Five Ways to "Do Something" about the Oil Spill

Remember "Five Things?" It was a new blog theme/meme designed to further appeal to the tl;dr crowd. Here are five new things and this is a BONUS because it also deals with current events.

Five Ways to "Do Something" about the Oil Spill

1. "Boycott" BP while continuing to consume as much oil as before from other oil companies
2. Buy an expensive, useless product that garishly proclaims your aversion to oil spills and/or love for seabirds (preferably a t-shirt or bumper sticker) and/or gives at least 1% of profits to conservation/environmental causes
3. Get angry at the government for not cleaning up the spill quickly enough
4. Add some "oil dripping" graphic to your twitter avatar (via green Iran activism)
5. Write a blog post or two offering one-sided opinions, freshman year-level philosophy, and largely unfeasible "solutions" without considering the unique circumstances of readers

Bicycling as a Response to the Oil Spill

I am not giving up on how much of a monumental disaster this oil spill is. Pretty soon we'll be seeing the end of mainstream media coverage of the spill - I give it two weeks. See my previous post for some perspective: how much is 70,000 barrels of oil a day? For the next two months?

I think it's important, though, to not just vilify BP or Big Oil in general or the government or the "drill, baby drill" Republican blowhards, but instead to use this opportunity to spur debate - how do we prevent this from happening again? And I don't mean, how do we create better technology so that when the next oil spill happens we can cap it more quickly. I mean, the reason that we are drilling oil off shore, the reason we are importing oil from the Middle East, and then sending troops over there to protect the stability in the region and thus the stability of our oil supply, is because with the status quo, we need oil. We demand it. Supply = demand. Basic econ.

We are the reason for the oil spill. We, with our cars, our heated homes and showers and laundry machines, our demand for meat, and out-of-season and processed and packaged food, our comfortable lifestyles - we demand the oil and we demand it cheaply. We see in the photo above how costly oil really is.

Top Kill

Update: Check out this image of how large the oil spill is in relation to your city. Here's how much of the Seattle metro area the oil spill would cover - and remember, it's not yet HALFWAY DONE SPILLING!

It was announced recently that "Top Kill" has failed, and that the next realistic option for plugging the Deepwater oil leak will be the relief wells BP is drilling - slated to be finished in AUGUST.

“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill."

Two more months of up to 70,000 barrels a day... How much is that? It's hard to fathom.