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A clean-energy future, now
May 11, 2010
The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico should be a wake-up call to us all.
Michael Brune, LA Times
Somehow, the word “spill” doesn’t quite capture the tragedy that is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. As the father of two young children, I have experience with spills. They seem to happen every time my wife and I give our son a glass of milk.
What I saw flying over the gulf waters Wednesday, and what we’ve all been watching on television the last two weeks, is no spill. It’s an endless explosion of toxic muck, a sickening creep of poisonous sludge that may soon blanket a national park, more than a dozen wildlife refuges and hundreds of miles of coastline, perhaps even oozing into the fragile Florida Keys and up the Eastern Seaboard.
This catastrophe may also prove to be one of those rare events that rivets attention, bolsters resolve and encourages pivotal change — in this case, a national commitment to stop the expansion of offshore drilling immediately and end our dependence on oil and the other dirty fuels that are fouling our planet in a slow-motion environmental disaster every day.
In western Canada, monstrous earthmoving machines rip up forests and pollute freshwater supplies to produce dirty oil from Alberta’s “tar sands.” In Ecuador, billions — with a “b” — of gallons of oil-contaminated waste were dumped into the Amazon watershed by Texaco, now owned by Chevron. And here in the U.S., 90 million Americans live near 150-plus oil refineries. These refineries release into the air and water millions of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals, such as benzene, butadiene and formaldehyde, along with nickel, lead and other pollutants linked to heart disease, asthma and other health threats.
