This post did not stop the oil spill in the Gulf

Well, weeks of me not writing about the oil spill in the Gulf has not resulted in the capping of the leak, so here we go.

(Oh, there's no way in Hades that this is going to make any difference with that situation. Let's not pretend for a second I was meaning to imply this would have any effect whatsoever. It was merely a silly rhetorical red herring.)

It seems the only thing I can do about that specific issue is enjoy the fodder the attempted resolutions by BP provided to The Daily Show. That's about it.

~

I must interject here the following: When I was first typing this on the train and got to that point the person who was sitting next to me (I don't recall when she got on but it wasn't the whole trip) got my attention. It was a young woman who had glanced over at the screen, noticed that I alluded to the oil spill, and then wanted to mention to me that she'd just been talking with relatives on the Florida coast who were likely to get oil washing up in their area; the young woman thought it an interesting coincidence how she'd just been discussing it and here I was starting to write about it.

We ended up talking for the rest of the ride. I fully admitted not having any expertise, and we agreed it was a tricky topic with no easy answer. She asked if I had a blog, which I admitted I did with some reluctance—not that I'm ashamed of what I post, but because what I do I don't consider to be proper "blogging"—and noted that whether this entry would ever get posted was questionable. She nicely encouraged that I should.

So then I felt some obligation to finsh. The next day I tried to recall where I was going with it…

~

I don't pretend to be any sort of expert on deep-water drilling—but then, from the way the efforts to plug the leak have gone, it seems neither are those who engage in that specific activity. (Ba-dump-chik!) Okay, that was a cheap joke, but it does get at what I've gleaned from watching coverage is that this venture was (shall we say) imprudent.

Now, I concede this is an easy topic about which the coverage can be indignant. It is catastrophic beyond belief, but I don't think the people tasked with stopping it are incompetent. I'd be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're legitimately trying their best. It's unfortunate that their best is wildly insufficient, but to make them out to be villainous buffoons is not helping stop make the pipe leak oil into the Gulf of Mexico at an astounding rate.

It is an amusing distraction when one has reached the point of hopelessness, though.

That we (sure, I'll lump us all in this) are forced to seek oil reserves at such depths, where it must be tremendously difficult to get in the first place (overlooking for the moment the danger of how horribly wrong it can go—and has gone here), clearly indicates how desperate we are to continue having a source of relatively cheap energy. To get all upset about the spill is understandable, but as long as we're driving cars that run on what ultimately comes from sources such as this, we don't have any moral high ground. The only simple solution here is to go back four decades and get the habits of the American public to start changing so that by now we consider gasoline to be on par with using whale oil. Lacking a time machine or any idea how the hell to get the public to change I can only hope that maybe there'll start to be a shift in the next four decades.

Before I was born a spill occurred off the California coast in the late '60s which I'm led to believe caused a bit of an outrage at the time. There were long lines at gas stations in the '70s I recall from my childhood, where people were restricted from buying gasoline based on whether the first number of their license plate was an odd or even number. In the '80s the crash of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled massive amounts of crude on the Alaska coast. Just a few years ago the price of gas approached $5 a gallon. And that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. What's the common factor with all of these incidents over the last four decades?

None of them changed public opinion about the use of fossil fuels to power our vehicles. I'm not suggesting absolutely no progress has been made on that front, but clearly it was nowhere close to being sufficient that in 2010 the thought of drilling at depths of thousands of feet in the Gulf was dismissed as unnecessary. It didn't turn getting off of petroleum as a priority with politicians and (more important) the companies who make money off that. So, as egregiously awful as the situation with the spill is right now, it's imprudent to expect this incident will have any larger effect than chipping away at public opinion, not be the proverbial straw breaking the proverbial camel's back.

The reality is that there's no simple answer (save, as noted, time travel). Castigating the public isn't helping anything either. Even if this event brings about some new dawn of ecological priorities on a grand scale, the situation is so well-established as it is that even if we made concerted efforts to change our relationship with petroleum starting tomorrow we might—and only might—be to the point where we are no longer suckling at the teat of crude oil by the time four more decades have passed. Our grandchildren might reap some reward.

Might.

And before any significant shift in direction for our energy can be commenced we need to all agree on what's the way to achieve that.

Uh, yeah. Even shooting for a modest shift, we'd need to implement some new paradigm that undoubtedly would require considerable up-front capital to finance. And with a down economy it's hardly realistic to expect average citizens, who've already had to make sacrifices, to be encouraging the economy to go that way (even if it is in their long-term better interest).

And doing the right thing is rarely as economically attractive as doing the easy thing.

The scope of the problem is massive. As individuals it's almost certain to feel overwhelming and beyond our control. I get that. There's limited influence one can have right now. But it does seem like keeping this incident in mind when making decisions (at least as much as possible)—when buying a new car, get one that has above-average mileage, for example—and when one is voting. Sure, politics is not the answer, but that's where more power is than what we have as individuals; it's something.

The saving grace to all this: If you make something convenient, the public will do it.

Yes, if there's one generalization that can be made about the American public it is this: If you make it easy to do and show them a benefit, they'll do it.

By way of obvious example, I will cite recycling. In my building there's a dumpster exclusively for items to be recycled. All I need do is make the modest effort to put applicable items in there rather than in the regular garbage. I don't have to sort out the recycling in to different types (aluminum, glass, plastic, paper). I don't have to pack up large amounts of these items and haul them down to some center during its business hours. I don't care about missing out on the pittance I might have gotten for all that effort; I'm content to have a convenient way of keeping any more of my trash than absolutely necessary from ending up in a landfill. It's not that I'm obsessed with ecology; I just happen to think nature looks nicer than piles of garbage.

I don't expect us to reach the point where being off petroleum is convenient for (best case scenario) a couple generations, and I don't expect it to happen without resistance from those who are benefiting from the current arrangement, but logic dictates that unless we start making the effort toward that it never will happen.

I do believe that no matter how deep we drill (even if we get better at doing so safely) that there is a finite amount of oil out there. Eventually it will run out. That's not parroting propaganda--it's the logical conclusion to draw from the fact that we were drilling at thousands of feet; if it were plentiful elsewhere we wouldn't be doing that. Let's not go off on the then-let's-drill-in-ANWAR idea. That's not addressing the ultimate issue; it merely would postpone the inevitable. When we hit that point where there's not enough oil to go around if we're not mostly, if not entirely, off the stuff, I have to imagine the consequences then will make us nostalgic for a gulf full of sludge.

America: At times we're short-sighted, but our history is full of instances where someone came up with a great innovation that changed the course of our country, and I have every confidence that it will happen again with this.

It won't be me, of course, but there's millions of people in our fine nation; those are decent odds. And I believe a majority of us will jump on that bandwagon as soon as it's simple.

~

So now the question for you, humble reader: Should I have just abandoned this task or was it worth blathering on in this pedantic and not terribly clever way?