[THS] Deepwater Horizon: This Is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25559.htm


Deepwater Horizon: This Is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like

By Richard Heinberg

May 27, 2010 "Post Carbon Institute" -- Lately I’ve been reading the excellent
coverage of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill at www.TheOilDrum.com, a site
frequented by veteran oil geologists and engineers. A couple of adages from the old-
timers are worth quoting: “Cut corners all you want, but never downhole,” and,
“There’s fast, there’s cheap, and there’s right, and you get to pick two.”

There will be plenty of blame to go around, as events leading up to the fatal rig
explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner
rather than later, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the
region will be incalculable and will linger for years if not decades. The deadly stench
from oil-oaked marshes—as spring turns to hot, fetid summer—will by itself ruin tens
or hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods. Then there’s the loss of the
seafood industry: we’re talking about more than the crippling of the economic
backbone of the region; anyone who’s spent time in New Orleans (my wife’s family all
live there) knows that the people and culture of southern Louisiana are literally as
well as figuratively composed of digested crawfish, shrimp, and speckled trout. Given
the historic political support from this part of the country for offshore drilling, and for
the petroleum industry in general, this really amounts to sacrificing the faithful on the
altar of oil.

But the following should be an even clearer conclusion from all that has happened,
and that is still unfolding: This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap,
easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what
we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed
foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost
integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.

The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway
as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end
our dependence on the stuff. Everybody knows we must do this. Even a recent
American president (an oil man, it should be noted) admitted that “America is
addicted to oil.” Will we let this addiction destroy us, or will we overcome it? Good
intentions are not enough. Now is the moment for the President, other elected
officials at all levels of government, and ordinary citizens to make this our central
priority as a nation. We have hard choices to make, and an enormous amount of
work to do.