Month 7, Day 6: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Water…

The Chicago Tribune (last seen as the site of a remarkably stupid column by Jonah Goldberg) ran an unremarkable AP story noting that oil is now found on the beaches in every state that borders the Gulf.

The spreading filth from the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon is making its presence felt everywhere. Beaches are contaminated, ecosystems shattered, and clean-up workers are already experiencing health problems. If anything good comes of this debacle, it must be that Americans finally come to terms with the truth about oil: it costs too much.

Not only have we subsidized oil production, keeping prices artificially low for decades, but we deferred the cost of cleaning up after our fossil fuel use, assuming that some future generation will have the technology well in hand when the bill comes due. Alas, it turns out we’re the generation who’ll have to pay — and the technology never got developed, as BP’s nonexistent contingency plans confirm. With oil accumulating on beaches everywhere in the Gulf of Mexico, the evidence mounts in each day’s news: we must break our addiction to oil, or it will break us.

Warren Senders