Laughing Bird Caye, Belize, south of the Gulf of Mexico

Today is World Oceans Day. See more here on it.   It should be a day of mourning for the Gulf of Mexico too. People are ruining the oceans off the coast of the United States with oil and natural gas and contaminants like “dispersants”. Dispersants are toxic, deadly chemicals that are designed in part to hide the amount of oil on the surface of the ocean after a big spill. They do that by breaking it into small bits so that it becomes suspended in the water column under the surface. The Gulf of Mexico is now filled with these chemicals. And in a sad report I heard on the Thom Hartmann radio show today, a caller said that tar balls are being reeled in on the fishing lines by fisherman off Key Largo in Florida today. Florida, you are next. It’s already there.

“What a thing we have created. What an extraordinary horror our rapacious need for cheap, endless energy hath unleashed; it’s a monster of a scale and proportion we can barely even fathom.

Because if you’re honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.”

Read more at: sfgate.com

Stay horrified.  As of June 7th, some scientists believe that 100,000 barrels of oil per day may be still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.  This is from McClatchy, a highly respected news organization.

“BP’s runaway Deepwater Horizon well may be spewing what the company once  called its worst case scenario — 100,000 barrels a day, a member of the government panel told McClatchy Monday. “In the data I’ve seen, there’s nothing inconsistent with BP’s worst case scenario,” Ira Leifer, an associate researcher at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a member of the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group, told McClatchy.”   Read more here.

We have created this monster, so how do we stop it?  There may be no way to stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. (The next post will be about that.)

How do we stop oil from being our master in the future? By not allowing our government to get away with telling us we need fossil fuels.  We know that’s a lie. The people who need fossil fuels are the millionaires and billionaires, the corporations, Wall Street, and the capitalists.  T. Boone Pickens needs fossil fuels; I don’t.  The rest of us could, in a few years, do without it.  We could, if we tried, transition off of fossil fuels in a few years;  but the above-mentioned people won’t let us, and no one is trying.  It [...]