Oil Spill In The Gulf of Mexico
American politicians (including the Obama administration) and the news media are focusing entirely on the wrong part of this disaster. They have already started playing the “blame game” trying to find someone evil to blame for not doing more to prevent this crude oil from reaching Louisiana. The sensationalist part.
This is more than just a total waste of energy and effort. Everyone involved is doing all they can do, which basically is not very much at all. This crude oil is going to foul the beaches and kill the shrimp and other wildlife in one of the nation's most beautiful and wild areas. The government and the media shouldn't be demoralizing everyone involved in the cleanup by already playing this negative-energy blame game.
Oil booms don't work in choppy sea waters, and dispersants are just chemicals like the laundry detergent that you put in your washing machine. Pouring many millions of gallons of these dispersant chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico may well end up harming the wildlife and being as much of an environmental disaster as the crude oil itself is.
Instead of this unproductive “blame game” the focus of attention should now be on how we as a society are going to change the regulatory environment and the laws in order to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again. No doubt deregulation and self-regulation played a big part in this mega disaster. We must not forget that only a month ago the Obama administration opened up the flood gates for more offshore oil drilling in vast areas which had been prohibited for the last twenty years.
America can learn a lot from other oil countries like Norway. There are things that we can insist that the industry do which can make oil drilling much less likely to cause future pollution nightmares like this one. If we can briefly get over our national know-it-all and arrogance of thinking that we know more than anyone else about everything, we might learn something from the other advanced countries around the world.
We have been hearing a lot recently about polluting ground water by industry fracturing rock to recover more natural gas. The law of the land protects these people from having to worry about polluting the country's groundwater. We must prevent the problem from happening in the first place. Slamming the barn door after the horses have already escaped may make us feel good, but honestly it is pretty dumb.
Yes, the American government must be supportive and helpful to all the people whose livelihoods will be destroyed by this oil well blow out. Including funding their benefits adequately. Providing enough income to them to continue their existing standard of living. Equally important is to make certain that we stop this kind of pollution from oil drilling from ever happening again.
Please note that at the same time we need to also be focusing our attention on the downside risks of nuclear energy. Not just old underground pipes leaking radioactive water into the ground water, or core melt downs. But also decommissioning of these nuclear power plants, nuclear waste transportation and permanent storage, and the genuine terrorist threat of a dirty bomb. The risks from nuclear power are very real, and we need to face up to them.
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