Aug 10 2010
Identifying the Culprit
About a hundred days after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, it became clear that the cap on the leaking wellhead would hold. Millions of barrels of oil had spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by then, but at least we could breathe easy again, knowing that the mess wouldn’t get any bigger.
Various officials have assured us that most of the oil has been burned, collected, or otherwise disbursed, so what the heck. . . No sense crying over spilled oil, right?
Everyone is tired of hearing about it. Consequently, the media is slowly relegating this story to the back burners. Soon it will slip from view altogether. Everything but the litigation, that is. And then it’ll be business as usual, until the next big environmental disaster captures the headlines.
Meanwhile, greenies like me traipse off to the woods to escape the madness of civilization. How do we reach the trailheads? By car, of course. My car runs on fossil fuels. How about yours? I figure it takes a gallon of gas to reach the nearest trailhead and another to get home. That’s about 4 or 5 gallons of crude oil.
Short of buying an electric car or living off the grid (neither one of which I can afford), I have little choice. The socially responsible thing to do would be to carpool, but I’m not that social. So I’ll either drive to the trailhead or stay home and hike Aldis Hill again.
How many decades have we been on this merry-go-round? Too many. And there’s no end in sight. Oh sure, I could tell you about the many promising clean tech companies I’ve discovered during my research, but since I’ve lost half of my nest-egg investing in them, I probably shouldn’t go there. Fact is, the much-touted alternatives to fossil fuels aren’t really valued. Not yet. I figure it’ll take a few dozen more world-class disasters before they are. Looks like H. sapiens isn’t as sharp a thinker as he/she used to be. Or maybe all the political rhetoric is clouding the matter.
We can blame the BP executives for their gross negligence, Transocean for operating the rig, or Haliburton for the nebulous role it played. We can blame the government in general for their slow and ineffectual response, or blame Obama in particular for endorsing offshore drilling last year. We can blame those who drive gas guzzlers, the greedy guys on Wall Street who trade in black gold, or OPEC for controlling the global flow of oil, thereby forcing us to desperate measures. The list goes on. But Pogo said it best, I think: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
As long as we keep pumping gas into our cars, we are screwed.
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