This year's dead zone is the largest ever recorded

“The annual summertime dead zone caused by low oxygen levels in water along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline this year is twice as big as last year’s, stretching 7,722 square miles across Louisiana’s coast well into Texan waters, scientists with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium announced Monday.

. . . . The size of this year’s dead zone might actually be larger than mapped. LUMCON’s R/V Pelican research ship found a large area of hypoxia, or low-oxygen water, along the coast west of Galveston Bay and offshore in that area, but was unable to finish mapping there before returning to map an area east of the Atchafalaya River.

“This is the largest such area off the upper Texas coast that we have found since we began this work in 1985,” said Nancy Rabalais, executive director of LUMCON and chief scientist for the dead-zone cruise.”

Read more here.

Little by little, we are apparently killing the Gulf of Mexico.  What body of water will be next? Thanks to all the oil and the dispersants now in the Gulf, the dead zone will probably be even bigger next year.  I don’t know at what point people will stop poisoning their environment (and themselves) before they “get it” but obviously we aren’t quite at that point yet.

Along those same lines, that of our destroying our environment willingly, this op-ed piece was published today in the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune:

“While serving on a panel in Denver discussing media coverage of the Gulf oil spill, I was asked why newspapers hadn’t used the tragedy to start a national discourse about fossil fuel consumption and alternative energy.

I had thought about the idea, but in that moment, I was forced to admit something that no dedicated journalist ever wants to. . . . .

I’m simply overwhelmed by the basic facts: Americans consume the equivalent of 20 million barrels of oil a day. That means that in the 100 days of BP’s spill, we consumed 400 times as much oil as the earth managed to spew out of that broken well.”

The facts are simple: we will never break our addiction to oil as long as oil and coal and other fossil fuels remain less expensive to use than renewable energy. That is why we need a big carbon fee and that is why it’s so hard to get this done. There is no political will in Washington whatsoever to impose a big carbon fee on anyone right now, because 90% (or the majority) of our politicians are  cowards who think only of their next election.  That is political reality clashing hard with environmental reality, and environmental reality is long term so it always loses.