Hypocracy
All this uproar and anger towards British Petroleum, as if they have some secret plan for success they simply have not invoked. The very vocal, very boisterous American minority is having rallies and letting their feelings be known that they hate 'big oil'. But very few of them seem to understand a few things, one this is not near the greatest spill in history and two the vast majority of the products they use every day that contain some from of petroleum.
It is one thing to say lets get off our dependency on oil as a fuel. Remember though that oil is used nearly as much for heat as it is for propulsion. So in order to get off oil, as they would advocate, you'd need to find a cost effective way to create the same amount of heating fuel as you do propulsion fuel. Not an easy task.
People also seem to avoid researching this topic at all costs. In 1979, following all the OPEC and oil-embargo nonsense, Mexico had the second largest oil spill in recorded history (the first being held by Iraqi troops in 1991 by burning oil fields).
The aftermath of this 9 month long oil spill:
Eventually, in the US, 162 miles (261 km) of beaches and 1421 birds were affected by 3,000,000 barrels (480,000 m3) of oil.[7] Pemex spent $100 million to clean up the spill and avoided paying compensation by asserting sovereign immunity.[8]
I'm not saying this to dissolve current oil conglomerates but to say that Ixtoc I was utilizing the same strategies to solve the same problem nearly 30 years ago. And I mean, the same. It was a blown well head that caused the leak with a well depth of over 11,000 feet. The blowout preverter didn't work then, as it didn't now, the Mexican government tried the "cap" idea that BP did, it failed then as it did now. The only method that worked was a secondary drill to relieve pressure. So you have to ask, where has research and development been over 30 years?
Why have government off shore oil drilling regulations not included vastly greater rules about blowout prevention and how to minimize the damage? Simply, Congress didn't care. And now because of their failure the government, yet again, is attempting to use a crisis to demand more control over an industry.
The government had its role and it failed, it is as simple as that. There is no magic bullet here, BP did not plan for the well to blow up. To this point the only eye I cast at BP is why they haven't tried harder to destroy the well head than preserve it. My guess is obvious, to keep the oil flowing to their rigs.
Now onto the other part of this, the get off oil crowd. When a person steps up and informs the GOO crowd they find that they immediately are told they hate the environment. Not at all, I'm a fan of the environment, I'm also a fan of reality and logic. We need to start smaller. Having efficient vehicles is a great plan and something we can do now, but we need to focus on the other elements of oil production which includes the hundreds of thousands of products derived from oil. It has been said that if we dropped all use of fossil fuels today and stopped the entire economy, we'd only be 60% less of a polluter than we were in 1990. So what is the end state here?
Lets attack a problem logically instead of emotionally. I can't imagine that the anti-oil crowd really wants us to go back to how it was before oil, because back then we used whale oil and you see how upset they get about the whales.
It is one thing to say lets get off our dependency on oil as a fuel. Remember though that oil is used nearly as much for heat as it is for propulsion. So in order to get off oil, as they would advocate, you'd need to find a cost effective way to create the same amount of heating fuel as you do propulsion fuel. Not an easy task.
People also seem to avoid researching this topic at all costs. In 1979, following all the OPEC and oil-embargo nonsense, Mexico had the second largest oil spill in recorded history (the first being held by Iraqi troops in 1991 by burning oil fields).
The aftermath of this 9 month long oil spill:
I'm not saying this to dissolve current oil conglomerates but to say that Ixtoc I was utilizing the same strategies to solve the same problem nearly 30 years ago. And I mean, the same. It was a blown well head that caused the leak with a well depth of over 11,000 feet. The blowout preverter didn't work then, as it didn't now, the Mexican government tried the "cap" idea that BP did, it failed then as it did now. The only method that worked was a secondary drill to relieve pressure. So you have to ask, where has research and development been over 30 years?
Why have government off shore oil drilling regulations not included vastly greater rules about blowout prevention and how to minimize the damage? Simply, Congress didn't care. And now because of their failure the government, yet again, is attempting to use a crisis to demand more control over an industry.
The government had its role and it failed, it is as simple as that. There is no magic bullet here, BP did not plan for the well to blow up. To this point the only eye I cast at BP is why they haven't tried harder to destroy the well head than preserve it. My guess is obvious, to keep the oil flowing to their rigs.
Now onto the other part of this, the get off oil crowd. When a person steps up and informs the GOO crowd they find that they immediately are told they hate the environment. Not at all, I'm a fan of the environment, I'm also a fan of reality and logic. We need to start smaller. Having efficient vehicles is a great plan and something we can do now, but we need to focus on the other elements of oil production which includes the hundreds of thousands of products derived from oil. It has been said that if we dropped all use of fossil fuels today and stopped the entire economy, we'd only be 60% less of a polluter than we were in 1990. So what is the end state here?
Lets attack a problem logically instead of emotionally. I can't imagine that the anti-oil crowd really wants us to go back to how it was before oil, because back then we used whale oil and you see how upset they get about the whales.
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