The ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has given rise to all sorts of “obvious” conclusions to be drawn, specifically that America’s addiction to oil is a proximate—if not THE proximate—cause of all environmental and natural despoliation, and only drastic legislative measures to curb said hankering for fossil fuels will ensure the continued survival of the human race.
More specifically, if there was a more propitious opportunity to pass so called “climate-change” legislation, one might be hard pressed to find it.
Really, one shouldn’t have to overtax one’s mental faculties to discern reasons why this ain’t necessarily so. However, in case one might need some sort of “learning aid” to help one clear the muddy [if not oily] waters of such thinking, consider the recent rumors that the “Oracle” of environmentalism—former Vice-President Al Gore—has taken the notion of “common cause” to its most logical conclusion with fellow traveler and Gulfstream environmentalist extraordinaire Laurie David, the woman who fought the scourge of the SUV from her private jet.
It seems as if Gore, whose carbon footprint is notoriously nearly as wide as David’s, has finally provided a salient analog for his purported “environmental science”: it’s as solid as his 40-year marriage to Tipper. Then again, one might wonder whether the Gore’s ill-advised PDA at the 2000 Democratic National Convention also provided a prescient analog to oil spills: the ick factor.
In any case, the Obamans—ostensibly the most pro-environment and anti-corporate administration in US history—have progressively more tightly bound their already rather securely tied hands until mere attempts indignant wringing have induced sympathy arthritis in even the President’s most avowed political enemies. Said spectacle really serves to illustrate two notions which are, nevertheless, as elementary as they are contradictory.
One is that, as much as we NEED our oil, there’s a LOT of it out there [for once, we can’t seem to get it to stop flowing], and much of it rather inconveniently located [hello—Middle East?] There is no reason—even in the face of the current environmental tragedy [and let’s face it, that’s what it is, and you can be a global warming “denier” like this writer is and still understand that]—that we not make any and all attempts to locate and drill for oil wherever we can find it in places other than the Fertile and Golden Crescents…IF—and this is a big IF—
--we figure out how to REGULATE, how to actually implement required legal safeguards and basic procedures, which by all accounts, seem to have been blatantly discarded by BP which directly led to the current mess.
As previously noted in these pages, Big Oil isn't going anywhere. Alternative energy strategies will be pursued when we have no other alternative, pace Churchill’s observation that Americans do the right thing when they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. However, if Big Oil were smart, they could turn this crisis somewhat to their advantage by working with legislators to allow some semblance of independent regulation and monitoring into the industry by throwing BP under the bus, by saying, in effect, “We don’t want this to happen again; who wants to waste all that oil? What BP did was greedy AND stupid. We may be greedy, but if keeping the landscape clean will save our profits, we’re all for helping clean this up. Do to BP what you want; we’ll help make sure this never repeats itself.” If the public is actually prepared to expect and accept this level of disingenuousness, it may be the first step towards an eventual win-win: more oil and less disaster.
It won’t happen any other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment