Oil: America’s Real Addiction |
When I think of drug addiction I think of the illogical things people do to not only rationalize their addiction, but what they are willing to give up in exchange for a moment of euphoria. So when I look at people’s reaction to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, I realize that even though he’s an inarticulate idiot, George Bush had it right: We’re addicted to oil.
This makes it ironic that the BP Gulf oil leak happened on 4/20, a day celebrated for drug use. Peter Jackson couldn’t have scripted this better. Americans are so addicted to oil we’re like that crackhead mother who loses custody of her children and then says “I’m going to get clean and get them back…right after this last hit.” Faced with unimaginable devastation of our environment, there are still Americans pushing for an expansion of oil drilling.
This especially rings true when you hear politicians speak about offshore oil drilling and lifting liability caps. You would think that during one of the worst environmental disasters this country has ever faced, rational thought would prevail and simple measures like a moratorium on offshore drilling (particularly deepwater drilling) and raising the liability caps of oil companies would get unanimous support. Well, you’d be wrong. To put this in perspective, after September 11th the Patriot Act was hastily written and put together a little over a month after the terrorist attack and passed with 98 Senators voting in favor. Ninety-eight Senators voted for one of the most egregious attacks on our civil liberties, but we can’t even get unanimous consent to raise the liability cap for oil companies for offshore drilling accidents from $75 million to $10 billion?
But it gets better.
Imagine my shock and surprise when I found out that Mary Landrieu, sitting senator for Louisiana, is pushing for the president to lift the moratorium not just on shallow water drilling but deepwater drilling (like the Deepwater Horizon station at the heart of this leak). Maybe if I was drunk enough you could convince me to lift the ban on shallow water drilling. But on deepwater drilling, too? Not only did this leak expose the horrible job the Minerals Management Service has done in regulating oil rigs, but it exposed that we don’t have a good way to cap a leak this far down in the water. Again, forget about who’s responsible and BP’s carelessness. Even if this was an unavoidable accident with no one to blame, WE STILL WOULD HAVE NO WAY OF CAPPING THE LEAK. And Landrieu wants to rush to lift the ban. On one hand, she wants to fight to clean the environment, but she also wants to destroy it. Tyrone Biggums has officially entered the classroom to tell kids to stay off of crack. This is like holding your girlfriend’s hand above the table as you slide your other hand up her sister’s skirt.
Please put the oil-filled crack pipe down, please.
Honestly, listening to Landrieu’s argument made me feel as though Tony Hayward was holding me down and pouring crude through my ears and directly onto my brain. Landrieu said that if we don’t lift the moratorium soon, oil companies would go elsewhere and with them oil jobs. “They employ a lot of people.” Well Landrieu, know who else employs a lot of people? Crack cocaine. I mean hell; if we got rid of drugs do you know how many people who work as drug counselors would be out of jobs?
I also found it interesting that she mentioned Nigeria as one place these companies would go. Yes, Nigeria, where Big oil routinely has leaks the size of the one in the Gulf but without anyone holding them responsible. We’re now complaining if we don’t buy our drug from our dealer, the dealer is just going to go sell somewhere else and destroy another community.
We’re an oil-addicted country. I understand we can’t go cold turkey. But this push to expand drilling locally threatens our fragile ecosystem. Pushes to expand offshore drilling or to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have less to do with ending our addiction to foreign oil and more with expanding Big Oil’s drug market. We’re addicted so we don’t see the problem. We’ve rationalized this absurd situation and it’s only going to get worse. Imagine the outrage if the president came out and said we were going to end our addiction to foreign cocaine by increasing production of it here locally. People would lose their minds. But that’s exactly what we are doing with oil. And apparently we as people are okay with that because we need our fix. And Big Oil is happy to give it to us.
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