For the first time in 40 years, after another 35,000 wells have been drilled, we finally got unlucky with an oil spill. Why did it take so long? Don't count on that ever being discussed.
Of course as a bicyclist and pedestrian I reacted at first with some evil pleasure at the notion of anything that will make gasoline cost more in the future. My goodness, I get so sick of noisy pickup trucks and hectic traffic.
It says something about our country that the Media immediately ran to the American president, as if he can just push a buzzer in the Oval Office and make the crisis du jour go away.
Watch the talking heads, the politicians, and the Greens posture in front of the TV cameras: none of these could handle the tiniest technical problem themselves. They have no appreciation for the complex engineering involved in bringing petroleum to an economy completely dependent on it.
Most galling are the Greens. This is a perfect chance for them to demagogue big Evil oil corporations. If only their fellow-travelers in the Media asked the Greens why Big Oil is drilling in mile-deep water in the first place, instead of drilling more safely on BLM or national forest land, with low-tech and smaller wells, and with easier containment of a small spill.
For decades now, America has been living in a dream world regarding energy, and yet, we've been getting away with it. It is really surprising that petroleum hasn't increased in price more than it has, with all the people in Asia driving cars and using more energy.
Some think-tank policy wonk will appear on a news show and scold us for not having an "energy policy." Usually that just means small increases in automobile fuel efficiency, with a giant loophole made for SUV's and pickup trucks, since they are "agricultural", you know. It also means more subsidies for suburban sentimentalists' favorite toy technologies, such as windmills or solar panels.
Put yourself in the place of the average post-industrial, suburban, environmentalist/sentimentalist: she looks at pictures of distraught pelicans on her giant TV screen on the other side of her great room, say, 30 feet in length. Her 3500 square foot Garage Mahal (subsidized by the US taxpayer) is climate-controlled 340 days per year. She drives one of the three family SUVs or pickup trucks to drop her kid off at school everyday, instead of telling the little chubbo to walk or ride his bike. She couldn't survive one day without the petroleum industry.
The reaction to the oil spill shows that a large part of the American economy -- and virtually all of its Media -- lives in a post-industrial dream world, where sentimentality and emotion trump engineering and economics, and where hypocrisy and escapism trump rational, adult thinking. They take all of their modern comforts for granted and prefer to moon and swoon over a pelican. A major oil spill like this is almost a blessing in disguise if it encourages the American people to reconnect to physical reality.
But let's end on a positive note: by sheer dumb luck, a retired executive of Shell, John Hofmeister, has just brought out a book entitled, "Why We Hate the Oil Companies." He is an articulate spokesman for a rational approach to energy problems. Surprisingly the news outlets are paying attention to him. And that makes him a pretty rare bird.
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