I sincerely doubt the ability to clean up this oil spill. It is absolutely disgusting, and the industry has directly caused countless losses of life and natural resources since its inception.
Is oil really worth destroying ecosystems that span international boundaries? Is it really worth the lives of the workers? Is it really worth the loss of revenue that would be brought in through fisheries and tourism? Nothing is worth this much.
These companies should all be ashamed of themselves. Nothing more than greed-driven madmen who cannot see beyond their own lifetimes of luxury. They stop at nothing for a dollar, even if it means denying involvement in environmental (and therefore humanitarian) disaster. They all deserve to be thrown in jail for their crimes. —Clean up your mess
This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.
oh joy, an econut, first thing today, i asked self, how can i help fuck up my enviroment? then i came here and seen this. now i know how to help make it worse. gonna talke my wheeler out this weekend, go to country and run thru streams, brooks, any where i can do some ecological damage. thanks o.p., for the idea of how to kill an otherwise boring weekend.
Do you know how many things you use on a daily basis would no longer exist if we stopped using oil? A fuck ton.
The “greed driven madmen” are the last people who wanted this to happen. Do you still fly knowing that planes have been known to crash? Have you entered a building taller than 4 stories since 9-11? There’s no doubt this will change things in the offshore oil biz (just as they have in the past after disasters such as Piper Alpha and Ocean Ranger) but like it or not offshore oil production will continue to coexist with fisheries & marine ecosystems.
Of course it’s not worth it, OP. Hydrogen is worth it, but requires significant investment in infrastructure, research, development, etc. nobody wants to foot the bill for that until it’s too late.
Yawn.
typical enviro MENTAL response big bad oil companies raping mother earth greed driven should be in jail yadda yadda stf up it was an accident they happen
Why do people have to have mental issues if they care about the environment?
It drives me nuts. Lefties go on all day about all the social programs they want, but anytime somebody wants to start a business or industry and make some money to create jobs and pay taxes, they get in a huff.
No oil. No factories. No industry.
Yes health care. Yes education. Yes social assistance.
How the fuck can you pay for that shit without industry and taxes?
exactly Y guy there in the own little world ; they want the rich to be taxed to the hilt to pay for everything but they don’t want big business or multi nationals to make any money so it’s a catch-22
It is typical of people in this part of the country to put making money ahead of environmental protection. The reason is obvious to me.
There aren’t enough quality employment opportunities in this part of the country. Governments at all levels can’t get businesses to locate here without throwing all kinds of public money at them. People having been leaving this province by the busload and planeload for decades because there are few opportunities for them here.
When you have a population desperate for work you have a population willing to support the corporate agenda. It would seem that being able to pay the rent and buy groceries trumps preserving a fragile ecosystem any day of the week. Or does it . . . ?
The Dexter government recently extended the moratorium on exploratory drilling on Georges Bank until 2015. The oil and gas companies aren’t happy about it for obvious reasons. But Georges Bank is one of most productive and at the same time ecologically sensitive fishing grounds off the East Coast. A blowout on Georges Bank, like the one in the Gulf of Mexico, would not only be an ecological disaster of major proportions, it would be an economic disaster for a province like Nova Scotia which relies heavily on tourism and would likely mean the end of what is left of Nova Scotia’s fishery. The oil company agenda of exploratory drilling on Georges Bank doesn’t do much for the economic security of Nova Scotia’s fishermen.
There are other examples here in Nova Scotia of the hazards of putting the making of money ahead of the environment.
The Sydney Tar Ponds is the most toxic waste site in North America and one of the most contaminated places on the planet. The Tar Ponds contamination came from over a century of industrial runoff from the steel mill operation. The Tar Ponds site contains tonnes of some of the worst carcinogens known, like PCBs and PAHs. The various steel companies which operated at the site will pay none of the estimated $400 million cleanup cost. The taxpayers will foot the entire bill. Residents of Sydney are also paying a heavy price for those decades of “job security” in the steel mill and area coal mines by having some of the highest incidences of cancer in the nation. Their health care costs are also funded by taxpayers.
When things like the well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico happen, I don’t think we should just shrug our shoulders and say “oh well accidents happen and that’s just the price of having an industrial economy”. We should hold corporations accountable. Make them pay the costs to clean up and put things right. They can afford it.
In the end, when we disregard the environmental impact of our industrial activities, we are “shitting in our own nest” so to speak. That’s pretty stupid in the long run.
Farmer Bob, I would personally rather camp out at the tar ponds site for my next 2 week vacation, than camp out at the Chernobyl site… just the first site a bit more deadly then the tar ponds, that popped into my head !
Actually Bob, oil companies in modern times spend millions and millions in environmental impact studies every year. The tar ponds and coal mines date back to a time when nobody knew what an environmental impact study even was. The prospect of drilling off Georges Bank seems a bit more sensible than all the drilling that’s currently going on at the Grand Banks which has a richer fishing ground, rougher weather, and icebergs to boot. The fact is I doubt oil companies are as disappointed as you might think they are. They know it’s there and we’ll get to it eventually when the price is higher and in the meantime it’s safe in a free natural storage facility below the bottom of the ocean. BP seems to have accepted responsibility for the spill and time will tell if they live up to that responsibility. The real company to watch in my opinion is Transocean who have a responsibility as the only company that builds these rigs to redesign and engineer to make sure this environmental disaster and loss of life never happens again.
well put C N it’s very bad business for these environmental disasters to happen somebody will pay big time for this
And another thing, the latest statistic I found was there were just over 5000 oil rigs in 1997, and this is the first spill of its kind that I know of.
And let’s put this in perspective, the Exxon disaster was 250 000 barrels, this may or may not pass that.
Meanwhile, over in Kuwait on January 23, 1991 Saddam Hussein purposely had over 1.5 million barrels poured into the Persian Gulf, and these same oil lefties still thought he was a good guy.