BP This Time--Another Oil Spill

We need oil. Anyone who thinks we can slip out of this fact by adding vegetable oil to the mix or building trucks that run tons of produce on electricity isn’t with us in real space and time. All the conservation in the world isn’t going to get everybody who lives in suburbia to work tomorrow. Windmills are great; they won’t power New York and Chicago. We have trapped ourselves into NEEDING oil.
On April 20, BP became the latest oil company to cast its oil upon the waters. As approximately 200,000 or more gallon pump themselves into Gulf waters from a leak that’s a mile straight down, we have the makings of a serious disaster.
The oil has already created a slick about 130 miles wide. It is threatening some of the richest fishing grounds on the planet and some of the finest shoreline wetlands and beaches. BP is already facing at least a dozen law suits.
There is no guarantee we can turn this thing off anytime in the next three months. By then it will have become the largest spill ever in American waters. So we shouldn’t have been drilling so deep down; we shouldn’t have been drilling in water at all. But we still NEED oil.
Continuing dependence on Arab oil could start limiting all sorts of our options. Can you guarantee that the Saud family will still rule Saudi Arabia in ten years? Will the successors be any more friendly than Iran? Can we rely on Iraqi or Iranian oil? For how long?
Increasingly, they don’t need us as a market. There’s always China, India and Japan to sell to. American oil that could cut back this reliance is increasingly found under water—leaving us exposed to more spills like this one.
My adult years have spanned the oil embargoes of 1973 and 1979, the rise of the Third World as an oil drinking industrial power house and escalation of American trade deficits. I’ve heard lots of discussion on conservation, alternative energies and new oil drilling.
One subject that has completely eluded my awareness—and that I’ve been thinking about since 1973—is the question of completely synthetic oil. Have you heard anyone talk about it? I’ve not heard a mention. Nary a peep.
Before you say, “That’s impossible”, let me refresh our memories with a few historical facts. We were totally dependent on RUBBER tires to run our cars, trucks and military vehicles before World War II. We lost ALL our rubber at the start of that war.
We came up with a substitute—synthetic—substance that makes perfectly fine tires that we use to this day. (Whoever thinks of Vietnam and rubber in the same breath anymore?)
We found ourselves in a deadly race with both German and Japanese scientists during World War II to build a super bomb using a technique that had never been tried, never even been attempted, and we put together a program that delivered an atomic bomb—from pencil notes on an envelope to a major “boom”—in about four years.
The Germans were cut off from most sources of oil during World War II. They came up with a synthetic gasoline that could deliver 100 octane fuel to top-notch fighter aircraft as well as trucks and cars. We captured their notes and took them to Washington.
Big Oil screamed “Foul!” We never even translated the recipe. (Does anyone have any idea if it still exists today—or where?) Even if we destroyed the files, if it could be done once, it could be done again. If a Los Alamos Project could deliver a bomb, a similar project today could reasonably be expected to deliver something that would run my Buick, your Toyota, the trucks on the road and all those big airplanes—that didn’t have to come out of the ground in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf waters. How great would that be?
It would also be PRACTICAL in a nation that has painted itself into a corner where there is no feasible alternative to the gasoline engines that deliver our food, our power, our workers to the office and keep our lawns mowed.
We need oil—like we needed rubber. We found a substitute for the one; why not for the other? We just aren’t talking about it. No one has the political will to order it done. BP will eventually wind up paying a few million in fines and move on.
Somebody’s got to start talking about it.