The BP oil spill (is that even the right word?) has been on our minds a lot lately. It’s a disaster unfolding before our eyes and we are powerless to stop it. Yesterday we discussed whether we know how to clean up the BP oil spill or not. There’s been a lot of people with ideas that sound simple but really aren’t (Bobby Jindal’s let’s build miles of barrier in 5 minutes idea comes to mind). Al Giordano at The Field would like us all to have a little reality check.
I don’t know how to cap the big oil leak in the Gulf and truth is neither do you. And even if it is capped in five minutes from now, the damage is already done.
That said, as a longtime vocal opponent of off shore oil drilling, and proponent of renewable energy, I wish to publicly disassociate myself from all the newly concerned voices screaming at the top of their lungs that the government must “do something” if they don’t come with concrete suggestions for what exactly can be done. They do not represent me and please don’t ever confuse me with them, okay?….
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Okay, just this once, I will point fingers. You know who is to blame in addition to BP and the government that allowed this oil rig to be built? Every single one of us that ever drove a car, got in an airplane, or drank from a plastic bottle (they’re made from petroleum, too). The heavier our “carbon footprints” the greater each of us is to blame. Go yell at yourself now.
Yell at yourself especially if you live in the United States, because you use up twenty times the earth’s resources as people in other countries. You are, therefore, twenty times greater to blame for this civilization’s addiction to oil that created the market for which BP and others went drilling in the seas.
Exactly. Go read the whole thing, it’s good.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the Obama administration deserves some criticism. It’s not that they’re not responding to the crisis because they are. There are something like 22 government agencies responding to the spill and more than 22,000 personnel. The problem I see is that the Whitehouse does not seem to be in charge of the response and is letting BP run the show. It’s not acceptable that BP refused to let people see video of the leak (until forced to by the government), refused to use a less toxic dispersant (this may be an availability issue more than anything else) and kick reporters off of oil-covered beaches at the behest of BP.
Basically, there’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t know if we’re doing the right thing by using a dispersant. A dispersant simply disperses the oil in the ocean, which keeps it from building up on the coastline. All the ideas to cap the flow of oil have been only modest successes at best. BP is going to try a “Top Kill” procedure today, which has never been tried at these ocean depths. It’s hard to think of clean up if we can’t even stop the bleeding.
I guess I don’t share the pessimism of a lot of people who think that the Gulf is dead. We don’t know that yet and I’m optimistic that some things will survive this crisis. We just won’t know for years what the real effects have been. My hope is that we’ll learn something from this crisis – that strong regulations are necessary and vital and that those crazy environmentalists were right. We need to stop and think about what we’re doing and consider the worst case scenarios. We need to break our addiction to oil because of the negative consequences to our foreign policy (we’re stuck in the Middle East) and environment. This crisis is trying to tell us something important – will we listen?