Since nobody’s going to come looking for a nuclear power debate in a thread about the BP disaster, I thought I’d start a new GD thread: “So what’s really blocking nuclear power? Cost? Red tape? Fear of lawsuits? Bad P.R.? What?”
Because you specified it as “very necessary”. No oil use is only necessary in the way the less disastrous housing bubble was necessary, IE completely avoidable if people hadn’t acted like fuckwits.
Had ya’ll listened to the hippies back in the day maybe the gulf wouldn’t be getting trashed right now.
Oil use isn’t necessary? Hippies don’t drive cars (ok, floral minibuses, but they use petroleum too!)?
Why didn’t I see that one coming?
Look, I’ll agree that once the day comes when we have electric cars that can do everything a internal combustion car can do and for the same price, I am all on board. That doesn’t exist right now. Charging times, range, reliability, disposal of batteries…there’s legit concerns on all those and more I’m not thinking of.
So for now…oil is necessary for transportation for many millions of people until that day comes.
But those electric cars need tires and plastics. Tires and plastics are made from petroleum, and AFAICT, so are a huge plethora of other things.
Granted that crude oil for gasoline production makes up the lion’s share of petroleum production, and that there’s environmental concerns out the wazoo with oil…we’re still always going to need it, albeit in smaller quantities than now.
Anyway, I don’t see any Austin-Powers-esque flower motifs on any of those cars pictured in your article, and until that happens, we’ll never be able to get elucidator to trade in his purple Prius for one.
Don’t own a car. Own a bike. You’ll have to find another hippiecrit.
Dammit! You’re never an easy target, are you?
The wheels are rubber. You have to walk barefooted.
How many CC?
Do you think we’ve learned nothing from the Bush administration?
Words can have two meanings!!
And only on the grass! The asphalt is made of…yeah.
“Hypocrisy is the pretty compliment that vice pays to virtue”
- La Rouche…La Rooshen…some French guy.
If the Reb Hillel lays the Golden Rule on you, its the Golden Rule. If Mike Tyson does it, its still the Golden Rule.
Or as Kurt V. said, “You are what you pretend to be, so be very, very careful about what you pretend to be.”
He leases. 
Concrete?
Gonzo, you forgot to handwave away the size and relatively catastrophic risk.
While I don’t expect Jesus Molecules to power my car and Internet connection, that doesn’t mean I can’t point out that just like offshore drilling, safeguards cannot be perfected, the risk of a major incident can’t be eliminated, and the potential–and veritably inevitable–outcome of a major event will be so devastating as to warrant objection to the power source.
sings
“One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is not the same”
Fix the “consumer-crap-culture keeping-up-with-the-Joneses math-and-science-are-hard!” sickness that just riddles but infuses throughout American Society, and you’ll fix the energy problem.
Get back to me in 50 or so years when any progress is made.
Much has been covered here, but really, I KNEW there would be a catastrophic oil spill, I just didnt know exactly when The spill came SOONER than I anticipated … yes, I failed to factor in the dismantling of safety regulations during the Bush Admin which the Obama Admin has not yet compensated for (to be fair, Bush left Obama’s plate really, really full in so many ways).
I’d just as soon the accident had never happened, but given that is HAS happened, my only option is the one I will take … making sure the "Drill Baby Drill"ers are recognized as the stupid, greedy scum they are and doing what I can to ensure that their ideas are never again taken seriously by anyone who is not a dittohead.
The Santa Barbara oil spill happened 41 years ago, and to this day, trying to expand off-shore drilling in California is a huge political fight. And it’s not just because of environmentalists. It’s because beach front property owners and industries which depend on clean oceans (such as tourism or fishing) have combined with environmentalists make up a strong enough coalition of political interests that expanding drilling in California is a fight.
If this spill starts doing serious damage on the shore, it will be a generation before it becomes politically feasible to even talk about expanding off-shore drilling in the Gulf. And while it may be simple and easy to lay the blame at the feet of environmentalists or big-government ideology, what will probably happen is that the same coalition of diverse interests will now have a common goal, and that will be enough to stop drilling.
So, anyone who actually wants expanded drilling (and I’m not opposed to it, per se), should be deeply concerned about (1) how to prevent a spill like this from happening and (2) how to make sure that damaged property owners and business are adequately compensated for their losses.
And the only way to make sure that both those concerns have even a shot of being taken care of is through having a smart regulatory and inspection regime which addresses them. If you want to expand off-shore drilling, rather than pooh-pooh the people who are rightly concerned about oil spills, you should be working with them to come up with a way to address these concerns properly.
This spill seems like a “perfect storm” scenario to me. I think people fail to understand the forces of nature, pressures, depths and such at play here, and sometimes, no amount of safeguards can prevent something like this. If the blowout preventer had worked as designed (and we’re talking about a HUGE piece of equipment here), nothing really would have happened. Instead we have a well spewing huge amounts of oil into the ocean with no end in sight.
Its the price we pay for being oil-dependent. I am in total agreement that we need to figure out a way to get ourselves around that isn’t so potentially environmentally damaging at both ends of the process (acquiring and burning) but in the meantime folks…we’re stuck with it, like it or not.
Well, the obvious solution is to prevent all off-shore drilling. If you don’t like that solution, then I don’t think an argument that “we’re stuck with it, like it or not” is going to make much headway with business or property owners damaged by the spill. For me personally, I’m not opposed to off-shore drilling, but if it doesn’t happen, I don’t really care. But people who are in favor of off-shore drilling better hope that politicians don’t run around telling people that we’re stuck with spills, because that’s a pretty good way to have that political coalition appear and shut down drilling for a generation.