Written by: John P. Stassek, Jeremy Winkworth, Rachel Galperin, David Ostrem & Gerard Pahl
Is our hunger for energy behind oil spills and accidents?
After watching the evening news recently, I started thinking about the Gulf oil spill and who’s to blame. BP, Transocean and Halliburton have had some huge profits in recent years. There is evidence that government regulations were not enforced. Greed and bureaucratic corruption are powerful forces that cause corners to be cut and safety protocols to be ignored, and that seems to be the case here. If this is true, I hope the guilty parties are punished and we try to correct, as best we can, what went wrong.
The fact remains that we are utterly dependent upon the brave and hard-working men and women, employed by profitable corporations, who supply us with energy.
The United States consumes approximately 20 million barrels of oil and 2.7 million tons of coal every day. That’s a football field of oil 1,948 feet high, and 163 coal trains, averaging 150 cars each, every day. That oil does not magically flow out of the ground, refine itself and deliver itself to its usage point. And that coal does not magically dig itself out of the ground and carry itself to our power plants.
Since the United States consumes approximately 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuel energy, multiply those numbers by four to get a rough idea of what daily world consumption rates are.
What should be apparent in this most recent tragedy is our increasingly difficult and expensive quest for energy. The focus on worldwide new oil production is largely offshore and in the arctic. Compared to drilling in East Texas or Saudi Arabia, these areas are much more expensive, dangerous and risky. But they are the best prospects left.
Our present way of life drives demand, demand drives production, and that production is going to have to take place in riskier areas. I’m afraid we’re going to see more examples of the Gulf spill and the recent coal mine accident in West Virginia. If we accept that as a reasonable cost of doing business, we are also going to have to accept some of the responsibility when things go wrong.
However, if we start working on ways of reducing that demand through conservation and focus on renewable energy sources, perhaps we may discover there are less risky and better ways of life.
Please check these sites if interested: http://transitionvba.ning.com/ and http://www.chrismartenson.com/
John P. Stassek/Bloomingdale
City plan for Allied Paper landfill is the best solution
As somebody who has read cover-to-cover both the 175-page Allied Paper/Kalamazoo River Remedial Investigation Report (2008) and the 360-page Feasibility Study Report (2009) — and understood most of both — I can tell you that the cleanup plan for the landfill, as proposed by the city of Kalamazoo, is the smart choice.
Although the PCB-contaminated material will not be moved out, it will be securely isolated, capped and monitored. There is no evidence that it will contaminate any city wellfields.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Read these reports online and you will see that a lot of excellent scientific and engineering work has been done on the landfill site over the past 20 years. The alternative of removing the contamination would require up to 10 years of daily truck traffic on Kalamazoo streets. Plus, why would you expose an estimated 1.5 million cubic yards of contaminated material when you can keep it safely covered up?
Finally, we should be very grateful to Millennium Chemical, a corporation that never made a penny from paper made here. It is handing us $100 million to help deal with the mess the Kalamazoo paper barons of the 1950s and ’60s left behind.
What happened in the Gulf is not a spill, it’s a disaster
When I hear the word “spill,” I think of an overturned glass of milk that has spread over the kitchen table and floor. A “spill” that’s been pouring forth for two months, contaminating flora and fauna along the Gulf coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, causing an economic disruption of local fishing and tourist industries, is not a “spill.” It’s a disaster, a calamity.
It seems that BP (British Petroleum) knew how to sink an oil well on the ocean floor but has no idea about how to plug the break in the oil pipeline. Euphemistically calling it a leak, blowout or discharge doesn’t come close.
Only by calling the DeepWater Horizon calamity what it is — a torrent, a gusher, a catastrophe — will it register on Americans and the federal government with President Obama’s “fierce urgency of now.”
Federal government has duty to maintain borders, restrict entry
Because our criminal justice system cannot fully protect the public from career or predatory criminals, it has accorded citizens online access to sex offender registries, jail and prison rosters, parolee listings and even parole absconder lists.
So what about the hundreds of thousands of people entering our country illegally every year through our porous northern and southern borders? Who is checking their criminal backgrounds and propensities and listing them online for all to see? The answer is: no one. This is a twofold failure of the undisputed federal duty to maintain the border and to stop those who would penetrate it illegally.
I wholeheartedly support legal immigration. It is what our nation is built on. It represents my ancestors. America needs an influx of people from other nations to keep moving forward, but it also needs an immigration policy that opens legal entry while enforcing lawful provisions to prevent entry that is illegal. It’s time now to secure our borders and review our policies to allow those who come here for legitimate purposes to do so lawfully.
BP caused a disaster and people are still buying its gas
I don’t get it. On March 23, 2005, there was an explosion at British Petroleum’s Houston Refinery that killed 15 people.
In 2006, the BP Alaskan pipeline sprung a leak due to poor maintenance and contaminated a large area of Alaskan wilderness.
Now we have the largest oil disaster in the nation’s history, courtesy of BP, and I still see people pulling into BP gas stations to purchase gasoline.
People, the only way they are going to get the message that they have to clean up their act is to hit them in the pocketbook. The only thing they understand is dollars and if you withhold them, maybe they will see the light.