Spill Baby, Spill!
I’ve been in numerous debates with friends and family over offshore drilling ever since Sara Palin uttered that famous “Drill Baby, Drill!” during her campaign speech. Unfortunately my argument can be easily illustrated just by reading any of the recent headlines about the recent BP drilling disaster in the Gulf Coast. What’s most concerning is that we pushed humanity’s technological capabilities and now we have no known way to stop this “spill” from potentially destroying all of Earth’s oceans. In fact, I think we should stop using the word spill because to me a spill is something that is done and over and we can begin cleaning up; not the case with the current flood of petroleum continually blasting into the Gulf of Mexico. If you look to my new GreenPeace widget on the right-hand side of my blog you can actually watch it tick out the gallons of oil being spilled off the coast of the United States as I type this. Pictures of the disaster are everywhere and show just how enormous this crisis has become. Some interesting calculations that I’ve come across indicate that one (1) gallon of oil can ruin about one (1) million gallons of water. We know that there are about 31 gallons of oil in a barrel. That’s 31 million gallons of water ruined per barrel. The hole drilled deep into the Earth’s crust that is uncontrollably shooting 5,000 barrels of pressurized oil into the Gulf of Mexico is destroying a terrifyingly vast swath of our environment each day since April 20, 2010. Worse yet, our technology to drill seems to have outpaced our ability to recover from this disaster. We are all in far more danger than is currently being reported and IF, that’s a very big if, we can stop this environmental catastrophe in time to stop the demise of the entire planet we have got to do more as individuals to reduce our reliance on petroleum immediately. We also have to stand up and say no to more offshore drilling. Even if we manage to survive this cataclysmic event, the repercussions of extending our capabilities without understanding the implications or providing sufficient safeguards will be felt for generations to come.
Filed under Environmentally Focused, Events, News | Tags: BP, cataclysm, catastrophe, disaster, environmental impact, gas, GreenPeace, Gulf of Mexico, oil, oil spill, petroleum dependence, spill, technology | Comment (0)
