Well, what did you expect? When you have tens of thousands of off-shore oil well drilling in deep waters in an environmentally sensitive area, you are going to have a disaster. This is what environmentalists said when there was debate about opening up the gulf to oil drilling. It’s what has been said about drilling off the coast of Florida. Even the Exxon Valdez wasn’t enough to convince people that the danger of a catastrophic oil spill is both real and frightening.
One this leak is stopped, most of you will go back to your lives and your chief worry will be about how much this disaster will affect oil prices and thus the price of a gallon of gas at the pump. And, of course, that’s the problem, the real reason that these things happen. Too few Americans feel any need to concern themselves about environmental issues, or about the other consequences of our addition to oil.
Every time you use some oil, whether it’s as gasoline in your car, plastics in consumer goods, electricity generated by oil burning plants, or even adding a can of lubricant to your car, you contribute to a host of problems that at first seem unrelated. But just for fun, lets consider them.
Here’s a brief list. It’s not comprehensive. When you use oil:
- Much of the money you spend goes to governments that are hostile to the U.S. The money behind 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, a country that is supposed to be our ally, but also the country from which most of the funding for Islamic terrorists originates. We also get oil from several African countries run by brutal dictators.Most of the big oil companies are so coddled by our government that they pay little or no taxes. It makes you wonder why we allow such cozy relationships between the safety regulators and the oil companies when these companies put us at risk for catastrophic environmental damage but pay no taxes.
- You contribute to green house warming, now called Climate Change. Recent evidence indicates that the changes we’ve already triggered in our climate may take place far faster than anyone wants to believe. We could see sea levels start to rise rapidly and see a transition to much warmer temperatures in as little as fifty years. There is evidence of such rapid climate transitions in the stalagmites found in blue holes in the Bahamas.
- You help set the stage for ecological disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf spill. Like it or not, all of us who use gasoline are as much part of the problem as BP is. We’ve known for forty years that it is foolish to depend on fossil fuels and foreign governments for our energy, but we’ve done little or nothing to correct the problem.
- You use up a finite resource. Eventually, we’ll run out of oil. Long before that, it will become far too expensive to use for energy production.
There are tens of thousands of oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. There is no reason to believe that any of those wells are run any more responsibly than this well was. That means we are at immediate risk for more spills just like this one or perhaps worse. In fact, it is inevitable. There is no way to predict and allow for every possible eventuality. Sometimes, you just have to make the decision that the cost to our environment has to be figured into these decisions and we have to say no.
Contrary to the right-wing alarmists, shifting away from oil isn’t going to cause some horrible catastrophic economic downturn. There’s no reason for that to happen at all. In fact, if we can simply start to reduce our dependence on oil by two to three percent per year, we can stave off much more expensive problems, and possibly even avoid the worst of the possible Climate Change scenarios.
There are two ways to reduce our dependance on oil. We can conserve, and we can use renewable sources of energy.
Conservation is much easier than it used to be. Simply getting everyone to shift to Compact Florescent bulbs will save lots of energy. If you want to do your part, that’s a great place to start. Getting a plug-in hybrid, pure electric, or even just a very efficient automobile will also help our nation make the transition. Recycling aluminum saves enormous amounts of energy. Extracting aluminum from ore is a very energy hungry process, while recycling uses only a tiny fraction of that energy.
There are many people who are terrified of change, or so heavily invested in the status quo, that they refuse to acknowledge what’s happening. They claim climate change is some kind of liberal conspiracy. But even if Climate Change were not an issue, oil is still a bad idea, because the supply is finite and because the oil industry bleeds money out of our pockets and puts it in the hands of people who have no loyalty and no love for us or our country.
It doesn’t take much on your part to make a difference. Recycle, Conserve, and let your elected representatives know that reducing our dependance on polluting fossil fuels is important to you.
