A Day in the Life of Big Oil
August 3, 2012
The graphic below is from Think Progress and it should underscore Bill McKibben’s recent comment in Rolling Stone Magazine that the fossil fuel industry should be public enemy number one.
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Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
There’s a lot wrong with this graphic I think.
It’s overly simplistic and turns people’s focus away from the problem. It’s not just “big oil”, it’s the entire industrial system and the various hierarchies and systems of oppression that are necessary to maintain it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s oil, coal, solar, or wind, as long as it’s being used to fuel a war on the earth, we’re all ultimately going to lose.
We should also remember that the blog that posted this graphic, Think Progress, is a project of the Center for American Progress which is a joke. Their politics are akin to MoveOn’s. They put pressure on the Democrats and Obama in some situations, but they always fall back in line when needed. Remember back in 2009 they provided a “progressive” justification (crappy as it was) for Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan War right at the same time other groups were finally organizing against it? They didn’t seem to worried about “big oil” then. Today you can read about how we need to save the middle class, their latest policy prescriptions (showing that they fully support the current system which you can’t have without the destruction of the earth), their plans for continued economic growth fueled by “green” energy (not possible), etc.
I think promoting this kind of analysis is just promoting another false solution like green light bulbs. Because they are just compartmentalizing problems (“big oil” = bad; “green energy” = good) they are just distracting from the real problems we face. That kind of analysis is aided when people repost this graphic without addressing it’s short-comings.