(Photo: Peter Ma)JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Eroding US Pipeline Explosions Reported as "Gas Hikes"

There are approximately, hold on to your seat, 185,000 oil spills and pipeline ruptures that happen every single day in the United States, alone. Reports on these daily disasters are deliberately censored. And now, devastating oil spill impacts are being redefined in the media as "gas hike warnings" instead of environmental disasters.

The federal government has not enforced safety regulations; thus when eroding oil pipes rupture, Big Oil's message is: You, Mr. and Mrs. America, will pay the price with gas hikes. Not only is Big Oil responsible for creating the deadly toxic mess by not upgrading their eroding pipelines, they make hard-working Americans pay for the ruptured pipes by raising gas prices. And if that doesn't tick you off, the oil pipeline industry receives billions of your tax dollars in subsidies.

In September 2016, a main oil pipeline ruptured in Alabama that disrupted supply distribution. The corporate news reported it as a "leak." The chosen word "leak" comes directly out of the oil industry's public relations' lexicon. They instruct politicians, the media anchors, and especially the president of the United States, to use the word "pipe leak". For instance, President Obama still characterizes the worst oil catastrophe in history, the 2010 BP Deep Horizon explosion that killed eleven workers and left 3,000 miles of the Gulf of Mexico's ocean floor a permanent dead zone, "a leak".

What do you think of when you hear the words "pipe leak"? I think of a slight drip, drip from the faucet, don't you? Exactly why Mr. Obama continues to use the word "leak" to impress upon the public that it's no big deal -- just a little leak, nothing to worry about.

In addition to diminishing pipeline ruptures to mere "leaks", the new PR strategy is to describe oil spills as a warning to the public that gas prices will go up:

A leak has caused the closure of a crucial pipeline that carries gasoline to the eastern United States, a disruption that threatens to drive up prices and leave service stations without fuel to sell. A section of the Colonial Pipeline, which runs from Houston to New York, has been closed since Sept. 9 after a spill of roughly 250,000 gallons was discovered in rural Shelby County, Ala.

When the news broke over the corporate networks, there was not a word mentioned about the environmental damage to water, land, wildlife and worse, the exposure to dangerous toxins of methane poisoning and how it will contaminate water for human consumption. Instead, the message is: Gas Hike.

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." -- Aldous Huxley

"Climate change is the mother of all risks to national security." -- The Pentagon

Just as our oil-soaked politicians and the oil industry have tried through deceptive language to reduce catastrophic oil disasters and pipeline explosions to the description of "leaks", for decades, the fossil fuel industry's highly paid public relation firms have been shamefully attempting to diminish climate disruption by referring to the hard evidence as nothing more than subjective opinions. You can accept an opinion or you can refute it. However, polluting industrialists do not have the right to delete or revise scientific conclusions to protect profits, especially when climate disruption is a threat to our very existence. But that's exactly what Big Oil's public relation firms have been doing by using strategic communication methods to persuade, influence and redefine the overwhelming scientific evidence into a debatable opinion: Throw enough doubt against the wall -- and maybe some of it will stick -- just enough to confuse the public into believing that global warming is not the reality, much less an emergency crisis. Talk show hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, and media anchors are ordered to repeat climate change skepticism across Republican media airwaves and mainstream corporate networks as well.

Big Oil pays the leading corporate networks millions of dollars to not only air their promotional advertisements -- they also insist that network news departments omit "climate disruption" from extreme weather disaster reports. The forty-year goal has been to turn the science on global warming into a confusing debate since 1982 right up to current extreme weather disasters. As we all know, meteorologists and network anchors rarely connect the dots between extreme weather calamities and climate disruption.* The ultimate goal is to persuade Americans into believing that global warming is merely the forces of Mother Nature.

Nothing boils my blood more than when the corporate reporters blame global warming on Mother Nature! If you dumped poison on a tree would you blame Mother Nature for killing the tree?

As far as the Obama White House and members of both Houses are concerned, the fossil fuel industry's profits remain the highest priority over and above climate disruption even after the Pentagon warned that "climate change is the mother of all risks to national security." So that's like the doctor who knows what the cure is but due to conflicts of financial interests, he allows the patient to die.

Unprecedented: Mass Extinctions Censored in Presidential Debates

Shocking as "mass extinction" is -- that thousands of species are dying every day, our politicians regard global warming and the coming event of the 6th mass extinction as minor inconveniences that are not worth mentioning at the 2016 embarrassingly dumb presidential debates between (D) Hillary Clinton and (R) Donald Trump.

Thousands of species are dying every day. Over a billion birds have gone extinct in North America since the 1970s to 2016. Think about that: "a billion birds" gone forever, off the face of the earth never to return again. Mass fish-kills are now the new normal. Droughts are wiping out thousands of plants and drastically destroying food crops. There were thousands of varieties of apples in the mid-1800s but thanks to industrial agriculture, there are maybe four or less varieties sold at the market.

Chemical pollutants are killing bees necessary for pollination, our food-chain is collapsing, and our water sources are tainted with lead that's cancerous to our children, but the feds are as reluctant to enforce strong environmental laws that should punish industrial violators with federal crimes and prison sentences as they are about prosecuting Wall Street thieves at the big banks.

We're all on this sinking ship together -- so as birds, fish, mammals, animals, food crops go extinct -- we're next.

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{*Definition: "climate disruption": As Truthout's environmental journalist, Dahr Jamail, explained, it's important to refer to climate change as "climate disruption" to clarify that human pollution is responsible for creating the global warming crisis. Global warming is not the result of a mere cycle in nature that will pass and normalize at some point as many Republican politicians have claimed. It is a causal effect from fossil fuel pollution with irreversible consequences that will intensify beyond staggering predictions, mass extinction, as long as we rely on it for fuel.}

Jacqueline Marcus' second collection of poems, Summer Rains, was recently published at Iris Press. Her first book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. Her essays/poems have been published at the Kenyon Review, North American Review, Antioch Review, and more. Her selected essays on the oil industry, Man Cannot Live on Oil Alone / Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us is available at Amazon Kindle Books. She taught philosophy for 20 years at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California, and is the editor of ForPoetry.com EnvironmentalPress. She is a contributing guest writer for Truthout.org