Oil spill tragedy: tragically over-hyped
Give us a break already with the anti-BP oil spill diatribes. Without getting into the idiocy of blaming the owner of a rig for the operators' actions (like blaming McDonald's when you dump their coffee in your own lap), the whole outrage being generated by liberal media is unjustifiably deafening – there's oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico people, not the Great Barrier Reef.
First and foremost, let's be honest: It's not devastating an intricate marine ecosystem. The Gulf has been so saturated with oil spills over the last fifty years that most people won't even swim in it, let alone eat from it. This goes double for nature, leaving the Gulf to the scavengers. So, it's not annihilating pods of humpback whales, it's killing sea gulls, and no one likes sea gulls anyway – they're like the pigeons of the sea. This limits its lethal range to roughly…jellyfish.
What exactly is the problem with fewer seagulls and fewer jellyfish? If anything, it's making the Gulf of Mexico more appealing, which is a pretty hard thing to accomplish in and of itself. This cesspool of oceanic wasteland is about as essential to our ecosystems as your un-flushed toilet water is to making a glass of lemonade.
Remember the last time you ate ANYTHING from the Gulf of Mexico? Of course not – there's nothing (safe) to eat there because the only things that thrive in the Gulf are oil companies. Ironically, the media hangs itself with its own rope by announcing that all the Gulf's seafood will have to be tested for safety – for decades – because of this spill, the irony being that if THIS spill makes seafood unsafe, the LAST spill makes it entirely inedible, and that would kind of prove my point.
If I hear one more pusillanimous liberal tell me this is the largest oil spill ever I'm just going to run towards the nearest living thing and beat it to death with a gas pump. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that Deepwater Horizon is belching a maximum of 19,000 barrels of oil per day, which puts the spill at roughly three quarters of a million gallons to date.
That's a lot of money floating around, but doesn't even come close to the LAST Gulf spill – the greatest accidental oil spill in the history of mankind – which NOAA assessed to be spewing over 30,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf every day – and not just every day, but every day for NINE MONTHS. The reason you never heard of Ixtoc I is because: A, it happened a lot closer to Mexico than Louisiana; and B, it dwarfs the Deepwater thing. Which makes the reporting media look like the bunch of sensationalist fear-mongers that they actually are.
This oil is LITERALLY more biodegradable than any of the stuff we turn it into and ESPECIALLY less harmful to the planet than the chemicals we're using to "clean it up." The media is telling people that BP has single-handedly destroyed the planet. Grow up. Much, much larger quantities of oil have been spilling into our waterways for centuries – waterways we actually eat from – and guess who's not dead yet? Us.
We live in America. We buy stuff – stuff that is largely comprised of petroleum-based products. Don't boycott BP, boycott all the companies that thrive on their petroleum. Stop wearing make up, smash your cell phone, give away your laptop, and trade your "eco-friendly" Prius in for a bicycle – with no tires.
Of course THAT won't happen, no one wants to sacrifice their OWN stuff, but you'll march around the BP station to protest the company that makes all of these products possible.
Look, as soon as someone figures out how to make a fully-functional Macbook out of leaves and hemp, let us know. Until then, stop being such a hypocrite. If you bought anything at all in the last decade that didn't grow out of the ground, you paid for BP to be here. Allowing BP to continue drilling is like choosing the lesser of two evils (if only one choice was actually evil): Would you rather have cheaper everything? Or more jellyfish?
Here's my point: if the liberals are right, and oil spills kill sea-life, then there hasn't been anything swimming in the Gulf for twenty years, so let's drill it. If the conservatives are right, then we need Gulf oil to make our economy affordable, so let's drill it.
In either case, it seems there is complete agreement that this Deepwater Horizon spill – while cataclysmically messy – will have the ecological impact of the thylacine extinction. Unless you want to pay $8 per gallon or start drilling off Santa Monica Pier, the drilling of this figurative sea of oilrigs (and recently, this literal sea of oil) needs to continue.
We can't fix the Gulf and it's not worth fixing anyway, but we need to insist that oil drilling stay limited to the Gulf. Essentially it comes down to this: since we can't stop consuming, we can at least STOP from making EVERY coast into the same mess by insisting we stick to drilling the Gulf.