That was a great post BUT I disagree with her that we are all to blame. Yes, in a sense, but honestly, some people are a LOT more to blame than others. And frankly they are the people in power. And in case anyone says we get the government we voted for, that is just so not true. Grrr.

Ironically, it seems that many of the very people who voted for an administration that allowed deregulation and shoddy oversight in the name of "less government intervention" are now wondering why the government doesn't step in and fix everything.

And they talk about the younger generation being Entitled? Sheeesh.


[it makes perfect sense, by their logic: if the government takes over the cleanup it becomes a tax burden, not a shareholder's cost. And these people know how to avoid taxes...]

Where's Captain Planet when we need him? I mean, really.

(I jest, but I do so in order to not start sobbing about it again this morning.)

Not only can I not write about it I can't read about it - the creeping death of it, the fact that fixing the leak today does nothing towards the already done damage. I can't even think about it. I am glad I am not part of any group trying to think of answers because it would break my mind.

This is, by any possible measure, a catastrophe. It's looking as though it may pollute — possibly fatally — not only the entire Gulf, but large areas of the Atlantic too including most of the US east coast. This could potentially kill every fishing ground from Texas to Nova Scotia, and possibly down to the Yucatan peninsula and the Caribbean.

What's worse, there's good reason for believing that BP not only knowingly and intentionally lied to us from the start about the magnitude of the gusher, but is still lying. On even just the evidence BP has allowed to escape its control, the claim of only five thousand barrels a day is laughable. I've seen expert estimates, based on the available data, ranging from twenty times that to a hundred times.

There are two major parties at fault here — BP, who put a difficult, complex, and already troublesome operation in the unsupervised hands of a trainee manager who'd never run a deepwater well before, who cut corners and violated mandatory safety rules after the well was already overdue and over budget; and the US Government, which basically handwaved all the required regulatory approvals without any inspection or anything. From what I've been reading, honestly, almost anything BP could have done wrong, they did.

It's all very well to say that we're all at fault and blame the consumer, but, you know ... consumers have to live, have to heat their homes, get to their jobs, run their businesses, and they're sort of stuck with using the available means for that. I'd LOVE to have a car powered off a fusion bottle, or even just a fuel cell, and have my house heated and powered by a deep-well geothermal tap. But I can't buy either one. They don't exist on the market. I'd love to cover my roof with solar panels, but they're not affordable enough yet. We're only now starting to see development of practical all-electric cars, whether battery or fuel-cell powered, because it's only now starting to become something within the reach of small upstart technology companies. The big automakers, particularly those in the US, really haven't been much interested. As long as they could continue to just update a few hundred dollars worth of paint and plastic each year and sell the same old crappy car, and add or update a couple of features every four years or so, and the customer had nowhere else to go, that was good enough for them. Toyota and Honda let that genie out of the bottle (yes, there was the GM EV-1, but really, come on, it was a bad joke). Hell, GM first sabotaged Saturn, then tied Hummer around its neck and threw it off a pier, for daring to be innovative and sell cars the customers actually wanted in a way that was fair to the customer. Saturn was too successful and GM's legacy divisions couldn't compete, so GM backstabbed it.

But I could go on about all these stupidities for a long time... and it won't fix anything as long as people continue to allow it to go on over and over and over again. We have a corrupt government that we know lies to us because voters keep re-electing and re-electing corrupt politicians whom they know lie to them. We have car companies that can get away with building crappy, inefficient cars because buyers are willing to keep on buying crappy, inefficient cars. And so it goes.



(Yeah ... I'm more than a little angry and upset about this, too.)

Edited at 2010-06-04 03:46 pm (UTC)

Yes! Thank you. I totally agree.

35 miles directly south of where I've lived since I was 12 is Holly Beach. It's not like the pretty beaches you find in Florida or south Texas but on a dark starlit night you can't tell that the water is more brown than blue. The waves crash, the wind blows off the water and the beige sand feels just as gritty as white while the moon shines down lighting a dark night. I earned my driver's license at age 15 and Holly Beach is where I'd run when I needed think or just be. Sometimes as I aged I'd chance westerly to Galveston or easterly to Sanibel Island but most times it's just straight south to the water and sand I know best.

The oily blackness creeping toward the coastline is coming. When broken down to it's most basic...it doesn't matter who's to blame. It'll be folk like my friends who are fishermen with no where to fish who lose their way of life. Marshes and wildlife are dying if not dead already.

Some things can't be changed no matter how badly we wish, hope, pray that they hadn't happened. What will happen is the same thing that did during Hurricane Rita...folks will be gathering tomorrow morning on Holly Beach, Constance Beach, Johnson Bayou, Cameron coasts to do clean ups. The one thing we can do is go out and make sure that the coast is as clean as we can make it before the black goop arrives. It's our hope that this will allow easier clean up once it does. We won't wait for the government, BP or anyone else to clean up because this is our home, our coast and it's too important to leave to others. And we all pray that the predictions of an active hurricane season will prove wrong this year...not to avoid the hurricanes but to avoid more massive damage from the spill.

Edited at 2010-06-05 12:03 pm (UTC)