From the Edmonton Journal comes news that some Greenpeace members rappelled off the top of Calgary Tower to hang a banner that read “Separate Oil and State.”

Scott Blasken got this shot from his office window Tuesday morning after Greenpeace unfurled a banner from the Calgary Tower.

Hey, I’m all in favor of separating oil and state. But that means no strategic oil reserves; no taxes, including carbon taxes; no cap-and-trade; no regulations; no moratoriums or bans on offshore or other drilling; no special protections of any kind, including caps on liability for actual damages to private property caused by oil companies;¹ no eminent domain (ab)use; and no mercantilistic and imperialistic wars to make the world safe for domestic consumption of foreign oil. But somehow I don’t expect all of this is what the Greenpeace activists confusedly mean by “separate oil and state.” Alas and alack.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Endnotes

1. I’m not talking about limited liability for shareholders here. I’m referring to caps like the $75 million liability cap that has received so much attention in the wake of the BP oil spill, enacted in 1990 as part of the Oil Pollution Act following the Exxon Valdez spill. [↩]

About Geoffrey Allan Plauché (373 Posts)

Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Liberal political philosopher and an adjunct instructor for Buena Vista University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the Journal of Value Inquiry, and Transformers and Philosophy. He lives in Edgewood, KY with his wife and two children.

Tagged as: Anti-Statism, BP, BP oil spill, Calgary Tower, Canada, cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, eminent domain, Exxon Valdez, foreign oil, Greenpeace, Imperialism, liability caps, limited liability, mercantilism, moratoriums, offshore drilling, oil, Oil Pollution Act of 1990, oil spills, oilsands, pollution, private property, regulations, separate oil and state, strategic oil reserves, taxes, War