Money For Nothing

Resist evil advertisements! with help from Slate.com

And propaganda from oil companies.

The Truth from The Independent (UK):

The Biggest Environmental Crime in History By Cahal Milmo, 10 December, 2007

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move "Beyond Petroleum" by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its "green sheen" by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the "biggest global warming crime" in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called "oil sands" that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists. (continued)

Since it's Christmas and we're all spending loads of money buying love for people, consider dropping a small monthly check Greenpeace's way. It's a hell of a lot more useful than the fat bills we fork over for coffee every month, and you can think of it as a way to purchase a clear(er) conscience. Those people on city streets with clipboards who try to guilt you into giving them money are pretty annoying (I used to be one) but they are doing something worthwhile, i.e. not ringing up your $300 pants assembled by Hungarian pre-schoolers.

It says a lot about the state of the world-- people acting on behalf of the environment have to shout you down and stand in your way just to be ignored most of the time if not ostracized (once a guy yelled "I hate the environment!" at me), while we all walk by quickly to where we really want to go, to buy the selves we want to be at H&M or Victoria's Secret. (Karolina Kurkova's rack is the size of a car on the Michigan Ave store's window in Chicago.)

Subversive culture isn't for sale, no matter how "indie" H&M's hoodies are. Be a punk, and don't buy anything. Except maybe some stock in the planet.