Scientists haven’t forgotten about the Deepwater Horizon explosion that unleashed an immense oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This week, biologists named a newly discovered species of deep sea shrimp in honor of Paul Montagna, author of a study on the ecological damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, with data that “shows the devastating effect the spill had on the sea floor itself, and demonstrates the damage to important natural resources.”
The people who live in Gulf Coast states haven’t forgotten the oil spill, either.They’re having to expand their legal budgets for the recovery of economic damages caused by the spill. British Petroleum (BP) is still attempting to evade its legal responsibility to compensate Americans for the damage its negligent oil drilling operations resulted in.
Barack Obama quickly seemed to forget about the Deepwater Horizon disaster, though. He rushed to diminish the impact of the oil spill, and hurried to increase, rather than decrease, drilling for crude oil along America’s shores. The Obama Administration covered up photographs of dead marine life from the Gulf of Mexico, and pushed to expand offshore drilling in the most ecologically sensitive and technically risky areas, such as the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.
The promise that President Obama made was that expanded offshore drilling for oil would reduce the cost of gasoline. That’s exactly the opposite of what has actually happened. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, since July 2010, the year of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the price of conventional gasoline in the United States has increased by 97 cents per gallon, to almost double the price of gasoline from a decade ago. Expanding offshore drilling has given us more expensive gasoline.
The Obama White House has allowed the oil industry to increase its profits and worsen the environmental condition of America’s oceans, while squeezing more money out of American drivers at the gasoline pump.
This Friday, Barack Obama moved to make the problem even worse, taking a drastic step to bring offshore drilling platforms to America’s Atlantic Ocean coastline all the way from Delaware to Florida by allowing seismic blasting of the sea floor by oil companies seeking places to drill for crude. The process will set off huge numbers of explosions, resulting in injury or death for well over 100,000 whales and other marine mammals, by the Obama Administration’s own estimates.