Warning: This post contains profanity and a fair bit of angry contempt. If that's not your cup of tea, and particularly if you've complained to me in the past that you'd prefer not to read that sort of thing, it's best that you stop reading now, or better yet, click here. That way, I don't have to issue an apology that I don't mean. Thanks.
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A week after the
Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar appeared at the State House in Boston and announced
Federal approval of the Cape Wind project. Cape Wind will be the first large scale offshore wind to energy program in US history. Ten years of studies, noisy town meetings, bickering and wrangling culminated in
Secretary Salazar's decision.
Cape Wind supporters wanted renewable energy to power Cape Cod and the Islands. Opponents couldn't argue the merits of the project, they just didn't want big windmill turbines in the middle of scenic Nantucket Sound. Now it's going to go forward, and within the next few years Massachusetts will be on the cutting edge of the green energy movement. We won't have to worry about major explosions. No birds or fish will die, much less by the tens of thousands. We won't have hundreds, if not thousands of miles of coastlines ruined forever, and we won't have to rely on BP to tell us anything. While the entire country watches the Gulf with growing horror, I think it's time we started learning at least one lesson from this catastrophic tragedy: Relying exclusively on fossil fuels for our energy is dangerously outdated, a waste of time, money and lives, not to mention the environment. Wind, solar and biofuels are what will power the next century. To the degree that we don't have the guts to acknowledge that, we're doomed to become a second-class economy.
If you're one of the nitwits who gleefully chanted "
Drill baby drill" along with Barbie McLipShmutz during the 2008 campaign, you had better be on the Gulf coast right now reporting for cleanup duty. Otherwise, and there's really no kind way of saying this, you're a fucking hypocrite. In addition, rightwing pinheads, you can't accuse President Obama of being a
socialist and then turn around and simultaneously accuse him of not doing enough to fix the gushing pipe in the Gulf, or worse, hoping the tragedy happens (
Heckuva job, Brownie). In short, you don't get to have it both ways, though Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh aren't likely to point out that bit of intellectual inconsistency, because those are really big words, and their audiences are too busy with the
misspelled signs and flat out
ignorance to waste time trying to understand reality. The truth is always more complicated than a handwritten sign or 10 second sound bite, and that confuses people who don't like to think too hard or can't be bothered to learn about the facts the belie their blowhard rhetoric. If I've just offended a friend or relative, that's just too damn bad. Deal with it.
If this
unforgettable video is to be believed (warning, extremely profane and NSFW), BP can't even pass Booming 101...by the way, I have a new favorite phrase after watching that video a couple dozen times. If you watch it, I think you'll agree with me..."fucking proper fucking booming" needs to enter the popular lexicon. So why is anyone surprised at what's
going on right now? You shouldn't be. You remember the
Exxon Valdez? You remember the
Torrey Canyon? You remember the
Atlantic Empress? This is already far worse than all of them put together, with no end in sight....and remember, the 2010 hurricane season just started. Because an oil disaster isn't frightening enough, let's blow some of that polluted water around, and see how bad
that gets. In any case, before the wind and waves from the first storm arrive, the economic and ecological damage will have already dwarfed anything we've ever seen. Trusting an oil company, whether it's BP or Exxon, to protect the environment is exactly like expecting the Catholic Church to reliably protect your child from, well, the Catholic Church. It's not a matter of
if you're going to get screwed, it's a matter of
when, how badly, and for how long.
The future of energy will be seen in Nantucket Sound, somewhere in the Great Lakes -- west of
New York state, and the state of Gujarat in India, where the
largest solar energy project in the world is under development. Further oil development needs to phase down, and eventually stop. If the Obama administration continues to approve oil exploration anywhere near US shores, it will be complicit in further tragedies. Otherwise, there will be more Deepwater Horizons. Count on it.
1 comments:
The Cape Wind project is so exciting! I hope that I will live long enough to see a nationwide turnover in energy production. However, because I live here in S. Louisiana, I am equally horrified at the sight of the beautiful birds and marshland being destroyed and seeing my friends and neighbors lose jobs and struggle to maintain their families and lifestyles, because of the President's moratorium on drilling for the next six months. I know there is a need to prevent this sort of disaster from happening again, but the serious hindrance to real people's lives is something to consider as well. Yes, for the next generation, they can be trained for other things, but what about the folks who have spent the last 20 or 30 years of their lives in the oilfield, still have 10 - 15 yrs on their mortgages and 2 kids in college? How are they supposed to survive? I don't know, David. While I completely agree that renewable energy is the way to go, I think people need to be focusing on some resolution to the problems folks will be facing in the immediate future as well.
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