Are consumers responsible for the BP oil disaster?

References

[1] Dave Chameides. “Who’s Really to Blame for the BP Oil Spill? We Are.” Care2, May 12, 2010.

[2] Mark Coeckelbergh. “We’re all to blame for the oil spill.” Guardian. June 9, 2010.

[3] Some other examples:

• Who’s To Blame For The BP Disaster?
• The Bp Oil Spill: Who’s to Blame? (See comment by ‘Martin Smith’)
• The Oil spill…..who’s to blame?
• BP oil spill – who’s to blame?
• Breaking Down the BP Gulf Spill Blame Game

[4] Al Gore. An Inconvenient Truth. New York: Rodale, 2006. p. 305

[5] Mark Perry. “Consumer, Not Corporate, ‘Greed’ Is Ultimately Behind Layoffs.” Macinac Center for Public Policy, January 7, 2002.

[6] Ludwig von Mises. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. p. 21

[7] James Gustave Speth. The Bridge at the Edge of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. p. 62

[8] Douglas Dowd. Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis. London: Pluto Press, 2009. p. 59

[9] Michael Lowy. “Advertising Is a ‘Serious Health Threat’ – to the Environment.” Monthly Review, January 2010. p. 20-21

[10] Michael Dawson. The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. p. 1, 134. See also Dawson’s excellent website with the same name.

[11] John Kenneth Galbraith. The Essential Galbraith. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001. p. 35,

[12] James B. Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks, and Edward N. Wolf. “The World Distribution of Household Wealth.” United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, February 2008. p. 7

[13] Calculation courtesy of Dick Nichols. The eleven are the ten men and one woman from Australia on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s billionaires. The 800,000 households are the poorest decile (10%) according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

[14] Jonathon Freedman. “Don’t Be Fooled by Europe’s Mood.” The Guardian, May 9, 2007.

[15] Eric Toussaint. Your Money Or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005. p. 34.

[16] Dawson. The Consumer Trap. p. 144.

[17] John Bellamy Foster. Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002. p. 101

[18] David Strahan. The Last Oil Shock. London: John Murray, 2007. p. 116.

[19] based on http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm

[20] Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg. The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, 2008. p. 20, 22

[21] Dawson. The Consumer Trap. P. 144.

[22] Thomas Princen. “Consumer Sovereignty and Sacrifice: Two Insidious Concepts in the Expansionist Consumer Economy.” In Michael Maniates and John M. Meyer, editors, The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010. p. 152

[23] Bob Herbert. “More Than Just an Oil Spill.” New York Times, May 21, 2010.

[24] Dawson. The Consumer Trap. p. 144.

Ian Angus has been active in movements for social justice since the 1960s. He is editor of the online journal Climate and Capitalism, and a founding member of the Ecosocialist International Network. He lives in Ontario, Canada.
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