Oil Spill in The Gulf of Mexico, A Nail in the ...

Last fall I opined on the folly in our human conduct (see "A True Devotion to Progress for Mankind," Glebewise, September 25, 2009). I mentioned that building nuclear plants to generate energy without the viable means to store nuclear waste was folly. Well, the general concept is even more lost on us than I thought then.

The latest is a deep sea oil drilling operation has blown out, killed eleven employees, and is spewing countless thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico daily (potentially millions of gallons). The oil slick is coming ashore and destroying plant and animal ecosystems. The scope of the catastrophe is not yet known. The fear is that the oil will catch in the Gulf Stream and work its way into the Florida Keys and then up the Atlantic coastline.

Many are holding recriminations until the scope of the disaster are better appreciated, especially as a solution to cap the oil at the source on the ocean floor is attempted (see New York Times, May 6, 2010). The blame will come to rest on us all: (a) the government did not require working safeguards and (b) the industry did the drill's preventer on the cheap to maximize profits. Halliburton, the war profiteering corporation, is reportedly involved as a supplier for the Deep Sea Explorer project. With Halliburton involved the disaster has the smell of a skunk (when liability is denied by British Petroleum and others who will travel the pathway of Exxon in the aftermath of the Exxon-Valdez disaster).

What we do know is that the Exxon-Valdez tanker disaster of March 24, 1989, was never cleaned up in any meaningful sense. Tanker spill was in the neighborhood of 10 million gallons. Congress's response to the disaster was to cap oil company liability for oil spill clean-up at $75 million dollars. The Supreme Court disallowed meaningful compensation to those Alaskans who suffered economic loss due to the spill. The seeds of the current disaster have long been sown. Drill Baby Drill is a disaster for mindlessness and despoiliation of our planet.