Oil Spill

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is distressing me as much if not more than Katrina did. I just… there really aren’t sufficient words for so many things that have gone and continue to go wrong and what a possibly world-changing disaster it could turn into. Like the Rude Pundit, I also wonder why BP gets to claim it’s in charge of the Gulf and why the United States lets them get away with it:

The Rude Pundit can’t get his mind around the fact that the well is still pouring out oil a month later. He can’t grasp how BP executives haven’t been arrested for, at the minimum, criminal negligence, if not manslaughter, and the well blown up and sealed. He can’t understand why BP is even involved in any decision-making here, why any notion of protecting profits and shareholders has had any effect on the solution, why the Obama administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, fucking NOAA hasn’t told BP to go fuck itself, that the well’s not theirs anymore. And then order the Coast Guard to shoot on sight anyone from BP who gets near it.

BP has wasted so much time on efforts to save the oil and its investment in the well that it is just now getting around to attempting to seal the well. It’s pretty simple. Fuck BP. Fucking blow it up. Fucking collapse the earth around it. And be fucking done with the spill and get to the clean up.

I have said from the beginning that BP, as a company, should cease to exist given an outrageous screw-up of this magnitude. Every last cent that it has should be put towards cleaning up the mess and mitigating the damage. It still won’t be enough, and thus they should bankrupt themselves attempting to repair the damage. A commenter over at Digby’s discussed something similar:

I’d like to add my own proposed solution to this ‘problem.’ since the incursion of oil into the wetlands has already started a probably irreversable process of die-off in those marshes, and since once they are gone the Gulf of Mexico will be literally in our laps and the next stiff breeze (never mind a hurricaine) will flood the city of New Orleans for good, here’s what I propose:

Nationalize BP. Just take over the company. Jail it’s executives (after first imposing bank-account-draining fines), seize it’s multibillion dollar profits, and liquidate it’s assets. Continue to run the company as a non-profit (call it Oil America or something) and pour all that money into a massive coastal restoration project. We’ve done this sort of thing before (the Tennessee Valley project and various irrigation schemes in the western states come immediately to mind) and the need has never been greater than now to seize these issues by the horns. We’ve had thirty years of oil company bullshit, and we sure as hell wouldn’t be in this position today if we’d simply continued down the road started by Carter administration energy policies (thank you, “Reagan Revolution”). That’s thirty years of anyone who dared suggest alternatives to Big Oil being sneered at as a tree-hugging liberal. Thirty years of Cheyney-esque entitlement to driving half-ton gas guzzlers 300 yards to the 7/11 to buy a burrito to pack onto our already grotesquely fat asses. Can we just admit finally that neo-conservatism and it’s fanatically pro-corporate policies have been a massive and spectacular failure and get on with it? Please?

This country has suffered from an utter lack of leadership, forward-thinking, and responsible stewardship and contingency planning when it comes to energy for far too long. When I was a kid, the fear was that we would all perish in a nuclear armaggedon–but now it seems much more likely that we (and many other species on the planet) will choke to death on oil. What a way to go. It was a nice planet for awhile, I guess.