Slick move BP!
I’ll be the first to admit it, when President Obama said he’ll consider off shore drilling I was a little surprised (actually very surprised). But I understood that he was dangling a carrot to get the bipartisan support he needs to pass a bill that would set limits on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Without the carrot the party of “NO” (a.k.a the Republican Party would continue to stay on the un-derailable NO train.
But in light of birds being scrubbed with dish detergent and dead sea turtles washing up on the gulf coast he rescinded he openness to it as he watched the oil slick a little smaller than Vermont float toward our coast line.
Drill baby drill, was always an ignorant statement to me. It just conjured up the same mentality of shooting bullets through a closed door because there might be danger on the other side. Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell thinks we should be drilling off shore and Queen of the Tea Bag movement Sarah Palin is still insisting that off shore drilling is a good thing and in our countries best interests. Well I’m here to tell you, what’s going on in the Gulf Coast is an eco-system changing event that could take years to return to normal. Palin on the denial trail even went so far as to post something to her Facebook page – “How could I still believe in drilling America’s domestic supply of energy after having seen the devastation of the Exxon-Valdez spill? I continue to believe in it because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation.” Yeah! What do sea turtles do anyway?
Now that being said those with “R’s” next to their names inside the beltway are a little more reserved. And that’s understandable and also the right thing to do. There are human lives at stake here, not just amphibian lives.
But here’s our situation – we are completely hooked on oil. If we ran out of it things would get primitive in a hurry and tensions would run high. Now that doesn’t excuse what happened, but I have to ask why there wasn’t redundancy built into shutting off a leak like this? Some kind of devise that could, right at the ocean floor crimps the pipe. Maybe I don’t understand what it takes to drill for oil, but I have to believe if you can drill for miles below the floor of the ocean then you can come up with more than one way to shut it off. Why wasn’t BP (or anyone who drill baby drill’s) better prepared for this? If our government wants to regulate anything it should be this. Oil companies make billions and billions in profits; they can easily afford a few more million to install a redundant shut off system.
Drill here – drill now, drill baby drill, these are terms and sayings that should sound as foreign as “More Doctors smoke
Camels than any other cigarette”, under the current light. When medical scientists had the epiphany that lighting a stick of dry tobacco leaves on fire and inhaling the smoke wasn’t good for and could possibly kill your doctors stopped answering survey questions about what they smoked. Applying that to deep sea drilling and a hemorrhaging oil well in the Gulf of Mexico that it pumping 200,000 gallons of crude to the surface of the ocean daily. It may be time to re-think this whole thing. Perhaps we need to figure out a way to loosen our grip on oil, lessen our dependency on Sarah Palin’s favorite fragrance. Lee Iacocca once asked the question, “We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves, how much clean air do we need?”. My answer – as much as my lungs can hold.
We have a teaching moment unfolding in the Gulf. What will we do with it? Develop solar, harness wind, Geo-Thermal or if you have to play in the ocean Tidal movement energy. I’m not saying that we need to stop using oil (nor is my SUV), but lessening our dependency seems to be the order of the day, just ask a Sea Turtle. What the hell is up with that?
