Brace Yourself: This Is the Tip of the Iceberg for Oil-Induced Enviro Catastrophes

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"While this is a horrible disaster, it occurs to me that Americans cannot accept the fact that getting oil out of the earth is dirty, difficult, hazardous work, with great risks for society," said James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. "We don't want to know about it, as long as we can drive comfortably to the strip mall, enjoy NPR and an iced beverage. When something happens to prick our bubble of unreality, we're indignant."

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But add it up and it's one hell of a cleanup for a country with an unceasing appetite for hyperconsumption but little stomach for hard work. Which is why the blame-game theory, while it makes for good theater and hopefully better punitive damages, is still a red herring distracting us from the environmental disaster's prime suspect: All of us.

"BP, Haliburton and Transocean will all be financially punished for this, and they, along with other oil companies, will say, 'Screw you, America, we're moving our operations to Angola,'" added Kunstler. "All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behavior."

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they'd rather drill for what's left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation.

"In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts," explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. "Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we're addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all."

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that's only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload.

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/146879/brace_yourself%3A_this_is_the_tip_of_the_iceberg_for_oil-induced_enviro_catastrophes/?page=2


Sooner or later, we're going to have to face our addiction and begin to rehabilitate ourselves. Global oil production has been declining for the past five years. All the easy oil is gone. And the BP clusterfuck is a glaring example of what can happen when going after the hard to reach oil. We are at a turning point. We must begin to power down. Like it or not.