Th Gulf gusher has, as the experts of The Oil Drum feared and predicted well in advance, not been capped from the top side. The solution has always been relief wells, reaching 13,000' beneath the seabed to interdict and fill the leaker with cement. These take two or three months and are subject to the exact same hazards that killed eleven men and sank the Deepwater Horizon.
There's been a lot of media orchestrated sniveling about Barack Obama not swimming a mile down into the Gulf of Mexico completely nude with a pipe wrench in his teeth to personally stopper the well. And Kossacks have gone along with the doubly foolish framing.
I'm not here to criticize my President, I'm here to help him. And I'm not talking about just stoppering the leak, which is merely a symptom; we're going to go right to the source of a couple of problems.
We, the citizens of the United States of America, are oil addicts. Oil does for our economy what crystal meth does to unwise farm boys who indulge in it. Everything moves faster on it ... but the consequences of long term use are horrific.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
We can not do this any more.
Not only do we have a mess in the Gulf of Mexico that's going to plague us for a generation or more, but we've got peak oil sneaking up behind us. Once the realm of conspiracists, this concept is now found in the U.S. military's Joint Operating Environment 2010 (warning:honkin' PDF) We've known for half a century it was coming and our reaction has been pure junky hubris; we could have started to climb down from our overly energetic lifestyle and the troubles it brings beginning 9/12/2001. Instead oil pushers Bush and Cheney lead us into an ill advised burglarly of Iraq, questing after the last unworked supergiant field beneath the sands of Kurdistan.
Peak oil has two fellow systemic failures that accompany it. Climate change is upon us; anyone reading here can't miss the flow of diaries about record low ice extents in the Arctic. When that ocean is ice free in the summertime all bets are off; we don't know what will happen to us, but the Siberian shelf clathrates are already coming out of cold storage. We may see an event similar to the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum.
The banking mess is a disaster of our own making, or rather unmaking. We took our eye off the ball, Phil Gramm & Co. slipped the poison pill that killed the Glass-Steagall act into our nation's laws, and now a decade later we have the mother of all bubbles deflating beneath us. You can check The Automatic Earth for the particulars, but we are approaching a time of consequences. I thought Iceland might set a global collapse in motion, now if it isn't Greece it'll be one of the other little PIIGS, or perhaps it will take all of them to tear the Eurozone apart, but it won't hold.
So, our assumptions going forward must include the following:
Envision oil so dear that we stop letting the market decide and have a structured program for its use based on real world economic production. We had rationing and prioritization in World War II; we turn and face peak oil and climate change like the deadly peril they are or we'll get mowed down. And we'll deserve whatever suffering befalls us.
Envision the strange weather we've been having becoming familiar. 50% of our vegetables being grown in California? That'll be replaced by 50% being grown in our back yards and the rest in a distributed fashion so as to avoid exposing our entire food supply to extreme weather in a single geographic region. Water conservation, water impoundments where formerly there were none; all sorts of effort will be made to keep our supply clean and safe.
Envision anything that requires the creation of debt simply imploding. Going forward things are going to be done with real money or they're not going to get done at all. Housing values should fall 80% to 90% from the peak. Even 'serious people' like Meredith Whitney are directly stating that our troubles have just begun. Investments valued on the assumption of perpetual growth are worthless. Consumption is dead, local production is king, and and if you don't know what a transition town is you'd better start educating yourself now
The only thing I've seen that makes any sense at all from the perspective of a physically fragile middle aged guy with two young children who is not into that whole End Of Days myth is an orderly unwinding of our automobile dependence in favor of a rail-centric future.
I've long been a fan of Alan Drake's work on rail electrification, work that is clearly represented in an integrated planning tool from the Millennium Institute called Threshold 21. The specific Threshold 21 North America plan has wonders in it: a 38% reduction in oil use, a 25% growth in our economy based on the development this will bring, and healthier, happier, sexier Americans. We're all gonna be trim, toned, and tanned, as we'll be biking and walking three seasons of the year.
We just have to do a few simple things to make this happen: clean house on our utterly corrupt, entirely useless Senate, slap down our corporate shill Supreme Court with a legislative solution to the insult that is the Citizens United decision, and fold, spindle, and mutilate our useless mainstream media.
Then each and every one of us gets a supersized bite of working more, having less, and paying an increased tax burden according to what we make. The Reagan era fantasy of taxing the wealthy less leading to economic growth is utterly done; a generation of unrestrained capitalism has proven its mettle: everything that wasn't nailed down has been sold overseas or just plain gambled away. Things we can never replace.
This was in comments and it's just too good to leave down below. Rachel Maddow on Deepwater Horizon and the runaway Ixtoc well of 1979.
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