Support the drilling moratorium

[nolawitch58]

Why would you not support the drilling moratorium? I say don't suspend it. We cannot trust that the BP catastrophe is an anomaly. We cannot trust that the Minerals Management Service (MMS) has been sufficiently reformed yet to make their inspections trustworthy. Many of their employees were literally in bed having sex with people in the oil industry. We cannot trust that all the other oil companies have any better safety devices. We have see that their so-called response plans are virtual photocopies of the same document.

Nobody's job is more important that protecting the environment from harm, especially for those of us who are Wiccan. We have already allowed our Mother Earth to be raped and scarred and pollution to an obscene degree. The fossil fuel industry needs to retool to produce energy in ways less detrimental to the ecosystem. We need to stop caring about those who are poisoning our land, water and air and more about finding better ways to produce energy and more efficient transportation and support reducing all our footprints.

Each one of us needs to recycle as much as we can. We need to replace our gas guzzlers with more fuel efficient vehicles or find ways to take public transportation. We need to stop wasting energy. We need to step up and do our part and not be whiny twerps about it. We need to demand that our earth be treated with respect so that others will be able to enjoy it in the future.

Comments

[blackbyrd2.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I was thinking about this just yesterday. For those whining about the ban on drilling, I want to ask them how they feel about the spill. If they welcome the spill, then I'll allow that their desire to start drilling again is at least not hypocritical, if misguided.

But if you're bitching about the oil in the gulf, you have zero business bitching about putting a stop to the drilling until we know that this isn't going to happen again tomorrow.

And Obama can't fold on this. If he reinstates drilling, and another disaster strikes, there'd be no excuses to be made. It'd be as smart as putting a gun to your head, and pulling the trigger, knowing that there's at least one bullet in the gun, and maybe more.

[real-skeptic.livejournal.com]

The problem is that individual efforts won't suffice. Individuals trying to do "the best they can" won't achieve much, and some of the issues are down to planning, which has to be done on a collective level.

I've been following news from Japan, and after the previous government was elected, they declared they wanted to make cutback in government expenses. The way they implemented this was to ask each government office to cut back as much as it can, setting no quotas whatsoever. The reasoning was that if they set a quota, everybody will just settle for the quota and will not endeavor to cut back any further. I'm sure you can guess the result of that - cutbacks were minuscule. And I don't think the government officials there are evil or corrupt in particular. It's just that when you are faced with a cut-back, there are many things that you believe you cannot do without, and you won't cut them back. In the same vein, if you ask individuals to cut back on pollution and emissions, there will be many things that they will feel they cannot do without. Personally, it's air conditioning. I can't imagine living in this weather without running one or two air conditioners for almost all day long. So yes, I use biodegradable garbage bags, ride a scooter rather than a car, use shopping baskets instead of disposable plastic bags, but it stops at the air conditioner. Perhaps if there was a law that taxed air conditioning heavily or something, people like me would cut back on that.

Moreover, what about corporations? You can save all the bags and recycle everything in your own home, but if the firm you work for wastes and dumps, you might opt to quit it and find another job, but in the current economy, you can't blame people for not doing so. You could ask customers not to buy from that firm, but many times, customers can't trace the origin of products they buy, and can't really follow internal practices at firms that provide them with goods and services.

And things like urban sprawl also cause a lot of energy waste, and that needs to be changed from the top down. And is it even possible to convince Americans not to live in separate housing units but live in apartment buildings which are packed more efficiently together? Or is it yet another "can't live without it" thing?

[nolawitch.livejournal.com]

I'm not discounting the need for government policies. When people are taking personal responsibility, they tend to have more of an ownership role in the process. Danny Dipwad, living in the farthest suburb from his workplace, driving his SUV into town by himself everyday, letting his wife and too many kids enjoy their profligate consumer lifestye, isn't going to vote for politicians who enact governmental policies toward greener ends.

The point is that to do nothing is simply giving up and letting the poisoners of our earth win.

[voxwoman.livejournal.com]

it is possible to do without air conditioning. Not that I'd want to either :)

Wben I had my 100-year-old farmhouse I had no window units - only some floor and window fans. How I survived the hot hot summers was due to the strategic placement of deciduous trees (that shaded parts of the house), gigantic windows, and a swimming pool where I could jump into and cool off as necessary. (the pool was also good for my daily aerobic exercize and I really miss it now). I never did an analysis to see if having the pool was "greener" than an air conditioner - but I will point out that the pool was used as a water supply to the local birds, bats, and small critters that lived in the area.

[real-skeptic.livejournal.com]

I'll acknowledge that a smart house may reduce the need for air conditioning. Here in Israel most of the apartment buildings have flat, whitewashed ceilings, which are a lot better than the silly red or even black tile roofs many people who become rich enough to buy a house put on their houses. A whitewashed roof is a smart Middle Eastern feature and we shouldn't pretend to be European. And then there are modern possibilities like insulating bricks, or the Japanese trick of growing vegetables vertically on the walls, where they absorb a lot of the sunlight, reducing the heat inside the house while producing fresh low-footprint vegetables for the owners. If you build your own house from scratch (or have the means to pick and choose) you can indeed save a lot of energy. But again, most individuals don't even own the houses they live in, and have little ability to choose green building. There should be building codes that require greener building, and then people would be able to buy or rent those homes more easily.

But Nolawitch is right - one of the responsibilities, above and beyond recycling and setting the thermometer, is to vote as best as one can.

Oh, but a house with a pool! *envy* Of course, in Israel, that's considered almost as evil as dunking pelicans in crude oil. Our water reserves are scant, we rely more and more on desalination, which in itself is not environmentally friendly at all. Even having lawns is a serious transgression.

Definitely

[tomo2k.livejournal.com]

Why was it a 65% BP, 25% Anadarko oil rig that went up?

Because they got unlucky first.

If you'd waited, this kind of accident would have occurred pretty soon anyway, because all these oil companies work in exactly the same way - they even mostly employ the same people, bouncing them from rig to rig, company to company.

So there does need to be a proper reckoning.

We've got companies doing drilling in places that they can't really get to, relying on safety equipment that has never really been tested in that situation, and is basically impossible to maintain because they can't really get to them.

It's quite hard to poke a stick into the bottom of the sea.
Going down there to repair bits of said stick is several orders of magnitude more difficult.

So until the oil companies have the genuine technology to fix a problem at that depth, they shouldn't be drilling there.

Unfortunately, humans are really bad at risk assessment, tending to assume that a big disaster simply can't happen despite all the evidence to the contrary.
So neither the regulators nor the oil companies really appreciate the risks involved.

- Incidentally, Anadarko appear to be shirking their responsibilities.
You might want to ask your local representatives what they think of an oil company that refuses to accept any responsibility for a project they had a 25% stake in.