Selective Outrage?

A little article tucked away in an inside page of today's IHT caught my attention. Here is an extract:

For the past month, Americans have watched with growing horror as a huge leak on a BP oil rig has poured millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico...

But it is important to remember that this mammoth polluting event, so extraordinary here, is not so unusual in some parts of the world. In an article published on Sunday in The Guardian of London, John Vidal, the paper’s environment editor, movingly recalls a trip to the Niger Delta a few years ago, where he literally swam in “pools of light Nigerian crude.”

A network of decades-old pipes and oil extraction equipment in the delta has been plagued by serious leaks and spills. “More oil is spilled from the delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico,” he writes.

O.K., Nigeria may seem far away to most Americans. So what does this have to do with us?

Well, consider this: Nigeria ranks fifth among the nations supplying crude oil exports to the United States. Companies that drill in the Niger delta include Shell and Exxon.

Could it be that pollution is not so serious when it happens outside the West?