Month 5, Day 2: We Don’t Need No Education

More on the Deepwater Horizon. This one goes to Newsweek, which has an article on how the spill is going to affect the future of offshore drilling.

The fate of hundreds of communities and multiple ecosystems now hangs in the balance as a toxic oil slick begins to wash up on the coastlines of Louisiana and Florida. The Deepwater Horizon spill is both a crisis of terrifying proportions and a testament to human folly and hubris.

The crucial question is, “What will we learn from this disaster?” Will we learn that we need to wean ourselves from oil as rapidly as possible — or will we learn that communities and ecosystems are expendable? Will we learn that there is more energy to be saved through eliminating waste than there is to be found under the seabed — or will we learn that conservation (in the words of Dick Cheney) can “never be the basis of a sound energy policy”? Will we learn that when we include the costs of cleaning up spills and mitigating the worst effects of climate change, oil is not cheap, but horribly expensive?

We can no longer afford disasters of this magnitude. How many more Deepwater Horizons will it take before we learn that we’re better off leaving that oil in the Earth, and moving to a renewable-energy economy?

Warren Senders