We don’t need more oil; we need more common sense

Every time I hear a politician say we need to extract more oil from offshore wells near our beaches or from the ground under our national parks, I flash back to things I’ve seen that convince me that’s not true.

For example: 

* In Fairmont we have a Dollar Store and a Big Lots located less than 100 yards apart. I have watched people come out of the Dollar Store, start their cars and drive across the parking lot to Big Lots. That’s probably a one-minute walk.

* When I lived in Cranberry Township, Pa., I saw parents drive their SUVs one block to the school bus stop in front of my house, sit in their cars with the motors running for 5, 10, 20 minutes until the bus arrived, and then drive one block back home.

* I know of kids who drive to school every day from three blocks away just to show off that they have a car. In fact, even I did that when I was in college. I had to use a fake address to get a parking pass because I lived too close to qualify for one. (I was young and stupid then.)

I could go on and on and on.

My point is, I don’t think we need more oil; what we need is more common sense. A little respect for the environment wouldn’t hurt, either.

I don’t know how many millions of gallons of gasoline and oil are wasted every year by people doing what I just described – and worse – but I’m sure it doesn’t just happen where I live. There are way too many examples of waste to list here, and it’s got to be happening everywhere, so multiply my experiences by 320 million.  

Waste isn’t the only problem. We had an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 because we were drilling there for oil to refine into gasoline. The Deepwater Horizon accident spilled 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and a lot of it found its way onto the beaches of our southern states. Cost of that spill including cleanup and reparations is now estimated at $62 billion.

Prior to that, the worst environmental disaster had been the crash of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989. An estimated 11 to 38 million gallons went into the water there, with costs exceeding $7 billion.  

Google turned up 29 significant oil spills affecting the United States since 1962 and two others in 1930 and 1910. The actual loss from some of these accidents was never calculated, but by my count, the accidents on this list collectively dispersed several hundred million gallons of oil or gasoline into the environment.

With this much waste and loss, do we really need to “drill baby drill?”

Now we have a president-elect who has promised to suck every last drop, ton or cubic foot of fossil fuel out of the earth and a designated Secretary of State who just retired as CEO of Exxon-Mobil. Why do I get the feeling this won’t end well?

     

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an objective scientific body set up under the auspices of the United Nations, has warned that if we consume more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves, we will cross an environmental “red line” by 2040 that will result in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels, etc.

If we were to consume ALL of our fossil fuel reserves, the panel says, humans would find large parts of the planet uninhabitable outdoors.

The Conservatives who are now running our government are in favor of conserving a lot of things, such as their own taxes and wealth, but they won’t do anything to conserve our most important asset – a clean and healthy environment. If they truly want to conserve something, I suggest they park their greed by the side of the road and start conserving planet earth.