May 06 2010

Barack “Offshore” Obama’s Brilliant Timing

This could have been a “teaching moment” for the United States.

As much as 100,000 barrels of oil, 4,000, 000 gallons per day leaking into the Gulf of Mexico!

Isn’t there a lesson in there somewhere, that any idiot could understand?

But unfortunately for all of us… and I don’t mean all of us Americans or even all of us human beings, but unfortunately for every living creature on our little blue planet…

Just a couple of weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, Barack “Offshore” Obama opened up more than 300,000,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere for offshore drilling, and now…

At an ideal time to teach a lesson about our catastrophic addiction to oil…

Our professor is dancing with Exxon, and chanting “Drill, baby, drill!”

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  1. From the Associated Press…

    A massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has become the testing ground for a new technique where a potent mix of chemicals is shot deep undersea in an effort to stop oil from reaching the surface, and scientists are hurriedly weighing the ecological risks and benefits.

    “They’re talking about using dispersants in the deep water where the oil is coming out that would prevent it from hitting shore, but would actually put it into the water column and possibly force it to the bottom of the ocean,” said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network.

    “The environmental impact of that is totally unknown. It could end up killing everything at the bottom of the ocean.“

  2. It’s not as if the planet will die tomorrow.  Oh, fish and crustaceans and sea turtles and sea birds will be deluged in a sea of toxic sludge, and the Gulf of Mexico will never be like it was before, but, really, it’s only a small section of the planet.  There are others.  And, it’s not like the ecosystem on all of planet Earth will collapse tomorrow on account of this one little oopsie, although, probably there are species that will die that we don’t even know about.

    The pragmatic, sensible, rational thing to do is to go on as we have before.

    You could argue that it’s coldly insane to wreck a part of the planet on account of a bottomless thirst for poisonous chemicals, but is it any less coldly insane than it is to build thousands of nuclear warheads when hundreds would probably suffice to destroy the planet several times over?

    We have to look at our options, really, and try in the future to only destroy those sections of the planet that nobody cares about, and forget about consequences that are too spread out for people to notice until it’s too late.  Yes, the Gulf oil volcano is bad, but there will always be some guy trying to set fire to his underwear and bring down a plane somewhere — and that, I really have to worry about, because it might affect ME in a more immediately tangible, scary sense.

    Not that everything I said above is coldly, rationally, instrumentally insane or anything.  It’s the species, man.

  3. In the realm of strange ironies, drilling on some of the undersea acreage that Obama opened for drilling was originally banned by Ronald Reagan.

    Reagan was also eager to bring down gas prices, but not at no matter what cost to the environment.

    And today that old cowboy would probably be too far left to run as a Democrat!

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