Like myself, I think you're going to be
very interested in this story that we're
going to tell you
and in this age of missiles and man-made
moons, it takes on
added significance...
 
Have you ever sat at a wobbly cafe
table and spilled your coffee?
Annoying isn't it? You might get a stain
on your trousers.
So what do you call it when a drilling
rig explodes
releasing millions of gallons of crude
oil into the ocean?
Oh, that's an oil spill.
Good evening, I'm Shannon Bream
in tonight for Bret Baier. President Obama says
the Federal Government shares
responsibility for the conditions that
led to the disastrous Gulf oil spill and
he vowed today that things are going to
change. 
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 was
called a ''spill'',
as though it were an unfortunate coffee
accident, but investigations found that
there were already known problems with
the well.
So to use the word ''spill'' sidesteps the
fact that someone might be to blame.
Public debates about science and the
environment are sometimes won or lost as
soon as the language to describe things
is chosen.
That's why the American pollster, Frank
Luntz, once advised the Republican Party
it's time for us to start talking about
climate change
instead of global warming because
climate change
is less frightening. Climate change
sounds like what happens when you go on
holiday
or turn on the air con. It also hides
the truth that most global warming is
caused by burning the oil that hasn't
been spilled.
 
 
Good, erm, well...we..errr, first of all
I...
there is...the err...the globe is warming...
Exciting new alternatives to
burning oil include bio-fuels
a name that sounds nice and natural. But
crude oil is made from dead plants and
animals
so it's just as bio as the corn that's
turned into biofuel
and burning bio fuels releases
greenhouse gases too.
Some people think we should call them agrofuels
which sounds more obviously like trouble.
Another potential energy source is
something called clean coal
at least if you believe Mitt Romney. He
said
By the way I like coal. I'm going to make sure
we continue to burn clean coal.
He didn't explain how you can continue
doing something that you never started
because clean coal doesn't actually
exist.
So right now, clean coal is the energy
equivalent of a unicorn.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Attractive terminology makes everything
sound better,
whether it's clean or bio or even
organic. Organic food itself is a
feel-good term of Unspeak.
Organic is often contrasted with
chemical farming
but chemicals are all there is. Organic
farming standards also allow the use of
some toxic pesticides,
the difference is that organic
pesticides are natural but then so are
deadly spiders
and syphilis. Using terms from nature and
farming for rather less idyllic
practices is a common trick.
The Japanese killing of whales is often
referred to as a harvest.
Well, what you normally harvest is a
plant crop.
To call the killing of mammals with
explosive harpoons a harvest
is deliberately to Unspeak violence
against sentient beings.
 
Environmentalists like to advocate what
they call Green Living
which doesn't mean dressing up like
a leprachaun or Kermit the Frog.
But how nice is nature anyway?
The philosopher David Hume said that of all words
there is none more ambiguous and
equivocal
than nature. Some people speak of nature
as a benign friend to the economy
a source of natural capital and natural
wealth
but nature also seems to be an
inscrutable source of natural disasters,
even if some natural disasters like
Hurricane Katrina
are made much worse because they are also
human disasters caused by bad planning
and response
and subsequently blamed on a nature
who can't talk back.
Earth loving dreams will continue to
invoke the eternal
benign virtue of Mother Nature
but in a future a pandemic disease
and climate chaos caused by burning
fossil fuels
it looks more as though Mother Nature is
going to be out to get us all.
