“We are way, way behind when it comes to the hard work of preventing accidents and responding to these catastrophes when they happen. With the deep-water oil drilling, we allowed the technological advances to drive the process at a rate that was unsafe, and we got really badly burned. The potential of a nuclear catastrophe is a major disaster in waiting.”
—
Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health
Now, I’m fine with marching forward, blindly, even stupidly, if the benefits are obvious. More oil doesn’t make for much in the Benefits Department, especially when we all know we need to cut back.
Of course, the reason we don’t cut back is because of petrodollars taking up so much of our economy, but if we don’t admit this fact openly we will never get to a point where we can plan for a future without any oil at all.
Make no mistake—we are running out of oil. The BP Oil Disaster is a perfect indicator—why do you think such deep water drilling was even happening? Because the more shallow, safer drilling (or say, drilling on LAND) can no longer be done because we’ve already used up all the oil.
So, let’s go crazy into *new* territory—not into entirely familiar, more dangerous territory. Acceptable losses for daring things that push us toward a new future are fine. Losses to maintain the status quo should not be acceptable at all.
