1) In the last 20 years, the only thing our public school children have learned about the oil and gas industry has been the Exxon Valdez disaster. From this point forward, the only thing future school children will learn about the oil and gas industry will be this BP disaster. So Exxon will be able to feel better about its contribution - or lack thereof - to our system of education.
2) If "climate" legislation wasn't already dead as a doornail before this happened, it certainly is now. A big part of the compromise surrounding the Kerry/Graham/Lieberman (KGL) bill currently under senate consideration was the Obama Administration's recent announcement that its 5 year plan for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf would include opening up new areas for exploration for oil and gas. That has been key to getting the votes of Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Jeff Bingaman and a few others. The BP disaster will destroy that compromise. Good riddance.
3) Over the last few days, we have been treated to the spectacle of our first openly fascist President, Barack Obama, and other high officials in his administration defending exploration for oil and gas in the offshore United States. The only reason they are doing that is because they are desperate to hold together the votes to pass the KGL bill. Had they not included expanded offshore access in their 5 year plan, they would without any question whatsoever have spent the last 10 days excoriating Republicans for their support of offshore drilling. It has been hilarious to watch the rank hypocrisy in action.
If y'all can think of other positives from this horrible tragedy, let me know, because I'm keeping a list.
In all seriousness, our hearts should all go out to the people of Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast whose environment and livelihoods will likely be impacted - and in some instances, devastated - by this broadening disaster. It is now obvious that the oil from this spill will become an ecological and economic disaster along the Southern coast of Louisiana. It is already moving into sensitive coastal wetland areas that were devastated just five years ago by Hurricane Katrina, and will almost certainly have severe impacts on the Louisiana fishing, shrimping and oyster bed industries that constitute such a vital part of the Louisiana economy. It seems likely that the currents in the Gulf of Mexico will ultimately carry this oil to the shores of other states, ultimately even being carried around the Florida peninsula and impacting that state's Eastern shore.
All sorts of theories are beginning to float around about what might have caused the initial explosion that triggered this disaster, most of them centering around the failure of the blowout preventer to trigger and shut down the flow of oil through the well bore. I have heard some of my colleagues talk about what "bad luck" BP has had in recent years, with several major disasters taking place at their U.S. facilities. The truth is that such accidents at large facilities of this sort are almost always due to some form of human error - they are almost never the result of a "bad luck" mechanical failure.
The reality is that BP has established an unfortunate safety record at its U.S. facilities in the last 5 years - both the explosion at its Texas City Refinery and its pipeline leak on the North Slope of Alaska were clear results of its personnel failing to follow safety procedures. BP and the federal government will perform their investigations and ultimately identify a cause, and we can expect that cause to have very little to do with "bad luck", and much to do with human error. Blowout preventers with triple-redundant triggering systems just don't fail on their own.
The sad part of this is that the oil and gas industry as a whole has over the last 20 years established an extraordinary record for safety in the Gulf of Mexico. The federal government defines a "significant" oil spill as any spill over 1,000 barrels. Not even the devastation wrought to oil and gas platforms in the Gulf by hurricanes Katrina and Rita triggered a single such spill.
That record will now be totally discounted in the U.S. liberal news media by this single incident, and the nation will become far more dependent on foreign oil as a result.
That's very sad, but it's also an unavoidable outcome of this terrible tragedy.
We are also seeing questions beginning to arise, even in the Obama lapdog media, about the slowness of the federal government's response to this event, with some even beginning to speculate that this could become "Obama's Katrina". Only time will tell if that ultimately becomes the case, but we must all realize that only the lapdog news media can make that happen, and given that they have richly earned their "lapdog" moniker in relation to this President, such an outcome seems very unlikely to ultimately take place.
After all, life in the liberal zoo bases its entire existence on a compliant and cooperative lapdog media.
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