Brace Yourself: This Is the Tip of the Iceberg for Oil-Induced Enviro Catastrophes

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"While this is a horrible disaster, it occurs to me that Americans cannot accept the fact that getting oil out of the earth is dirty, difficult, hazardous work, with great risks for society," said James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. "We don't want to know about it, as long as we can drive comfortably to the strip mall, enjoy NPR and an iced beverage. When something happens to prick our bubble of unreality, we're indignant."

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But add it up and it's one hell of a cleanup for a country with an unceasing appetite for hyperconsumption but little stomach for hard work. Which is why the blame-game theory, while it makes for good theater and hopefully better punitive damages, is still a red herring distracting us from the environmental disaster's prime suspect: All of us.

"BP, Haliburton and Transocean will all be financially punished for this, and they, along with other oil companies, will say, 'Screw you, America, we're moving our operations to Angola,'" added Kunstler. "All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behavior."

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they'd rather drill for what's left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation.

"In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts," explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. "Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we're addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all."

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that's only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload.

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/146879/brace_yourself%3A_this_is_the_tip_of_the_iceberg_for_oil-induced_enviro_catastrophes/?page=2


Sooner or later, we're going to have to face our addiction and begin to rehabilitate ourselves. Global oil production has been declining for the past five years. All the easy oil is gone. And the BP clusterfuck is a glaring example of what can happen when going after the hard to reach oil. We are at a turning point. We must begin to power down. Like it or not.

[RandomThoughts]

1. Or power up on different sources, instead of black oil.

Although I disagree with X-files conclusions. They blame aliens, that creates a method to go secret and think a group is in resistance to some bad thing, a delusion that is part of false alien doctrine.

However in metaphor, mars is war, and fear and terror, it being dark side is correct. X files does speak to the dangers of the oil cartels, and systems of consolidated power, and how corruption moves like a virus.

They had some episodes on Black Oil. And the dark side does work through people, it can be seen as a spiritual metaphor. The light side also works through people, so there is always that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGgZmiWW6xI


However X files does speak to the dangers of the oil cartels, and systems of consolidated power and corruption. If it is true that many foreign governments are trying to run the USA, then an open spigot in the Gulf might be something they don't work that hard to stop.

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2. We'll of course, in our desperation, attempt to employ

different sources of energy in an effort to replace oil. And that's when we'll find that whatever different source we turn to, it just will not scale up to fuel a cheap oil-based civilization. The simple fact is that there is nothing that can replace oil on the scale oil is used and at the price we've been so long accustomed to paying. And the less and less oil we have, the more we'll need to prioritize what is done with what is left. For instance, we might have to ration in order to ensure enough oil is available to manufacture plastic medical supplies.