. But the steep human and
environmental costs are looming, and,
increasingly, are no longer hidden. Millions
of people living in quaking homes and
offices is a harbinger of even bigger
“costs.”
That’s capitalism for you.
The pursuit of private financial profit is
the only objective that over-rules all other
considerations. Poisoning water and people,
destroying the Earth and natural ecosystems
are all irrelevant where capitalism is
concerned. Profit is the only
decision-maker, no matter how absurd, unjust
or calamitous.
The state of Oklahoma was
reportedly hit with over 550 quakes in the
past year. In the 1930s, the red-dirt state
was clobbered with another ecological
crisis, known as the “dust bowl era.”
Millions of families were uprooted,
dispossessed and displaced because new
intensive farming practices in preceding
years had ruined the soil structure, making
it blow away in huge waves of dust. Farms
were shuttered by banks foreclosing on
bankrupt families. Industrial agriculture
and the reckless pursuit of capitalist
profit was the primary cause of the Dust
Bowl.
In his classic novel, The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck wrote
about the anguish and suffering of the
droves of people from Oklahoma and other
Midwest states, who during the Great
Depression had to migrate to California to
eke out a living as farm laborers. They
endured heartrending poverty, sickness,
hunger, death, and brutality from
truncheon-wielding cops along the way.
Eight decades on,
America still hasn’t learnt anything.
Capitalism is killing the Earth and its
people, again and again. How many
calamities must be endured under this
barbaric, irrational system? When will
we finish with it, before it finishes
us?
And it’s not just about
oil and gas, or agriculture. Capitalism
mandates imperialism, which in turn mandates
conflict and war. Anyone must see that
America’s collision course with Russia over
the trumped-up Ukraine crisis is a direct
function of US imperialism and its European
vassals. Ultimately, this capitalist logic,
unchecked, could lead to nuclear war, just
as American imperialist-capitalist logic was
behind the dropping of atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Part of the reason for
subjugating Eastern Ukraine is to make way
for oil and gas fracking in Novorossiya by
the company Burisma, whose executive board
members include Hunter Biden, son of Joe
Biden, the US vice president.
So there you have the
complete circle. Killing people at home and
around the world, and all for the making of
tacky bits of paper called dollars. Surely
human beings can do better than that.
Finian Cunningham (born
1963) has written extensively on
international affairs, with articles
published in several languages. He is a
Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry
and worked as a scientific editor for the
Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge,
England, before pursuing a career in
newspaper journalism.