When the oil rig Deepwater Horizon sank on April 20th killing 11 people and opening an underwater oil geyser 5,000 feet below the ocean surface, few predicted the length and extent of the disaster. The inability to stop the leak, which the federal government now estimates is dumping 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil a day (approximately an Exxon Valdez spill every 4 to 7 days), is heavily impacting the Gulf Coast ecosystem, generating profound effects on its communities and economy for years and potentially decades to come. As the oil-soaked wildlife pictures roll in and uncertainty prevails around the region's seafood and tourist industries, it's hard to imagine any beneficial outcome from this calamity.
However, there are numerous examples of environmental disasters that generated enormous long-term benefits out of the ashes of tragedy. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill which also occurred from an oil rig blowout soiled pristine California beaches, killing thousands of birds and impacting uncounted numbers of seals and sea lions. This event helped ignite and expand environmental consciousness which in 1970 resulted in the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire in Ohio -- the river literally caught on fire from its high pollution content -- spurred water pollution regulation such as the Clean Water Act. And the 1978 Love Canal tragedy of a community exposed to deadly carcinogens from a toxic waste landfill residing beneath homes and schools outraged the nation and led to the Superfund creation, which addresses hazardous waste sites. Thirty years later, families are still dealing with the health ramifications of the tragedy.
While these events were tragic for both people and ecosystems alike, the country learned from them. America enacted the needed widespread policy and regulation to prevent recurrence and solve the underlying pollution problem. Ultimately, these safeguards save lives, making America healthier and more secure. The Gulf Coast oil disaster should be no different.
Through the reorganization of the Minerals Management Service and commissioning an independent team to investigate the oil blowout, the Obama administration is taking appropriate steps for enacting regulation to allow safe oil drilling. However, the underlying problem of the massive spill still exists -- America's fossil fuel addiction. The U.S. cannot hope to be safe from the impact of fossil fuels such as oil on our national, economic, environmental and climate security, until we are free from our dependency.
This addiction could not be more apparent as governors and Congress members from Gulf Coast states are already asking the President to remove the 6 month moratorium of deepwater drilling because they believe it will cripple their economy--making statements like "we have to keep drilling" and "we can't survive a 6 month moratorium." The very states impacted by the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, which could potentially cripple coastal economies and the way of life for an entire region, are asking for continued deepwater drilling in the face of unknown risks and a pending investigation. If this doesn't prove our addiction, nothing will.
In order to curb U.S. oil and fossil fuel use, a comprehensive energy policy is needed which eliminates big oil subsidies, encourages energy efficiency, incentivizes renewable energy, spurs technological innovation and puts a cap on carbon. Arguments abound for not capping carbon, but without limiting this pollution, the U.S. is setting itself up for the next environmental and economic tragedy -- a changing climate. Once climate change becomes apparent, no amount of regulations or policies will be able to stop the growing impacts. Curbing carbon will also send the appropriate market signals to make clean energy profitable for America's businesses, ultimately ending our dependency more quickly.
In President Obama's national address on the BP oil crisis, he emphasized both the urgency of cleaning up the Gulf Coast oil spill and enacting policy to end America's fossil fuel dependency. There are political figures arguing that the President's push for clean energy is opportunistic in the face of tragedy. But not taking action that enhances the future security of communities who are now alerted to this danger would be truly irresponsible. Had past Presidents and Congresses simply cleaned up the mess of the Cuyahoga River, Love Canal or Santa Barbara and done nothing to solve the underlying problem, the public would consider it gross negligence.
If the worst environmental disaster doesn't generate a change in U.S. behavior and a comprehensive energy policy, all the pain and ecological destruction will have gone unheeded with no lessons learned about our current destructive energy choices. While the tragedy in the Gulf is enormous, an even greater tragedy is failing to set a course for solving the underlying cause of this disaster-America's fossil fuel addiction.
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Look at the people in the gulf that still want to drill.
Americans are oil crackheads. People do not care about this disaster, they want gas, cheap.
All the people that think this will change anything are dreaming.
One thing that happens when "addiction" ( as a metaphor for our oil use), is brought into the energy discussion, it occurs to everyone that interventions, treatments, etc. are successful less than half the time.
Addiction may be a proper analogy to our consumption, but we must also remember that there is no guarantee we can willingly kick the habit...... maybe it doesn't matter- as when the drugs are taken away the addict can go cold turkey or die.
