Opium and oil: we stopped the first
# 4058
Opium was a worldwide cross-state boundaries problem. I have been looking for leveraging that could disrupt intensifying climate change. Amatov Ghosh's book, Smoke and Ashes, shows how a mobilized press took on opium and defeated it. He also makes clear that opium addiction taken on by about 50% of the Chinese population has parallels with fossil fuel addiction by the nearly entire world population. The hint is that a mobilized editorial thrust by the world's newspapers can have a large effect, more like cultural solidarity than a legislative initiative. Here is a taste of the process/.
“In that capacity, at a meeting with the British diplomat Rutherford Alcock in 1869, the Prince made an impassioned protest that was later submitted also as a written memorial:
‘[A]ll say that England trades in opium because she desires to work China’s ruin … the Chinese merchant supplies your country with his goodly tea and silk, conferring thereby a benefit upon her, but the English merchant empoisons China with pestilent opium. Such conduct is unrighteous. Who can justify it? What wonder if officials and people say that England is willfully working out China’s ruin…?”
These words—especially the refrain, ‘All say that England trades in opium because she desires to work China’s ruin’—resonated around the world, being carried far afield by newspapers and journals. The presence of the international press within China was a relatively new development that had followed after the First Opium War: the same processes of imperial aggression that had ripped open China’s economy had also ensured that the country was no longer shut off from the world’s gaze.”
“As a result, the Prince’s protest had ‘momentous, sustained and long-term consequences … [its] sustained and comprehensive reception by audiences from Asia to western Europe and North America made it the first stimulus behind a mobilization of anti-opium sentiment on a global scale.”
The combination of strong ethical claims and wide distribution is the kind of leveage we need to counter climate destruction as carried out by oil and coal companies right through COP 28 and into the foreseeable future.
We need strong language. Oil company execs are genocidal, riding out a wave of murder, not only of people but of the ecologies of the earth, and corruption that has been clear but repressed and hence hidden from most of us for decades. We are living off the million year old carcasses of animals and plants, sucking up the remains to fuel our immodest soul and body-destroying economy We, of course, need a strong press globally to amplify the message.