Oil in drinking water

Imagine that you have an acquaintance who once often visited your friends. But his friends began to notice that he was behaving rather indecently: he was rude, broke things, stuck his nose where they weren’t asked, it was disgusting to go to the toilet after him, look, he would start spitting on the floor... And now no one invites him, and more Moreover, everyone openly expresses their hostility to him. Then you call him and say: come to me. I can do everything. I don't even care about the floor. This is how we live here ourselves.

Strange situation, isn't it? It's somehow implausible. On a personal level, yes. But at the country level, this is exactly how we behave. We can do anything. In our country, we don’t have to repair long-corroded and leaky oil pipelines, flood entire hectares with oil, and not even think about removing it. You can quietly, while everyone is relaxing and celebrating, pour something very poisonous into the river. You can take and cut down some protected forest. Shoot from a helicopter or from a yacht at some rare birds and animals; it would be nice if they were included in the Red Book, it would be more fun. You can drive people off the land and start mining something there. Or just put up a fence and say that’s how it happened. It’s possible... yes, a lot more is possible, if you have the desire. And if someone doesn’t like it, then they can hit them in the face so that they don’t perform too much.

The first half of May once again showed that this is exactly the case. In Pervouralsk, toxic waste from local production was dumped into Chusovaya. When the activists tried to figure it out and take samples, they were first taken to the police, and a couple of days later, the most active one was beaten by local police. In the Voronezh region, local residents protesting against the mining of non-ferrous metals on agricultural black soil lands were beaten by private security company officers, and the police sluggishly tried to separate the fighters.

I wonder if the local police and private security officers don’t understand that they will drink the same poisoned water, breathe the same poisoned air? Most likely, they just don’t think about it. Well, until people think about it, everything that was mentioned, and much more, will be possible.

And is it any wonder that on May 14, at a meeting of shareholders of the Norwegian oil company Statoil, which, together with Rosneft, is going to drill and produce oil in the Arctic, only 0.64% of shareholders opposed ending this partnership. Despite 70,000 signatures collected in Russia and Scandinavia. Despite the speech of a Greenpeace representative at the meeting.

Norwegians respect Norway, and drilling in the ice there is prohibited. Neither others, nor ourselves. But in Russia you can - both your own and strangers, so it’s a sin not to take advantage of it, especially when you invite them. And we are also waiting for Shell, which was asked from the American Arctic, to visit our shelf, the Romanian company GSP, which has never drilled in the Arctic, and Exxon, and God knows who else. Come, we can do it. And they will definitely come. Who cares about our Arctic ice if we ourselves don’t care? Who will respect us if we don’t respect ourselves?