Another Failed Effort


BP has admitted that its latest effort to stem the flow of oil into the no longer pristine waters of the Gulf of Mexico has failed. They claim to have another plan to implement but if we all pull out our best plans first and BP is down to attempt four or five then what is in the future is not good. The sick jokes are now popping up: BP's new oil clean up method - birds and furry animals. And a website is taking bets on which will be the first fish, bird or animal of the gulf to go extinct because of this. I hope not the brown pelican. I love pelicans.

I am not sure why this particular event of all the horrid things going on in the world today is so troubling to me. Maybe it is the greed of BP and other oil companies. Or all the short cuts we now know they took to expedite the flow of oil and make this spill more than just possible but probable. Or that our country has no power to oversee these oil shore leases because of concessions made by Bush II. Or that BP has been able to block inspections to its other rigs. Or that it has lied to the press about the enormous amount of oil spewing from this hole they drilled.

My upset is due to something more than just the fact I am intimately familiar with the shoreline effected or that I have fished on the gulf more than once or I feel for all the creatures great and small that are so horridly effected.

Maybe it is that I lived through the first oil crisis in 1970's. When we pledged better gas mileage on cars, use of alternate fuels and development of clean energy. And none of that was done. We wasted 40 years! And during that time our greed for oil just grew and grew and grew. And there have been other spills because of that greed for oil. And other wars because of oil. And we have made concession after concession to oil companies because of the finite amount of oil they can tap. And they have raised prices and recorded some of the largest profits ever made by corporations. But still they will cut corners (6 safety valves instead of 21) to make more profits.

But I think it is that in my inner self I know that this spill is not over and that the scope of it grows daily and it will end up being an ecological disaster on the scale of the eruption of Krakatoa. And a political disaster because Obama is bearing the blame he does not deserve. The drilling began almost a decade ago on this rig. And concessions on oversight before that.

But mostly this upsets me because this was preventable had we stayed the course that was talked about in the1970's.

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