I sat horrified watching this for a while yesterday:
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_inte...ov_stream.html

Right now it's showing some large metal cage (?) but the camera view changes now and then, and for a while it was the oil gushing out of the hole. Terrifying.

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As a civilization we are willing to get oil from more and more remote and dangerous places. And we're pretty snug about it. I read a feature about this guy that specializes in "killing" operations, who boasts that there isn't a well he's not been able to kill, and how confident he is that this one will be no exception. That kind of technical self-suffisance makes me sick. This well might teach us a lesson... but what will we learn?

I can ride my bike to work all I want - great! - but that's just the peak of the iceberg. Everything we consume heavily relies on fossil fuels, including services such as the Internet (how much energy used by a single google search? a post on TeamEstrogen?), television, health care, etc. All things we take for granted. Renewables, you say? Some guy did the back-of-the-envelope calculation to check out whether the UK could live only on renewables. http://www.withouthotair.com/ (There is a 10-page synopsis.) Bad news ladies: basically it would require 75% of the country to be covered in crops for biomass, 500 km of coast line to be used for tidal, and solar panels covering about 5 to 10% of the country. You'd also have to fill the sea with windmills, equivalent to twice the area of Wales. And that would be quite enough at current levels of use. To say nothing of the mining and destruction required to make, say, electric car batteries.

The conclusion is obvious: the only way is to drastically reduce our consumption, not just of direct energy (in our homes) but of everything. Or to keep watching live, in horror, as millions of gallons of oil transform the Gulf of Mexico into a dead sea.

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If you read this far, thanks for letting me vent.