America's Chernobyl?

Washington, D.C. -- As the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe worsens by the minute, and as BP desperately tries to tame an underwater gusher, one thing is overwhelmingly clear:

The intellectual foundation of the offshore-drilling enterprise -- that oil companies know how to handle ever-deeper drilling "horizons" -- is false. BP doesn't know what it is doing -- and neither do any of the other oil companies. Our technology for dealing with oil spills turns out to be almost useless -- once you dump millions of gallons of oil in the ocean, you really can't do much to stop the damage. Prevention, not rapid response, is the key.

Still, after every disaster, the oil industry promises that it could never happen again.

Let's learn the right lesson: Oil and water don't mix. A major explosion on land is a tragedy, but it's not a region-wide catastrophe on the scale we see here. Oddly enough, Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the more thoughtful offshore drilling advocates, seems tone deaf on this one. Senator Graham is arguing that after the Challenger disaster America went back into space, so after Deepwater Horizon we should keep opening up new areas to oil drilling.

That analogy is simply wrong. Imagine that the Challenger tragedy, in addition to causing the deaths of astronauts, had put at risk the economic base of a significant part of the United States. Suppose thousands of businesses were ruined, and hundreds of thousands of workers lost their livelihoods. Would we have continued launching Space Shuttles?

I don't think so. It's time to start phasing out offshore oil production now, as a first step to making America genuinely independent of oil. 

 

 

 

Follow Carl Pope on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CarlPope

Comments

[djekizian]

06:33 PM on 06/19/2010

Turns out this post was prophetic. The hole drilled into the dike is a technogenic catastrophe.

[gsteinum]

07:19 PM on 05/05/2010

maybe boehner/palin's katrina.

[gsteinum]

07:17 PM on 05/05/2010

no. america's chernobyl was three mile island.

[research]

11:06 PM on 05/04/2010

Stop obsessing on the last few drops of oil!

Green energy: wind, solar and waste bio flue, are clean, safe, cheaper in the long run, able to replace fossil and nukes in 12 years, and will supply the world energy and fuel needs forever.

[billshut]

03:12 PM on 05/04/2010

Nothing new or objective to read here, move along.

[Downtown]

10:10 AM on 05/04/2010

my thought exactly, as soon as it became apparent that the initial reports of "only" 1000 barrels a day leaking were shown to be completely false I thought "oh, this is far more like Chernobyl than 'Obama's Katrina' or anything else"... Having been in the USSR at the time and seen how the gov. responded, BP's response struck me as very similar. and the long-range and long-term damage not only in the Gulf but in the Keys, up the East Coast, and potentially even further, struck me again as being very similar to the Chernobyl accident.

[grumpyfarmer]

08:17 AM on 05/04/2010

I don't believe this compares to Chernobyl. Nice try though.

[jsarets]

10:31 AM on 05/04/2010

Too early to tell... it could essentially wipe out the Gulf seafood industry for a number of years. It's a marine ecosystem, so it's naturally more sensitive to than a forest ecosystem, but the effect may be more acute and less chronic since contaminants disperse more readily in water than in soil.

[BlackbirdHighway]

08:08 AM on 05/04/2010

I've been driving my electric car for a year now and I've driven 10,000 fossil-fuel free miles. I charge it up with my solar panels. No oil or coal is being burned in this process.

We don't have to wait for some future pie-in-the-sky green technology to be invented. We can make changes with the technology we have right now.

Don't listen to the lies from our government, big corporations, or main-stream media. Continued dependence on fossil fuels is a political choice, not a technological limitation.

[Fleurdamour]

03:16 AM on 05/04/2010

None of our business leaders know what they are doing, nor do our politicians. They are all trained at the same institutions in one discipline only - how to gain and hold power. That is the only knowledge they have, that of self-interest.

[Jason Abdon]

07:32 PM on 05/03/2010

I've written the president informing him that the damage to the environment continues. BP could have stopped this American Chernobyl by exploding the well head so that it collapses in on its self to stop the damage. But no, they don't to lose their well. Doesn't make any difference that all the people on the coast are going to lose their business, their property values are going to Baltic Avenue, great American ecospheres will be destroyed for a century and a half, some of the American people will be poisoned, and the American and Hispanic people have lost an important food source for generations. BP must have its well head intact for a few dollars more in their profit margin.

The attitude of the leadership of this country is actually making physical and mental wrecks of the citizens of America.