I’m getting so angry about this oil leak I have to take some time off reading and writing about it. I can’t look at any more oil-covered wildlife. I can barely look at reporters talking about it.   I am ready to start throwing things.  No, it’s not happening where I live, but it feels very personal, like 9/11 initially felt very personal  (until we learned more about it).   This oil leak is something that is being done to all Americans.  It feels like a war.

I’m extremely pissed off at BP,  Transocean, Congress, at the lack of adequate government response,  (No, I don’t believe that they’re doing everything they can. If they were doing everything they can the leak would be over by now. Send in the Marines) and the insane, continued calls for more offshore drilling.   The officials in Louisiana would rather get their oil jobs back as soon as possible than protect the environment. They have gone stark, raving mad.  Their response to the biggest environmental disaster in our history is to drill in the ocean even more.  Gov. Bobby Jindal and Mary Landreau and a few others need lobotomies.**

So now, not only is British Petroleum polluting the Gulf of Mexico, the waters off of the southern United States, for probably about 60-70 years, but it plans on burning the oil it is collecting. BP is going to pollute the atmosphere enormously, while oil gushes into the ocean.  If they gathered the oil, refined it and sold it to be burned later by cars or factories, would the pollution be more or less than if they just burn it up at sea?

I suppose this is good in an ironic way because it means we will reach the end of oil even sooner than before,  and then we can get off of this dirty greasy crud for good.  I’m curious if anyone thinks this is really a good idea or an absolutely crazy idea: Burning the oil at sea.  Pollute the air now or later?

This is a recent announcement that I read this morning in passing on CSPAN. They announced it like it was no big deal. Gather up hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil from the ocean and just burn it.  Hey, why not.   (Personally, my reaction when I first read this was more or less incoherent and unprintable.)  I’m so upset with these  Billionaire Pollutors at the moment I can’t even think rationally about them, or our energy policy, or  our disappointing government response to this, and the fact that BP has its own “reporters” that it quotes on its web site of propaganda.

Oh yeah, BP is deep into the Canadian tar sands too, of course. But their approach to the dirtiest, most unconscionable source of “oil” on earth is that they are doing it “responsibly”. Which by now means nothing at all. From USAToday:

“. . . . The government has estimated 600,000 to 1.2 million gallons [...]