Mad as Hell

From where I sit, it all comes down to strategy: there's the strategy that says "Stop the oil leak. Period." And then there's the strategy that says "Cap the well - we'll get the oil later."  Which one do you think we're pursuing? My friend John said it best:

We ought to set off a small tactical nuke down the BP hole, and seal off the ocean floor with less fallout, so to speak, than letting the oil flood the Gulf."

Nukes sound so dramatic - and then you look at the pictures.

Welcome to Day 45 of what is now the worst environmental disaster in our nation's history. I don't know about you, but whenever I see the coverage I start to weep. And then I get outraged. And then I weep again. Rinse and repeat repeatedly throughout the day.

Honestly, I'm not sure which is worse: the ineptitude or the lies.

 

Oil rig

The rig wasn't supposed to blow up. Wasn't supposed to be capable of sinking. And if the unthinkable happened, we were supposed to be able to stop the oil. Cap it. Cover it. Kill it. At least contain the flow, prevent it from landing on the marshlands. The beaches. The reefs.

Or not. 

And so here we are, killing, and I do mean killing the Gulf.

Commercial fishing industry? Dead.

Fly fishing industry? Dead.

Tourism? While the eco-tourists will have plenty of opportunities to perform good deeds in the future, the rest of it is dead, and for a good while.

Indigenous people living off the land? Dead, or rather, displaced, in another week or two. Funny that BP won't send any officials to talk to those guys. They sent some boom, but not enough boom. But some nice folks who lived through the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska drove down to help their brothers and sisters understand the dreadful future ahead.

Birds, fish and wildlife. Dead. Maybe for generations.

Regular folks, those hardy souls cleaning up after BP are falling sick every day, up to their necks in toxic oil that's been treated with toxic dispersant. But there's no need to give them respirators because they've simply come down with food poisoning. I can just smell those mesothelioma lawyers sharpening their pencils for the class action suit to come. 

My vote is that Tony Hayward be stripped to his shorts, given a bowie knife and forced to live off the marshland he's destroyed for the next 5-10 years - by himself. He can go back to his summer estate when the water becomes potable and the wildlife have returned.

Look, I know the oil companies are evil. A necessary evil. But this is more evil than I can swallow. I will never buy BP products ever again even though they used to be my preferred gas provider. I believed a lot of the crap they were spewing on TV about their support for alternative energy. And there's an ever-so-convenient ARCO one mile from my house. I used to say to myself "for an oil company, they seem to be rather environmentally-sensitive." Ha. Five bonus points for pulling one over on the marketing person. Now I would, ironically, rather spend more money driving further for gas than to give BP another dime of my money. They need to take their butts home to the Queen and get back to poisoning their own kin.

If this disaster had taken place off the coast of England do you really think we'd be looking at 45+ days of massive oil pollution? But hey, it's only Louisiana. Florida. Texas. Those daft gits will find some way to survive. 

Mr Hayward checks his watch. Is it time for my eight weeks of vacation yet? I hear Morocco is lovely this time of year.  

 

Comments

[MylesWildes48]

The ineptitude ought to be a possibility

[kitty]

[this is good] Yep. I'm so tired of amoral corporations.

[Mark]

You know, corporations are by design amoral, and always have been. The problem here is our continuing failure to recognize that something will always go wrong - the worst-case scenario will, eventually, come to pass. If the worst-case scenario has you losing seven astronauts, or losing the Gulf of Mexico, and you're not willing to do that, then you just shouldn't take the risk.
We're not built that way though; we'll always take the risk, and as our technological capability grows, the downside gets larger and larger.

[Patty]

It makes me sick just to think of it. I can bare to look at the images.

[Vishy]

[this is good] I am new to your blog and I discovered it through Nancy Mitchell's blog. I love your header image of beautiful sparrows (are they sparrows?) hopping around :) I found your post very thought-provoking. Everyday when I see the news about the oil leaking in the gulf, it makes me very depressed and sad. I don't know whether this kind of mess can be ever cleaned. I don't know how they let this happen and the way the BP folks have handled this disaster is really sad. On top of this, I heard that BP might be giving a dividend to its shareholders - I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.