Ever get the feeling that last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill never occurred? What worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history?
Now we have a president so defensive about $4-a-gallon-gas that he feels obligated to extend existing oil-drilling leases in the Gulf. Even though the risk-reward ratio is a well-established non-starter. Is this an application of a lesson learned from the BP spill?
“I have seen no evidence that they have marshaled containment efforts that are sufficient to deal with another major spill,” assesses Charles Perrow, a Yale University professor specializing in accidents involving high-risk technologies. “I don’t think they have found ways to change the corporate culture sufficiently to prevent future accidents. … There are so many opportunities for things to go wrong that major spills are unavoidable.”
Too bad nothing ever came of President Carter’s call to energy arms more than–indeed, it was–30 years ago. Remember the “Moral Equivalent of War,” the energy imperative to do something other than more of the same? Remember how that phrase was ridiculed and acronymed mockingly into “MEOW”?
And now it’s 2011. Sure, we have some hybrid cars and fleet mpg averages are up. But the bottom line remains the same.
We can’t drill our way to energy independence. We need to get smart about mass transit, self-sacrifice and how we incentivize the use of oil alternatives.
And, above all, not forget that the U.S. produces about 5 percent of the world’s petroleum while consuming about 20 percent. It’s obvious we must focus the lion’s share of our attention on the latter figure, not the former.