May 16 2010

Obama’s Offshore Military “Earth Day”

Basket stars, crinoids, anemone, and crab

Basket stars, crinoids, anemone, and crab (NOAA Deepwater Coral Expedition, Gulf of Mexico, 2009)

This is the unseen world imperiled by the uncapped oil well a mile below the surface of the gulf. The millions of gallons of crude, and the introduction of chemicals to disperse it, have thrown this underwater ecosystem into chaos, and scientists have no answer to the question of how this unintended and uncontrolled experiment in marine biology and chemistry will ultimately play out.

Some of the press may be wondering why we are announcing offshore drilling in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base.  Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me.  The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels.  And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.

obama-jet

4 comments

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  1. The leaking gulf well, drilled by the now-sunken rig Deepwater Horizon, has cast a light on a part of the planet usually out of sight, out of mind, below the horizon, and beyond our ken. The well is surrounded by a complex ecosystem that only in recent years has been explored by scientists. Between the uncapped well and the surface is a mile of water that riots with life, and now contains a vast cloud of oil, gas and chemical dispersants and long, dense columns of clotted crude.

    “Everybody fixates on the picture of the cormorant or the bird flailing around all covered with oil, and while that’s obviously sad to see, no one should assume there’s not similar things occurring in the open ocean,” said Andy Bowen, an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

  2. Thank you for thinking in 3 dimensions.

    I believe BP used dispersants to break up the oil, preventing it from reaching the surface, which would have more realistically shown to the world, the actual scope of the ongoing spill.

    Again, here is what lies under our normal view.

    (please click & go to “original” size.)

    Vivid Aquarium

  3. for an earth day speech. To use earth day to launch a weapon deliverer to be used for killing people for their oil or other resources and set the world on fire while they are at it is chilling. Talk about mind bending doublespeak. the government has no control of the corporate entities they own the world. It is delusional to ‘believe’ that corporations who are blind by nature to anything but profit and now are the US government will provide solutions or offer any respect for anything that is alive, from our society to our world they are only interested in destruction. Our beds are burning as are the other living beings that live on this earth. you cannot reform killers and they protect nothing but their own carnage and mindless ‘profit’. We need to take it back it does not belong to the ‘free market’ crisis capitalist’s not the world our our country.

         

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