Year 2, Month 10, Day 16: Kill ’em All and Let Dick Cheney Sort ’em Out.

Oh, great. Read it in The Independent (UK) and weep:

BP is making contingency plans to fight the largest oil spill in history, as it prepares to drill more than 4,000 feet down in the Atlantic in wildlife-rich British waters off the Shetland Islands.

Internal company documents seen by The Independent show that the worst-case scenario for a spill from its North Uist exploratory well, to be sunk next year, would involve a leak of 75,000 barrels a day for 140 days – a total of 10.5 million barrels of oil, comfortably the world’s biggest pollution disaster.

Fossil fuels make it possible for stupid and unethical people to become hideously rich and powerful. That alone should be a reason to remove them from our world economy.

Sent October 12:

We’ve known for years that oil is toxic. The devastation of entire regional ecologies in the aftermath of spills is amply and tragically documented. Crude offers a remarkable array of carcinogens, along with many other toxins. Medicine is only beginning to understand the profound neurological consequences of crude oil exposure, but no sane person doubts that it’s viciously poisonous.

But that’s not all. It now appears that oil can cause profound cognitive damage even among those who don’t come in direct contact with it. The symptoms include significantly impaired judgment, including indifference to public opinion, ethical lapses, and an inability to draw logical conclusions from available data. How else shall we explain BP’s plans for exploratory drilling off the Shetland Islands?

The ghastly lessons of the Deepwater Horizon disaster have been ignored by the corporation most responsible. The ecosystems and economies of the Gulf of Mexico have no such luxury.

Warren Senders