We don't like to see all that black gooey stuff on the beaches and on wildlife as much as anyone else. However, the tone in the media is getting ugly and taking on the form of retribution mongering. Nor will bankrupting BP fix the problem.
The facts as we see them are BP would shut the flow into the Gulf in an instant if they had the power to do so. Mr. Obama and all the other politicos will need to not bite the hand that can most quickly stop the problem. We don't think Mr. Obama or anyone in government can do much about the realities of dealing with this mess.
All this points out to just how vulnerable we all are to oil and the vagaries of getting it out of the ground (or ocean floor). The drilling moratorium the politicos are talking about have another set of problems for our dependency on oil. If the numbers we researched are true, we get about a third of our daily oil needs from the Gulf region. If the oil rigs get shut down they will be moved to places where they can drill and they won't be back for a considerable period of time.
What to do? Don't bite the hand that we need to fix the problem would seem to be first. Second, figure out the solutions to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. Third, implement the quickest and best solutions. Next, would be to definitively figure out what went wrong and put steps in place to keep it from happening again.
We need to wean ourselves off oil to the greatest extent possible. The true costs of an oil based energy source are way more than the per bbl. costs we see posted by market exchanges.
The car in this post may be in our collective futures sooner than we planned.
$20 billion may not cover the mess this accident caused.
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