Louisiana oil disaster

Disaster alley. Strange coincidence that the path of the Deepwater Horizon-BP oil mess mimics Katrina's. Not so strange that our shameful and shameless junior Republican senator wants the federal government to take over the clean up. Privatize gain and when the inevitable result of corporate greed kicks in then we socialize loss.

Talk of clean-up is embarrassing. The oil is projected to make landfall from South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi to Pensacola on the Florida Panhandle. I think thats about 300 miles. So far 22.5 miles of booms are in place to protect the shoreline, and most of these have been blown ashore or otherwise rendered useless by rough seas. Talk of burning off the oil at the site of the leak is fantasy. Just the image of the Gulf aflame should give up pause. And it won't work. It's too windy and the oil is mixing with water, most of it won't light. Skimming with boat towed booms would be marginal help in the best of conditions and with the wind the way it is on the Gulf they can't even deploy the boats.

I search for vocabulary. This is not an oil spill. A tanker with a drunk at the wheel can run aground and all the oil aboard can spill. That is a disaster, an oil spill of a known quantity. Decades later Prince William Sound is still crippled by the Exxon Valdez spill. Here we have a huge lake of oil, blowing out through a hole we punched in the skin of our home planet a mile below the sea where we have no real chance to patch it. It is expected that the abrasive flow now seeping out of the damaged pipe will cause the whole well head to fail soon and the flow will increase tenfold or more. And nobody knows how much oil we can expect from this.

"Responsible" people point out that there are risks involved, but we need the oil. Who is "we"? BP, Haliburton, Shell, etc. . . they would not exist without oil. For me and for you it would be possible, very hard perhaps but possible, to do without oil. Not so hard really to do with much less. I am reminded of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, surrounded by hostile Natives. The Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "We're in big trouble now," and Tonto replies, "Why do you say 'we,' whitey?"