Catastrophic Oil Spill In The Gulf Of Mexico....

[PunkMaister]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

The estimated numbers of barrels/day went up over the weekend (Christian Science Monitor wrote about 25000 barrels instead of the prior estimate of 5000) along with the devastating news, that the attempt to place the dome to contain the leak failed. It is also said, that sand in the oil erodes the structures containing the wells, potentially widening the opening and increasing the outflow. This is just getting worse every day - people like naturalnews.com already start to churn out doomsday prophecies about the spill having global consequences (which I am inclined to believe if it remains uncontained for several weeks to come and the stuff reaches the Atlantic) with devastating effects on the oceans and global food supply as well as oceanic carbon uptake capacities etc.
If we manage to contain this, alternative energy is definitely something to think about - or should be. I am afraid what will happen is the opposite. People will advocate "clean" nuclear power (working towards another Chernobyl) or they will state that we have shown that our technology can contain such an event, so we can go on with it and will be prepared in the future. (LOLing sarcastically). And even if the deep sea drilling is postponed until issues are resolved, they still have plenty of oil, they just have to strip mine Canada for oil sands, devastating landscapes there (like a 50.000km² open pit mining operation) or they can just continue to flatten the mountains in eastern US by "mountain top removal", making rivers acidic and poisenous.

Ok, I'm depressed now - should maybe not have watched BBCs "How Earth made us" documentary or "HOME" - but then - is blissful ignorance a solution?

But Aurora what else can we do? Right now Nuclear seems the most viable option till renewable energy sources catch up to the point in which they can generate sufficient power and not just a third or so as it is today. I rather switch to nuclear and move toward renewables now. We cannot tolerate another disaster of this magnitude. Oil has proven to be too toxic for it's continued use with this event alone.