Eventually we will HAVE to comply with reality- but it is getting late and the sky is acting strangely.
"Halliburton, the Texan oilfield services giant, has emerged as a key player in the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The controversial firm, once run by former vice president and Iraq war architect Dick Cheney, had been hired by BP to handle the cementing process on the doomed rig.
According to Transocean, the operator of the drilling platform, Halliburton workers had just finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the 18,000 ft well with cement shortly before the explosion that caused the rig to catch fire and ultimately to sink.
Latest reports suggest oil is blasting from three seperate holes in the bedrock beneath the gulf of Mexico at a rate of 200,000 gallons a day - a rate that has caused the slick to spread far more rapidly and widely than previous estimates forecast."
Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/62899,business,dick-cheney-halliburton-implicated-in-bp-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill#ixzz26LbijlW1
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/under-cheneys-influence-wyomings-oil-ties-flooded-mms
See: Life Threatening Danger at http://www.aesopinstitute.org updated today.
Also, What to Do! on the same website.
Chris Landau, a geologist, believes the solution may be to drill 8 or more new, vertical wells, in a circle around the gusher, on the assumption that far more oil will be produced than can otherwise be controlled.
He states the oil might continue to be produced in huge quantities.
He believes several new wells can allow recovery of the oil, which may need to continue for a very, very, long time.
You may want to also read Moving Beyond Oil and Running on Water on that Aesop site.
With adequate support, a 24/7 development program could move breakthrough technologies into production.
We can supersede oil faster than might be imagined.
This may prove to be an emergency equivalent to all out war!
These new technologies are much less complicated than weapons systems.
The science is hard to believe, as it disagrees with conventional wisdom. But, independent and National laboratories are increasingly involved. Once prototypes for schools are in production, it will become obvious that gasoline, oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power will face low cost competition that can leave all of them behind.
Recognize this emergency! We have a difficult, but possible, job to do! So, let's begin to really do it!
Ah! with the hydrino delusion.
The report (TechnicalPresentation021710.pdf) on http://www.american-reporter.com/ is just a lot of rehashed publicity showing spectra results easily explained by crystal field theory. When science is not on your side (you can do a lot of fancy math and hand-jiving but Mother Nature has the last say), appeal to authority and bring out the celebrities: "The company has assembled a formidable board of directors that include a former head of Westinghouse, a top federal nuclear energy official, ..." The American Reporter is another left-wingnut rag. Show us something from, say, National Science Foundation or the American Physical Society.
Garret Moddel from colorado.edu have debunked all this ZPE wet dreams in his paper "Assessment of proposed electromagnetic quantum vacuum energy extraction methods" (xxx.lanl.gov). Unfortunately for himself, who has aUS patent “Quantum vacuum energy extraction,” Patent 7379286, he did not understand the physics of EM surface waves on Casimir tubes; thus his scheme is worthless. After exchanging a couple of emails, Moddel admitted to me that his patent was a mistake. Sensible people becoming silly.
As I said before, I emailed Rowan. The faculty at Rowan were tight-mouthed and referred me to Black Light Power for any discussion. They are backing away from BLP claims that they confirmed hydrinos.
Black Light Power submitted 4 patent applications in the UK: all 4 applications denied. Black Light Power appealed and lost. Fabrizio Pinto has supposedly 7 patents but most of them are in legal limbo due to the action of Robert Parkof U of Maryland.
His patents follow the paper by D. C. Cole and H. E. Puthoff:
"Extracting Energy and Heat from the Vacuum," Phys. Rev. E, vol 48, p 1562 (1993)
which claimed to show that one can extract energy from zero point fluctuations but all the arguments relate to extracting photon (non-ZPE) energy from non-zero temperature environment. Where they claimed a closed loop operation, as in the common heat engine cycle, in reality the closed loop cannot be achieved without the electromagnetic equivalent of the Maxwell Demon (which Prof. Moddel independently has proven). I actually had a correspondence with one of the 2 authors in the mid-1990's. The author cannot respond to my specific comments and just sent me his life work in a big manila envelop.
Hope we decide to actually address our oil addiction beyond the speechifying of gab-gifted pols-- which has been the outer limits of actual action for 30 solid years, but even if, somehow we do, there are many years of oil use ahead of us, and accidents will happen. What won't happen ever again though, is the Gulf Of Mexico as previously constituted or inhabited. And BP could throw 100 billion at what they destroyed, and still there will be no Gulf like there was.