The oil continues to spill. Here, I was thinking that by the time my op-ed got printed in USA Today, it would have been capped and we could move on to the next disaster. But, no. I write:
In the Gulf of Mexico, however, we may have found our infinite fount. This deep-water accident has no horizon. It isn’t an oil spill in the conventional sense, where a fixed amount of fuel escapes from the hull of a ship. When this rig sank, it left behind a severed umbilical cord that had tethered it to an oil borehole reaching deep into the earth’s crust a mile below the waves. We have tapped into something we quite literally can’t control.
And so I argue, that as Cape Cod succumbs to the an interrupted horizon in the form of the nation’s first off-shore wind farm, and oil fills the waters of the Gulf, that one byproduct of this could be that Americans start seeing their energy production for what it is — environmentally destructive and sometimes lethal, to humans and other forms of life. Everything, I repeat everything, comes at a cost, even the so-called green clean energies. Hybrid cars need batteries that need lithium mined in South America. Wind turbines kill birds. Conservation and consumption are the main issues, and if we can watch the meters rise and fall with our electrical use, see the turbine blades spinning on the horizon, kneel to separate sand from oil, if we can viscerally experience that power comes from somewhere other than the Land of Make Believe and West Virginia, a place most have never been and will never go, the better.
Read the whole piece here.
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