Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

NASA released this satellite photograph of the rapidly expanding oil slick coming from the site of the wrecked Deepwater Horizon. As you can see, when this photograph was taken, the oil slick was clearly larger than the city of New Orleans. I was astonished by that. Now, that’s small potatoes. The oil slick is at 28,600 square miles, larger than the state of West Virgina.

So far, all efforts by BP to stop oil from surging up from the wellhead and riser on the sea floor have failed, and the slick is getting closer to shore day by day, threatening fisheries, shrimping grounds, oyster beds, tourist beaches, and the mangroves that protect the delta from being washed away by hurricanes. The slick is now just 30 miles from shore and should hit the Breton National Wildlife Refuge and the Delta National Wildlife Refuge first.

The Obama Administration says that it will continue pushing ahead with its policy to expand offshore oil drilling, unchanged, despite this offshore drilling disaster. How is that different from the approach the Bush Administration took? Is that what we voted for in 2008?