Super Bowl Update

A little less than two years ago I spoke rather angrily from atop the WMRA Civic Soapbox about the absurdity of the chant being used at McCain presidential rallies – drill baby drill. Now we’re confronted with the effects of this movement to push the country into greater and greater efforts to find fossil fuel resources available within our own boundaries. To all who love wildlife and treasure the Gulf of Mexico as more than just an energy source, the current gusher flooding the ocean and the costal marshes with oil is an overwhelming tragedy.

Who is to blame for this unbelievable mess? The courts will certainly spend years sorting it out, but for me, it’s not entirely the corporations who made this mess. Yes BP and Transocean were incredibly careless and entirely focused on the bottom line. Profits are what drive corporation’s not environmental protection. It is the federal and state government’s job to protect the environment, especially many miles off shore.

For years, small government advocates have decried regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department as impediments to business. The longer time went on without a major oil spill, the louder the cries became to get government off the backs of our great companies and let them produce. But it only takes one mistake and now we have it. While we don’t have a definitive answer, it looks like the third largest oil spill since the world began using petroleum as a fuel.

So where are the small government advocates and the drill baby drill crowd now? Just listen to Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, one of the leading voices in the small government movement and you will hear endless cries for federal government help. It seems you can have it both ways according to Governor Jindal. Complain about federal interference when you want and demand help at other times. Funny, but we haven’t heard much from Sara Palin lately on this spill. She must be fishing in the clean waters of Alaska right now.

But I’m taking easy potshots at politicians when I really believe the ones to blame for this mess are each and every one of us that has yet to take the steps in our lives to substantially lower our consumption of energy. We are currently 5% of the world’s population yet we consume 24% of the world’s energy. This is unsustainable and cannot continue. We cannot wait for our political leaders to come up with new energy policies, some of which are based on fantasies like clean coal. We cannot sit around and hope that a big technological breakthrough will magically make it so we do not have to change our lifestyles to accommodate the reality that we are changing our planet’s climate. We must all take real steps in our lives to lower our energy consumption and do it soon.

The enormous oil spill in the gulf is certainly a wakeup call, but wake up calls are only worth something if we wake up and don’t just push the snooze button. Glaciers are melting, Artic sea ice is retreating, and ocean temperatures are rising. These are facts, not guesses. We may live in Virginia, but the mess in the gulf is our mess too. It is the legacy we are passing on to our children and grand children. We should be ashamed and until we make serious changes in the way we consume energy, blaming it all on BP is just the easy way out.

                                               ---Larry Stopper lives in Nelson County