Are we taking too many risks to get our oil?
| 10:32 UK time, Thursday, 6 May 2010
UPDATE: The oil spill continues to dominate headlines with questions about the risks involved in drilling for oil. Today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman , he thinks there's no fooling Mother Nature:
"You can't fool Mother Nature. She knows when we're just messing around. Mother Nature operates by her own iron laws. And if we violate them, there is no lobby or big donor to get us off the hook. No, what's gone will be gone. What's ruined will be ruined. What's extinct will be extinct -- and later, when we're finally ready to stop messing around, it will be too late."
Krupa's original post:
We are obsessed with oil - that's what some of you had to say when I went through your comments on the US oil spill this morning.
'We expect convenience at any cost,' wrote Bert.
'Corporate greed and fossil fuel manipulation have consumed the world. Enough is enough,' said Emmanuel Sanda.
And they are not alone in thinking this way.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has from a drilling proposal off the coast of Southern California,
"It will not happen here in California," Schwarzenegger said. "If I have a choice between the $100 million and what I see in the Gulf of Mexico, I'd rather just figure out how to make up for that $100 million."
we are not committed enough to finding alternatives to oil, there is a moral lesson to be learnt from the disaster - 'our short-term thinking is madness'.
expresses its concern with its neighbour's obsession with energy.
Barely a month ago, sounding like an oil executive, Barack Obama defended his offshore drilling policy by saying "oil rigs generally don't cause spills. They are technically very advanced." One imagines he is currently rueing that word "generally," and reminding himself that "very advanced" technology is not a magic wand, as his enemies gleefully refer to the spill as "Obama's hurricane Katrina".
it's an American obsession embedded into a way of life.
And it's this way of life that cannot be shaken overnight; our infrastructure depends on it and the political and financial costs of overhauling these systems are too high.
Plan B economics agrees that talking about alternative source of energy is futile unless it can really sustain our current way of life,
'We are the reason oil companies take the risks they do. We drive our SUVs to pick up a carton of milk. We are the ones that don't adequately support public transportation and choose to live in the suburbs. To satisfy our addition to oil, companies like BP must take calculated risks. Sometimes those risks pay off, sometimes they don't.'
Are the risks taken to get our oil risks worth taking? Should we be looking at our own lifestyle before pointing the finger at oil companies?
