Approximately one month and eleven years ago the Exonn-Valdez oil spill was being cleaned up in Alaska. Today on the news I heard that ~5,000 barrels of oil are being released by an underwater leak due to a drilling station exploding about a week ago. All of this amidst a renewed debate about offshore drilling. Yes we need to get some of our own sources of oil, and yes we need to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern and Russian oil. Agreed. The problem I have is what costs are we willing to pay? Are we willing to wipe out entire ecosystems whenever one of these "incidents" occurs? President Obama just approved more offshore drilling, keeping in line with his campaign promises. OK- I get the idea, I understand the plan, but how about we reduce our dependence on oil, period. Leave out the Foreign part. Really we are in a long term struggle against fossil fuels in general. The longer we put off the inevitable, the more it's going to bite us in the ass later. The less our economy is tied to the inevitably disappearing carbon producing fuels of yore, the more we can grow in a forward direction without the inevitable tether that will be around our feet in the future.Finally, a rough calculation based on the 5,000 barrels of oil per hour, or ~225,000 gallons/day - this spill will reach the level of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in approximately 50 days. They expect this to take months to fix and clean up.
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There must be some way to run our cars and generators on human blood instead of the black blood of Earth.
Then we could proceed to consume and waste blindly without a care - 'cause we could just grow more people or adopt cute little foreign children to bleed dry in the name of conscious-less progress. It might reduce atmospheric pollution and reverse global warming, too. My understanding is that vehicles which run on red blood emit only tears as exhaust.
Sarcasm aside, this type of disaster is incredibly unfortunate - and likely to have far reaching environmental and economic consequences. Hopefully it will put some more kindling in the fire under the Fed's greening of our economy. If the lobbyists for Big Oil and "who cares about the future, we're making money today!" movements aren't able to buy sufficient congressional votes, that is. We'll see!
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