Oil Of Oy Vey

It's time to stop referring to the greatest environmental disaster in history as a "spill". When I reach across the breakfast table and knock over my orange juice, that's a spill. Oops! To equate that with tens of thousands of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico per day is engaging in denial of the highest order. BP contends that their current solution (#459, I believe) has reduced it to a "relative trickle", but we also know they're really bad at math. However, the seductive language is far from accidental on the part of those who contend that this is a minor mishap; the cost of doing business. It creates a subliminal connotation that it's all gonna be just fine. It's not. Because, among all the sturm und drang on both sides of the political aisle, efforts to continually prop up big oil (clearly at any cost) is an effort in continued futility. There are three industries that employ most of the residents of the Gulf Coast region: tourism, oil, and fishing. After Obama's moratorium on drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon debacle, jobs are being lost in all three. Plans to resume drilling in order to restore those jobs can be considered a pyrrhic victory, at best. It's also hard to recall a time in recent memory when the public reaction to corporate incompetence has been so tepid. We live in a nation where parents will pick up torches against Wendy's when their kid gets the wrong CD in their happy meal, yet the reaction to BP has strangely been along the lines of, "mistakes happen". I suppose even the dimmest among us realize that outrage over this disaster would force us to look ourselves in the mirror and willfully ignore a very basic truth: oil is simply not the future. Sadly, as long as it remains cheap, we will do nothing to face that fact. The cover of the latest issue of Newsweek says, "What The Spill Will Kill" above a picture of a sea turtle. Taken in the larger context, that turtle might as well be us.