oleo tranquillior [translation]

This past week, Kim Stanley Robinson's new book Sixty Days and Counting came out, and I hadn't found a chance yet to visit the good folks at Borderlands Books here in San Francisco. Over the weekend I was at WonderCon, so I wouldn't be able to visit Borderlands yet again.

But they were at WonderCon! Hooray!

But they didn't have any copies yet. Much sadness.

I hope to pick up a copy from them this weekend, but by now I'm almost chewing pencils in my excitement. It doesn't help that Salon.com features a nice write-up on the book, with an amazing, incisive excerpt. The first part of the rant had me bouncing up and down with joy:

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model no one pays it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty-three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You're helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible."

Last updated by eric Wed Mar 07 08:13 2007 | omission | link