Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

It’s an amazing sight this morning from the Deepwater Horizon drill site: A robotic submersible has a circular saw attached, and a mile down under the surface, is cutting into the pipe from which a massive amount of crude oil has been gushing since the oil rig exploded and sank a month and a half ago.

BP has been repeatedly impotent in its efforts to contain the oil spill. The current effort, to cap the main spill site, isn’t even aiming to completely stop the spill. Oh, how the standards of offshore drilling have fallen. They once told us that they were technological geniuses. Now, they’re big energy goofballs.

Why, with this repeated incompetence, should we continue to allow offshore drilling?

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?

One of the consequences of global warming is rising sea levels. There is no rational debate about whether sea levels are rising – this change has been measured worldwide.

At the end of last week, the EPA issued a new report on the likely implications of sea level rise. The report goes into a good amount of detail, making it a useful resource if you’re truly interested in the subject, but not a thrilling read if you’re only casually tracking the issue.

The report confirms that “Rising water levels are already an important factor in submerging low-lying lands, eroding beaches, converting wetlands to open water, and exacerbating coastal flooding.” In comparing the social and environmental costs of trying to preserve current shorelines and managing a retreat to higher ground, the report concludes that attempting to preserve current shorelines will have a lower social and environmental cost in the short run, but will have a higher cost in the long term.