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Originally Posted by Bownesian
I think that the US administration's efforts should be on helping the locals whose industries and livelihoods will be destroyed while making sure that they don't create a worse humanitarian problem by rushing people out to skim the water and clean the beaches without adequate protection from the dangerous compounds floating in the Gulf. They need to make sure that the approach of mixing surfactants is the best approach, long term, because this will be a long term problem. They need to determine how to prevent this situation for next time. The government's focus has to be on protecting people now and long term first, how to minimize the total environmental damage second and how to clean up the mess in a safe manner last.
Appearing on TV mad about the situation, creating the spin that the Government is in control of an uncontrolled situation and staging photo-ops at a beach won't stop the oil from flowing and won't stop soon to be out of work fishermen from being poisoned by volitile organic compounds or feed their families.
From all appearances, the flow will not be stopped until the late summer so people need to prepare for double or triple or more of the Valdez spill. I read on another message board that this is the oil industry's Chernobyl and I thought that description was pretty apt. Perhaps this will be the event that marks the first real turning point in our eventual march away from fossil fuels. I work in the industry but I know that we can't keep drilling deeper in more remote areas while increasing consumption of a limited resource.
We will eventually end up converting to a different primary energy source - most likely nuclear supplemented with wind and hydro power, but those energy sources are all much less portable than oil (thus requiring a very large supply) and all take a long time to build. I hope that we will start now while we have the cheap oil to do it with.
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Natural gas is probably the next logical energy input over the next 10 to 20 years according to some pretty prominent researchers in and around town. I know that it's still a non-renewable resource but it's a hell of a lot cleaner and the supply (onshore) is pretty impressive if all estimates are true for shale gas reserves.
But energy substitutes won't happen without price surges. Back in the day, whale blubber was a major energy source until we discovered petroleum and its various uses. So you're not going to see the move to energy substitutes until the price of oil sky rockets in my opinion because so many manufacturers that use oil as an input won't have a need to change their business until their businesses are directly affected. Environment notwithstanding, unfortunately.