Nice going humans.
Roughly 50,000 barrels of oil per day are now spewing forth from the site of a British Petroleum-operated oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. That means an additional 4.5 million barrels of oil will be added to the 3,850 square mile slick by the time BP and potentially the US Government will be able to cap the leak. It's already the size of Porto Rico approaching the size of Connecticut. Next week it'll be the size of Sarah Palin's ego.
The only positive I can see coming out of this is that the disaster will dampen enthusiasm for the new offshore drilling plans agreed upon by President Obama. That and the money being spent on clean up is a new sort of industry.
The negatives, on the other hand, are multitudinous and include the total massacre of marine life in the gulf, the erasure of entire industries that profit from that life, irreversible damage to the wetlands in at least four coastal states, the poisoning of entire species of shore birds, and the creation of a toxic kill zone the size of Texas.
Way to go! It's relatively hard to do that much damage with one measly explosion. But those guys at BP, they hit the jackpot on this one and it's going to take them a decade to clean it up.
Just so we're clear, people, let's take this opportunity to point out that THIS IS WHY WE DON'T LIKE THE IDEA OF DRILLING OIL OFF THE COAST!!!!
No rig = no spill.
Now, I don't live on the Gulf of Mexico. But the water from that area is connected to the water in every single ocean in the world. We're all on the same blue planet here. So let's act like it and stop doing things that make the blue planet sick. Got it????
Stumble It!