I posted this at the BN Critters Facebook page and also over at www.bncritters.com
(you do frequent those sites for bonus material, right?), but I thought I'd also post here.
This is an excellent OP-ED piece written in the New York Times on May 1st, 2010.
A Spill of Our Own
By LISA MARGONELLI
Published: May 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opini ... nelli.html
A few excerpts (highlight emphasis mine).....
"It seems likely that the oil company that holds the lease on Deepwater Horizon, BP, will finally have to abandon its
Orwellian “Beyond Petroleum” marketing campaign. This slogan has been so perversely successful that,
in 2008, British marketers voted BP’s brand more “green” than Greenpeace. Factually ludicrous, the slogan does accurately reflect drivers’ desire to buy unlimited gasoline while remaining “beyond” all the mess."
......
......
"Oil, however, is too complicated for simple solutions. Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds? "
Moratoriums have a moral problem, though.
All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and
when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.
