rebecca LANDO

via ericmortensen: rainblog:

You may have noticed that the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana shoreline are in the process of turning black. You may have noticed that tens of thousands of people have died over the past few years in a Middle Eastern war whose initial motivations had at least something to do with US dependence on foreign oil. You may have seen that the US is often obliged to make special concessions to oil-rich states (one in particular springs to mind) that, shall we say, do not share all of our core moral values. The root cause for all these things can be traced back to the fact that we are deeply, helplessly dependent on oil.

I live in a pedestrian-friendly city with a functioning public transport system, which allows me to live without a car. As a result, my immediate, personal demand for gasoline may be smaller than that of many Americans. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t leave metaphorical oily footprints wherever I go. For a start, everything I consume has to be trucked to me. And then there’s the question of what exactly I am consuming.

My delivery sushi lunch today arrived in a bag (plastic). The sushi rolls were delivered in a tray (plastic) with a clear top (plastic). The wasabi and the ginger came in little tubs (plastic). The salad came in another tray (plastic) with a lid (plastic). So did the ginger sauce for the salad. There was also a tub (plastic) of soup, and a ziploc bag (plastic) of utensils, including a spoon (plastic) and a handful of plastic sachets of soy sauce. Non-oil-derived products included a paper napkin, a paper menu, wooden chopsticks, and a little foil tray for my soy sauce.

Now that I’m done eating, all that stuff is going straight into the trash. It will be picked up, driven away, and dumped in a landfill somewhere, where it will simply sit, failing to degrade. These things we have made persist long, long after we cease to have any use for them. If the remains of my lunch escape the incinerator, they’ll be around - still in the same recognizable shape - long after every trace of me has vanished from this planet, taking up useful land and constituting a problem for someone else to deal with further down the line.

This is what makes our national dependence on oil so insane. The oil that we’re so profoundly addicted to, which warps our thinking and blackens our coastlines, is used to make things that we don’t want. Using oil and energy to make things that we want and use is one thing; using them to create stuff that we throw away the second we’re done with it is something else again.

It’s generally assumed that American consumers will violently resist any attempt to interfere with their fossil-fuel-hungry lifestyle (the way of life that Dick Cheney arrogantly declared to be ‘not negotiable’). A dictator who tapped everyone’s phones and sent the secret police to break down a few selected doors at dawn would inspire mild grumbling at best. Let him try to force everyone to ride bicycles or do without that third widescreen TV and there’d be a popular insurrection in less time than you can say “The right of the people to consume hydrocarbons shall not be infringed.” Any politician who raises the taxes on gasoline does so at his peril.

But how hard would it be to persuade Americans - and by extension, everybody else in an increasingly consumerist world - to give up the stuff that they don’t actually want in the first place? All that disposable packaging; the air conditioning in malls and offices that chills you to the bone instead of keeping you comfortable (it’s 84F outside and I’m wearing a fleece); all the food that gets trucked or flown across thousands of miles only to be thrown away or stuffed into the bellies of people who already take in so many excess calories that they have to spend hours each week burning them off at the gym.

Despite our best collective efforts to resist the knowledge, it’s becoming harder to deny the mounting evidence that we are in the process of destroying our own environment. A planet is a big thing and life is extraordinarily resilient, but we now have the capacity to fuck things up so badly that even our own survival as a species may be called into question. Sooner or later, we have to face up to that and take some kind of action.

So here’s a modest proposal: if telling people that they can’t have the things they want is politically unthinkable, maybe we should explore the possibility of telling them that they can’t have the things they don’t want?

andres:

ericmortensen:

It’s not just cars. It’s plastic bottles. It’s CDs and DVDs and records. It’s paint. It’s film. It’s diapers. And thousands of other products.

If you want to make a difference, walk or ride a bike. Stop buying bottled water. Never, ever let anyone put your purchased products in a plastic bag. If you want to punish the oil industry, use less of their product. Giving your money to Exxon instead of BP doesn’t change anything. 

Precisely.

robertreich:

A petroleum engineer who’s worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here’s what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage. If the President were to put BP into temporary receivership, he’d have the power to get BP to:

1. Stop releasing dispersants. So-called dispersants are toxic, and it’s crazy to add more poison to the Gulf. Dispersants do nothing to assist the environment in naturally cleaning the oil; their main use is PR. They reduce the number of ugly pictures of birds covered in pure black crude. Dispersants break the thick layer of crude into smaller globs, but that doesn’t help the Gulf and its wildlife. Most of the crude just mixes with the water to produce a goop that looks like chocolate ice cream but is highly poisonous.

2. Mobilize every possible tanker to siphon up crude from as close to the leak points as possible. Oil industry leaders as John Hofmeister (president of Shell Oil from 2005 until 2008) have recommended this, but inexplicably neither BP nor the federal government are talking about even trying this idea. BP currently has only one spot where they have inserted a tube into a riser, or pipe, that is leaking oil from the sea floor. The company is gathering the crude oil and siphoning it up to a drill ship for storage.

They should have at least a dozen collectors. BP has 24 tankers that are being used to make money for BP, not for clean-up duty. (President Obama should also use all necessary federal power — or money, and send BP the bill — to put as many tankers and refineries from other companies on the task.)

Mile-long pipes could be dangled down into the crude spewing from the wellhead and at each breach in the riser pipe, and the tankers could pump the crude mixed with water back into the tankers. They could then separate the crude and water in the tanker, and pump the water out on the spot. This should continue until each tanker is full of oil. The crude should then be taken to a refinery for processing, as other tankers take their place. Submersibles can be used to monitor the uptake into the dangling pipes, moving them as needed to keep them picking up as much crude as possible.

Even after some separation time in the tankers, the crude will be contaminated with water beyond the typical water contamination levels acceptable at refineries. This would drive up the price of gas in the short term. The president will need to go on TV and ask all Americans to cut their gasoline and energy usage in half, as an emergency response to the disaster in the Gulf, so that tankers and refineries can enact these far-from-perfect cleanup measures.

3. Restart work on the second pressure relief well. BP did start work on two relief wells as the government requested, but the second has been shut down to cannabalize parts from it for the primary well kill effort. The President must order BP to spend whatever money it takes to get another blow out preventer on site, to re-start work on the second pressure relief well. A recent blow-out off the coast of Australia required five pressure relief wells to successfully shut it down.