I think I already used the whole Kermit "It aint easy being green" witty title last year, so let's just roll with this one. A week and a half ago was Earth Day, if you actually care about that. What does that mean? Much like Mother's day (May 9th) you needed to call up Earth and thank it for letting you live on it. You need not send flowers, it grows its own.
So the question comes up as to what exactly you did to celebrate Earth Day. How exactly did you go green and what are you doing a week and some change later to maintain that green going? Me for example, I have being doing the following:
Showered in a low flow shower
Took a dump in a low flow toilet
Wore a green lantern shirt
Used a canvas bag while I shopped at the Farmer's Market.
All things that promote the whole greenness and what not. But perhaps we should think of more ways to help the environment in the future. It is all about thinking of new energy sources, right?
Oh.... so oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. That's good to know Mr. Obama. So what Sarah Palin has been saying all along about drilling for oil isn't too bad? Hmm I suppose I can live with tha..... what's this?
Eighteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon rig operated by BP America 41 miles of the Louisiana coast exploded. The giant spill has not yet reached the beaches of the Gulf Coast, and there is a chance the damage can be limited by setting some of the oil ablaze.
Obama’s claim that oil rigs did not cause any spills during Hurricane Katrina is simply false, as the Wonk Room reported in June, 2008, when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other conservatives made the same false claim:quote:
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs. [MMS, 1/22/07]
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.” [MMS, 5/1/06]P
On April 23, three days after the rig caught fire, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama’s support for offshore drilling was unchanged.
Oh yeah, just put more water on the oil...
Not more than 2 weeks after saying drilling for oil is not dangerous to the environment we get a massive oil spill that has pretty much spelled doom for the Gulf Coast. Though, I suppose we are all at fault here. If we didn't have such a chemical dependency on oil to drive our society, it wouldn't have much of a need to crank out so much oil.
Major blame can go towards BOP as it didn't work. Which is a multi-million dollar piece of kit at the bottom of the ocean that's designed as a pair of hydraulic plates to close off the well by cutting the drill pipe if necessary. They pressed the big red button and nothing happened. Which in regulatory terms means that the 'oh shit' button of last resort can be as unreliable for unknown reasons as the system itself. Which is always a great piece of mind to have.
So now they have to drill down a side wall starting three thousand feet below sea level, pour concrete in and hope they can close off the oil leakage. Oh, it'll only take two months or so, no biggie.
As a friendly reminder that no one gives a shit. Remember that a jury hit Exxon Mobil with billions in punitive damages for the valdez spill, and then after a decade of appeals the supreme court reduced it to a tiny fraction of quarterly revenue. BP quarterly revenue is right around 10 billion right now. There will be no meaningful consequences to this whole mess.
As much as I would like this incident to at least bring awareness to the American people to their senses regarding offshore drilling and sustainability, literally nobody gives a shit. You could serve fried chunks of burnt pipe in a drilling fluid sauce as an appetizer at Razzoos and nobody would fucking care.
But for those who do, here's some boring numbers, please just scroll by if you're not a math professor:
- 50% of shrimp catch comes from the affected area.
- 70% of north American migratory waterfowl species use this as a prime wintering spot; now is also peak migration for neotropical birds landing from across the golfo de mexicanico. so about 25 million birds are going plip plop into the oil each daily
- The exploded rig is one of about 4000 off the coast of Louisiana, about 4000 of which don't have emergency shutoff gear / equip slots (or are affected by class restrictions) so, odds are passing fair that this may happen again
- At least 2 presidents have publicly underestimated/downplayed the volume of this spill; the organizations they chair range in acronym length from "BP" to "USA". coincidentally this is the number of presidents who are stinky jerks
Especially tragic is that emergency shrimping season opened to allow a final over harvesting before poison wipes out the remnants of shrimp culture as we know it. BP stock fell 2 whole percent when the news came out and should be dropping faster than the rock they plan to put over the hole. So at least the market is meting out justice...
I'm not gonna compare this to rape because that's not very feminist like, but it does conjure a metaphor of the forced penetration of mother earth (personified). Suffice to say, the Gulf Coast is pretty much fucked and Florida could be really screwed over considering the way the water flows there.
So far 9 million barrels have already spilled covering 6000 square km, so if the entire 3 billion barrels this well holds, it will cover the whole gulf of Mexico, which is 1.6 million square km. The perfect storm, and frankly, as much as I like people, I have to side with mother nature on this one.... I just hope that a hurricane comes, lifts up the oil soaked water and at the same time of it being rained down on America, gets lit on fire. How else would we know of the coming Ragnarok?
I'm sure I'll write more about this in the future. I just want to say one thing.. BAD AMERICA! BAD! Fuck you Sarah Palin. Fuck you Big Oil. Fuck this world.
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