Oil spill

[Grog]

I am pretty upset about this.

In the meantime, this article is interesting:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/...driving?page=1

[shootingstar]

The British Columbia provincial govn't premier (Campbell) has offered up our oil spill experts to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1553788/

Campbell has and continues to actively promote off-shore oil well drilling by British Columbian coast. This has never been done before. And there is alot of concern about this. This whole area is virgin and wild territory/waters.

Grog's article link where author focuses on getting car drivers to reduce oil consumption/dependency by using other transportation modes for shorter car trips, is useful.

The tough challenge is convincing a huge group of people who are very accustomed to living a perceived faster pace of life, getting something instantly..ie. getting somewhere by car, which they perceive is faster (despite sometimes, congestion and driving around to find parking), have their own personal space/privacy (in a car) and be protected from the weather.

One wonders how many people will see the connection between high risk of oil spills in oil extraction that comes with communities and lifestyle all oriented around cars..which depend on alot of oil consumption.

Will they make the connection, when they can not buy fresh/local shrimp/seafood? Methinks even if the dead animals wash up onto the land near their area, alot of people still won't see the big picture. They'll still want to jump into their car several times per week, at any time, for the 3-5 mile drive to the store / bank / library / community centre...vs. cycling, taking public transit or walking or at least car-share. Or maybe the change is/will happen alot sooner.

[tulip]

I read yesterday that they have NO IDEA how much oil is spilled, and that some estimates from satellite images are in the 9-million gallon range already.

Terrible, terrible. It was not an accident. It was negligence--permissible by the industry and by the government. There should have been backups to backups. And Plans B, C, D, and E. But no, there were not.

[shootingstar]

Am curious to know though...for people living the states that border the Gulf where the oil spill is occurring:

Are most people just horrified by what they see, and just continue on with their lives, but not change aspects of their lives to reduce oil dependency?

I guess until the oil is lapping up literally into their backyard, most people won't make the change. Or they can't eat local shrimp/local seafood right now because it's contaminated?

I know it's not that easy if an area is built ..to depend on cars primarily to get around, etc.

[Grog]

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.

[SOAP BOX]

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.

[/SOAP BOX]

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